Martin Camargo

Chaucer and the Oxford Renaissance of Anglo-Latin Rhetoric

Writing over eighty years ago, John M. Manly posed the questions that have shaped scholarly debate over the nature and extent of Chaucer’s debt to medieval rhetoric ever since: ‘‘What . . . was medieval rhetoric? Who were its principal authorities in Chaucer’s time? And what use did Chaucer make of methods and doctrines unmistakably due to the rhetoricians?’’1 In his answer to the first question, Manly restricted medieval rhetoric to a set of formal precepts that fell into three categories: ‘‘(1) arrangement or organization; (2) amplification and abbreviation; (3) style and its ornaments.’’2 Especially among the generation immediately following the 1926 publication of Manly’s landmark essay, that definition prevailed and shaped many subsequent studies devoted to identifying the various rhetorical figures employed in Chaucer’s poetry. Those who wrote such studies also accepted Manly’s answer to his second basic question: the principal sources of rhetorical doctrine for Chaucer and his contemporaries were the Latin textbooks composed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries by Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and others, several of which were made available in modern printed editions by Edmond Faral only two years before Manly explored their influence on Chaucer.3 Often referred to as artes poetriae, these are treatises on general composition, a genre that Douglas Kelly has designated more precisely as ‘‘arts of poetry and prose.’’4 The most

A good idea, in theory: Why Mathias of Linköping's Poetria fell short in practice

Although highly innovative in its blend of medieval Aristotelian with Horatian and Ciceronian doctrine, the Poetria by the fourteenth-century Swedish writer Mathias of Linkoping survives in only one manuscript copy and appears to have had little or no influence outside Sweden. Likely reasons for its failure to gain traction among late medieval teachers of Latin composition are (1) its sharp separation of prose from poetry, (2) its implication that verse composition is a more advanced subject than prose composition, and (3) its disproportionate reliance on theoretical precepts rather than illustrative examples.

Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Memorial Verses

Throughout his career Geoffrey of Vinsauf composed highly rhetorical poems that dramatized and thus memorialized the emotions associated with England’s (and his own) greatest triumphs and tragedies. His most frequently quoted poem, the lament for King Richard I, probably began as just such a composition. Geoffrey’s occasional pieces clearly and succinctly embody the grand poetic ambitions behind his Poetria nova. This essay sheds light on the ten shorter poems that have been attributed to Geoffrey both by identifying their characteristic rhetorical strategies and by translating them into English for the first time.

Writing instruction in late medieval Europe

Ways to Read This Book: An Introduction, James J. Murphy * Ancient Greek Writing Instruction and Its Oral Antecedents, Richard Leo Enos * Roman Writing Instruction as Described by Quintilian, James J. Murphy * Writing Instruction from Late Antiquity to the Twelfth Century, Carol Dana Lanham * Writing Instruction in Late Medieval Europe, Martin Camargo and Marjorie Curry Woods * Reading, Writing, and Rhetoric in the Renaissance, Don Paul Abbott * Writing Instruction in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Great Britain: Continuity and Change, Transitions and Shifts, Linda Ferreira-Buckley * From Rhetoric to Rhetorics: An Interim Report on the History of American Writing Instruction to 1900, Suzanne Bordelon, Elizabethada A. Wright, and S. Michael Halloran * Writing Instruction in School and College English: The Twentieth Century and the New Millennium, David Gold, Catherine L. Hobbs, and James A. Berlin Not a Conclusion, But an Epilogue, James J. Murphy Glossary of Key Terms in the History of Writing Instruction The Next Step in Your Research: A Bibliography for Further Study

The State of Medieval Studies: A Tale of Two Universities

My administrative experiences as department chair may not have provided me with any unique insights into the current state of medieval studies. If anything, the many tasks that go into leading a large department have absorbed so much of my attention that I almost certainly have spent less time reflecting on the specific concerns facing medievalists during my four years as an administrator than during any comparable period of my twenty-six-year career as a practicing medievalist. Where I hope I might have something unique to contribute is in my experience as a medievalist who has both thought about and experienced the state of medieval studies at two different universities. Indeed, my perspective on those experiences may have been colored more than I realize by my having served as chair of English at each of those universities. Two years ago I made the most important and in some ways the most difficult decision of my professional career when I left my position as Professor and Chair of English at the University of Missouri at Columbia, where I had spent the previous twenty-three years, to become Professor and Head of English at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. I had great affection for my colleagues at Missouri, who had just elected me to a second three-year term as department chair by a unanimous vote, and considerable loyalty to the institution that had fostered my development as a scholar and teacher of medieval literature. Nonetheless, I decided to accept the offer from Illinois for a variety of