Three medieval rhetorical arts

University of California Press, 1971]. Hardcover, 235 pp. [From jacket flaps] This volume presents for the first time a coordinated collection of major translations representing the three mainstreams of medieval Latin rhetoric. The primary purpose of the book is to provide the reader with an opportunity to understand each of these three main movements through representative texts brought together in one volume to facilitate comparison. As the Editor points out in his Introduction, medieval men developed their own concepts of writing and speaking by a pragmatic adaptation of ancient grammatical and rhetorical ideas. These medieval innovations are best appreciated when the three preceptive traditions of the Middle Ages can be seen together in this way. The anonymous Princples of Letter Writing (1133 A.D.), here translated by Mr. Murphy, is the first ars dictaminis ever rendered into a modern language, even though the medieval dictamen movement in the course of five centuries produced hundreds of Latin treatises dealing with the written communications of popes, emperors, prelates, and kings. The New Poetics of Geoffrey of Vinsauf (c. 1210 A.D.), translated by Jane Baltzell Kopp, was one of the most influential medieval blendings of grammatical and rhetorical concepts of verse-writing. Robert of Basevorn's Form of Preaching (1322 A.D.), translated by the Reverend Leopold Krul, O.S.B., has long been regarded as one of the finest examples of the ars praedicandi, or manual for preachers. An Appendix contains brief excerpts from Aristotles Topics and his O