- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Rita Copeland
University of Pennsylvania, Classical Studies and English, Faculty Member
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So far this book has emphasized the status and condition of exegesis, its relationship with rhetoric, and its role within vernacular translation. Now it is necessary to reverse that emphasis and to consider the fortunes of rhetoric, and... more
So far this book has emphasized the status and condition of exegesis, its relationship with rhetoric, and its role within vernacular translation. Now it is necessary to reverse that emphasis and to consider the fortunes of rhetoric, and specifically the role of rhetorical inventio in vernacular translation. The translations that I have discussed so far, Notker's translation of Martianus Capella, the Ovide moralise , and the Old French and Middle English versions of the Consolatio , define themselves in terms of exegetical practice. In the final chapter I will consider translations that offer themselves as forms of rhetorical invention. In order to understand this latter form of translation we must first take account of how the value of invention changes from the context of classical oratory to that of medieval poetics. My interest in this chapter will be to retrace the history of the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics, but this time directing my focus to how this relationship defines the meaning of rhetorical inventio for the later Middle Ages. INVENTION IN ANTIQUITY In ancient rhetoric, invention is the discovery of a plausible and persuasive argument through a system of proofs. Inventio (Greek heuresis ) literally means a “coming upon,” a discovery of that which is there, or already there, to be discovered. The term has little to do with originality or with creation ex nihilo . In all of its theoretical avatars among the ancients, invention is what Roland Barthes has aptly termed an “extractive” operation.
Research Interests: Art and Middle Ages
Chapter 4 turns from following the long and varied tradition of stylistic teaching and practice to dedicated theory: now the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and especially its analytic of the emotions from antiquity to the late... more
Chapter 4 turns from following the long and varied tradition of stylistic teaching and practice to dedicated theory: now the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and especially its analytic of the emotions from antiquity to the late thirteenth century. This chapter treats pathos and enthymeme in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. It contrasts other ancient philosophical traditions of the passions with Aristotle’s phenomenological treatment of emotion in the Rhetoric. It traces the post-classical reception of the Rhetoric through medieval Arabic commentators on the emotions, Moerbeke’s authoritative Latin translation, Giles of Rome’s important commentary on the Rhetoric, c.1272, and other scholastic commentators on the relevant sections of Aristotle’s text. It also contrasts other medieval philosophies of the passions with what readers would have found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In his first engagement with the Rhetoric, Giles did not grasp the political significance of Aristotle’s treatment of emotio...
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Chapter 1 traces the millennial length of a theoretical discourse about affectio that begins with Cicero’s De inventione before turning to a tradition of stylistic teaching that arose in parallel with that speculative rhetorical thought... more
Chapter 1 traces the millennial length of a theoretical discourse about affectio that begins with Cicero’s De inventione before turning to a tradition of stylistic teaching that arose in parallel with that speculative rhetorical thought and that was to have much more profound consequences for medieval rhetorical practice. Cicero’s De inventione was the main Latin rhetorical treatise, along with Rhetorica ad Herennium, that the Middle Ages inherited from antiquity. Cicero treats emotion (affectio) as a topic of invention, and understands it in philosophical terms as a perturbation of the soul. That philosophical approach was elaborated in medieval commentaries. The chapter then turns to late antique handbooks of style. Style came to constitute a separate study; through these influences, style also became the main conduit for teaching emotion and rhetorical persuasion.
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Chapter 2 considers the fortunes of stylistic teaching about emotion in late antique and early Christian literary rhetoric: Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, Macrobius’ Saturnalia, and Cassiodorus’ psalm commentary. Here the teaching... more
Chapter 2 considers the fortunes of stylistic teaching about emotion in late antique and early Christian literary rhetoric: Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, Macrobius’ Saturnalia, and Cassiodorus’ psalm commentary. Here the teaching can explicitly articulate an ethical dimension of style, where the teacher/speaker calls attention to his investment in the emotional charge of the text. But when that ethical value is merely assumed, not overtly stated, as in many monastic and clerical rhetorics over the following centuries, the force of the ethical defense of rhetoric diminishes. The chapter traces this “naturalization” of the ethical defense in the rhetorics of Isidore of Seville, Bede, Rupert of Deutz, and the twelfth-century cathedral master Onulf of Speyer.
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Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized... more
Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in th...
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... Page 175. 148 RITA COPELAND grammatical categories by reference to English. ... Cicero recommends translation as a practical method of learn-ing the style and form of the Greek masters of oratory (De Optimo Genere Oratorum 1949: v.... more
... Page 175. 148 RITA COPELAND grammatical categories by reference to English. ... Cicero recommends translation as a practical method of learn-ing the style and form of the Greek masters of oratory (De Optimo Genere Oratorum 1949: v. 14-15; De Oratore, 1942: 1. xxxiv. 155). ...
