Medieval rhetoric and poetic to 1400 : Interpreted from representative works

"Medieval rhetoric and poetic to 1400: Interpreted from representative works" by Charles Sears Baldwin is a scholarly study written in the early 20th century. It traces how medieval theories of composition—rhetoric and poetic—both reflected and shaped education and literature, reading them through key texts and practices. The volume follows the transmission from antiquity, the dominance of style in the schools, and the complementary roles of sermons, letters, hymnody, and verse narrative, culminating in the vernacular achievements of Dante and Chaucer. The opening of this study sets out its plan and stakes: to read medieval rhetoric and poetic historically and in tandem, showing how they descend from late Roman schooling, absorb St. Augustine’s reforming impulse for preaching, and become largely a lore of style in the hands of the medieval grammarian. It then begins with a concise genealogy of sophistic rhetoric, contrasting Plato’s suspicion with Aristotle’s broader, moral theory of rhetoric, and explaining how the loss of deliberative public speech pushed ancient practice toward display and panegyric. Baldwin sketches the “second sophistic” via Philostratus—its virtuosity, theme-based declamation, improvisation, theatrical delivery, decorative dilation (notably ecphrasis), and reliance on fixed patterns. He illustrates how school exercises (the progymnasmata of Hermogenes—fable, chria, encomium, comparison, characterization, ecphrasis, thesis, and more) crystallized habits that prized balance, archaism, clausular cadence, and vehemence over sustained argument. The section closes by implying that such empty technic required a new motive—ultimately supplied by Christian preaching—to restore rhetoric’s larger purpose. ... Read more