Preaching, Emotion, and the Aristotelian Turn

Chapter 7 explores the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric on the emotional work of preaching. Many manuscripts of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (and a good proportion of manuscripts of De regimine principum) belonged to clerical institutions; some of the most interesting responses to Aristotelian rhetoric are left to us by readers who were actively engaged in preaching. The many medieval artes praedicandi offer nothing like Aristotle’s Rhetoric in terms of teaching emotional appeal. The preachers who encountered the Rhetoric would find that it voiced the theory behind what was already lodged in their practice but which the preceptive traditions they had inherited did not articulate. It affirmed, in theoretical terms, what no medieval art of preaching articulated so systematically: the behavioral psychology of emotion and the strategies for appealing to emotions through argument. This chapter gives particular attention to three preachers who used the Rhetoric in their own practice: Thomas Eborall of London, Engelbert of Admont, and Mathias of Linköping (confessor to Birgitta of Sweden). Finally, the chapter explores the impact of the Rhetoric on an anonymous fifteenth-century pastoral reader who composed a short English verse on “Piers the Plowman” which he left in a copy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric next to the section on amicitia; it considers how this preacher brought together the emotional concerns of English poetry (the broad Piers Plowman phenomenon) and the theory of emotion in the Rhetoric.

«Així com un camp de batalla»: A l’entorn de les imatges de tipus militar als sermons de Vicent Ferrer

El corpus sermonari de sant Vicent Ferrer es ric en simils i al・legories de tall bellic. El present article analitza l’us d’aquest tipus d’imatgeria per part del dominic valencia, principalmente mitjancant la lectura comparada dels seus sermons amb els d’altres predicadors medievals i diversos tractats de predicacio de l’epoca. En concret, hom centra l’atencio en tres aspectes de la presencia d’aquesta mena d’imatges dins la predicacio vicentina: a) la presentacio de Jesucrist com un cavaller (Christus miles) que lluita contra el diable per tal de redimir la humanitat; b) el desenvolupament de similitudines complexes en que el conjunt de la cristiandat es presentat com una host en formacio de batalla contra els vicis i les temptacions; i c) el recurs frequent a l’al・legoria del castell espiritual, un simbol el significat del qual fluctúa en funcio de cada sermo.Saint Vincent Ferrer’s corpus of sermons presents a rich variety of military similes and allegories. The present paper analyzes the use of these images in Ferrerian preaching, and does it mainly by means of a comparative approach which takes into account also the work of other medieval preachers and several Artes praedicandi treatises. Particular consideration has been given to three diferent aspects of the use of this sort of imagery in Ferrer’s sermons: a) the portrayal of Jesus Christ as a knight (Christus miles) who jousts against the devil for human salvation; b) the elaboration of complex similitudines in which the whole of Christendom is represented as a host assembled in battle array against temptations and vices; c) the regular use of the spiritual allegory of the castle under siege, a symbol whose meaning fluctuates from sermon to sermon.

Tratamiento del ordo en la teorización poética medieval

Although medieval artes poetriae authors, because of their grammatical and versificatory orientation and the importance they attributed to elocutio, paid less attention to the parts of speech than the attention paid by authors of artes praedicandi or artes dictaminis, however, they did not neglect the dispositive aspects of literary discourse, and strengthened the textual character that began to dominate in Poetics under the dominance of Rhetoric. Although dispositio was not a part of grammar instruction in the XIII century – heir to the grammatical concept of Quintilian –, nevertheless, as a result of the rhetoricalisation process undergone by medieval poetry, other medieval artes poetriae, following in the footsteps of Horace’s Ars poetica, paid great attention to the operative organisation of literary text. Despite the familiarity with classical rhetorical treatises, when medieval poetry scholars dealt with the various ways to start a poem, they did not make use of these sources, as these were written having the forensic oratory as a model, and concentrated their study on techniques that make the defence of legal causes effective, developing the doctrine of exordium to present the case to the receiver and get the favourable disposition of the auditorium. We will pay attention to the sources of artes poetriae in the binomial ordo naturalis/ordo artificialis doctrine and we will analyse the consolidation that textual construction receives in Poetria nova. In this work Geoffrey of Vinsauf provides an extensive treatment on dispositio and the procedures to move from the objective and actual order, which follows the road of nature – ordo naturalis – to the poetic order – ordo artificialis. This distinction will have a great influence on the structure of narrative material. This study provides interesting data about the importance of the structure of literary texts in medieval times and provides a solid theoretical framework to understand the structure of the literary text and thus of textual linguistics.