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How did Horace's Ars poetica become a classic of literary theory? What were the conditions in its medieval reception that transformed the work from a pragmatic teaching text into a canonical classic of poetic theory?
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Research Interests: Art and Literature
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Chaucer and Rhetoric RITA COPELAND In the" General Bibliography" of the Riverside Chaucer, rhetoric is pre-sented under the rubric" Style and ... 1Z4 Contexts and Cultures sion"(Rhetoric, 1. 2), a definition that was... more
Chaucer and Rhetoric RITA COPELAND In the" General Bibliography" of the Riverside Chaucer, rhetoric is pre-sented under the rubric" Style and ... 1Z4 Contexts and Cultures sion"(Rhetoric, 1. 2), a definition that was echoed by Cicero.''The Rhetorica ad Herennium (c. 90 BC ...
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Fourteenth-century readers depended, often without historical awareness, on the innovations of the twelfth century in the trivium arts of grammar and rhetoric. The literary culture of the fourteenth-century grammar classroom could trace... more
Fourteenth-century readers depended, often without historical awareness, on the innovations of the twelfth century in the trivium arts of grammar and rhetoric. The literary culture of the fourteenth-century grammar classroom could trace itself back to developments of the twelfth century and the standardized forms these assumed in the thirteenth. Without the decisive classicism of twelfth-century teaching, the ‘digested’ and anthologized classicism of the later periods would have been unlikely. Fourteenth-century literary learning was more professionalized than that of earlier periods, and often more streamlined. But its particular achievements, as reflected in the work of Chaucer, Gower, and others, would have been impossible without the pedagogical and theoretical breakthroughs of the earlier period.
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If emotion is expressed through the persuasive form of the enthymeme, what are the fields in which we can find this activated? Chapter 6 turns to poetry itself, poetry written in the wake of De regimine principum and arising from the... more
If emotion is expressed through the persuasive form of the enthymeme, what are the fields in which we can find this activated? Chapter 6 turns to poetry itself, poetry written in the wake of De regimine principum and arising from the sphere of political thought. It focuses on three texts that can be read in the light of De regimine principum: Dante’s Convivio, with emphasis on tractate IV and its canzone, part IV of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, and Hoccleve’s Prologue to his Regiment of Princes. Two of these, Convivio and Regiment of Princes, engage directly and explicitly with Giles of Rome’s work. Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale carries the accumulated influence of De regimine without directly citing it; Chaucer’s intertext is Dante’s Convivio. While these texts express some of the greater themes of De regimine, their poetic arguments can be read as enthymematic, using a brevity of argument that is emotionally effective. In this way, these poetic texts reflect—via the mediation of Giles’ De r...
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Alexander Neckham, medieval word lists, medieval pedagogy, from literacy to the "literary."
Chapter 5 considers the most important factor in the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, its translation from the speculative domain of scholastic philosophy to political philosophy and statecraft in Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum.... more
Chapter 5 considers the most important factor in the reception of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, its translation from the speculative domain of scholastic philosophy to political philosophy and statecraft in Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum. Widely copied and translated, this treatise proved the most influential interpretation of the Rhetoric. If in his early commentary Giles had showed little understanding of Aristotle’s distinctive phenomenology of emotions, his mirror of princes, written only a few years later, registers and mobilizes that active political dimension of emotion that is so important to Aristotelian rhetoric. Aristotle’s treatise on the emotions in book 2 of the Rhetoric figures extensively in De regimine principum, as Giles frames his theory of kingship in terms of the communicative strategies essential to rhetoric, “through arguments that are obvious and felt by the senses.” In this treatise, we also see how Giles has internalized the power of enthymematic argument, u...
Medieval grammatical curricula did not treat all authors alike: the prestige conferred on the auctor was determined by the functions that various texts served in the curriculum. This paper attempts a fine-tuned account of the progression... more
Medieval grammatical curricula did not treat all authors alike: the prestige conferred on the auctor was determined by the functions that various texts served in the curriculum. This paper attempts a fine-tuned account of the progression from one kind of auctor to another, from elementary to advanced, from those that served the acquisition of literacy (e.g. the group of texts comprising the so-called Liber Catonianus) to those classical and medieval works that represented the transition to the “literary” in its own right. What features of critical analysis characterized the approaches to those classical texts considered advanced literary fare, such as certain kinds of stylistic analysis, attention to historical or generic concerns, or theoretical approaches to language? How are different “levels” of author marked as either objects of imitation or as subjects of critical interpretation? And what is it that defines that highest level of auctor if it is not the production of the skills of the lector? The most advanced authors demand, not imitators, but readers. This is the key critical lesson exported beyond the classroom to define authorial prestige—and authorial self-consciousness—in medieval literary culture. This essay draws on late medieval curricular surveys, including works by Alexander Neckam and Hugh of Trimberg, which are guides to mastery of increasingly difficult texts.
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New Medieval Literatures - now published by Boydell and Brewer - is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work... more
New Medieval Literatures - now published by Boydell and Brewer - is an annual of work on medieval textual cultures, aiming to engage with intellectual and cultural pluralism in the Middle Ages and now. Its scope is inclusive of work across the theoretical, archival, philological, and historicist methodologies associated with medieval literary studies, and embraces both the British Isles and Europe. Topics in this volume include the political ecology of Havelok the Dane: Thomas Hoccleve and the making of "Chaucer"; and Britain and the Welsh Marches in Fouke le Fitz Waryn/. Contributors: Alexis Kellner Becker, Emily Dolmans, Marcel Elias, Philip Knox, Sebastian Langdell, Jonathan Morton, Marco Nievergelt, George Younge.
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The field of the sacred is not interior to the history of rhetoric. This is not to suggest that rhetorical theory and practice do not keep company with the sacred, but rather that the history we might write of rhetoric would not be the... more
The field of the sacred is not interior to the history of rhetoric. This is not to suggest that rhetorical theory and practice do not keep company with the sacred, but rather that the history we might write of rhetoric would not be the same as the history we might write of religious belief in the Christian West. These fields present competing historiographies, for the terms on which the history of rhetoric has been written are exactly the terms against which religious communities would define their own notions of the sacred. Yet, as I suggest here, the history of rhetoric can yield some surprising truths about the construction of sacred history as it emerged in the Christian Middle Ages.
Research Interests: History and Middle Ages
The classical learning of medieval readers, especially those fortunate to have access to a good library, could be formidable. But in the Middle Ages knowledge was also a commodity, and there was powerful temptation to satisfy intellectual... more
The classical learning of medieval readers, especially those fortunate to have access to a good library, could be formidable. But in the Middle Ages knowledge was also a commodity, and there was powerful temptation to satisfy intellectual hunger with compressed, simplified digests and easy fare. One text, De vita et moribus philosophorum , long attributed to Walter Burley, seems to have achieved particular success in satisfying that hunger for an easy version of ancient lore. Its roots reach back to Diogenes Laertius' Greek Lives of the Philosophers . This essay explores the roads of transmission that led to the making of De vita et moribus philosophorum , which fed a popular fascination with ancient philosophy and the lives of ancient philosophers. Through what channels did the 'history' of ancient philosophy find a readership beyond the scholarly academy, and how can we explain the appeal of such classical knowledge?
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Research Interests: Art and Oxford university
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Join us for the launch of _Sources in Early Poetics_, a new series with Brill, with addresses from the editors and a roundtable discussion featuring Prof. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge), Prof. Rita Copeland (Penn), Dr Lara Harb (Princeton),... more
Join us for the launch of _Sources in Early Poetics_, a new series with Brill, with addresses from the editors and a roundtable discussion featuring Prof. Gavin Alexander (Cambridge), Prof. Rita Copeland (Penn), Dr Lara Harb (Princeton), Dr Aglae Pizzone (Southern Denmark), and Prof. Filippomaria Pontani (Venice)!
Free registration via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sources-in-early-poetics-launch-and-roundtable-tickets-247177995037
'Sources in Early Poetics' publishes primary sources in literary criticism from Greco-Roman antiquity to the Enlightenment. Cutting across established period and disciplinary divides, the series emphasizes both the essential continuity and the inventive range of over two millennia of criticism in the West and its neighbouring traditions. From the Levant to the Americas, from Greek and Latin to Arabic, Hebrew, and the rising vernaculars, Sources in Early Poetics provides a forum for new materials and perspectives in the long, cosmopolitan history of literary thought.
The series publishes editions of single works as well as collections of shorter texts by one or more authors, with facing-page English translations provided for all non-English texts. We also publish English translations of works available in adequate editions elsewhere, but unavailable in authoritative and accessible English renderings. Special attention is given to unpublished, unedited, and untranslated sources, especially those remaining in manuscript.
The series has its origin in Poetics before Modernity, an international project founded by the General Editors in 2016. In addition to sponsoring _Sources in Early Poetics_ and other publications, the project also organizes events and collaborates with affiliated institutions, and is backed by an extensive Advisory Board, featuring some of the most distinguished scholars in the field.
General Editors
Vladimir Brljak (Durham) and Micha Lazarus (Warburg)
Editorial Board
Baukje van den Berg (CEU), Elsa Bouchard, (Montreal), Bryan Brazeau (Warwick), and Andrew Kraebel (Trinity)
Advisory Board
Gavin Alexander (Cambridge), Jan Bloemendal (Huygens), Rita Copeland (Pennsylvania), Anders Cullhed (Stockholm), Pierre Destrée (U catholique de Louvain), Kathy Eden (Columbia), Roland Greene (Stanford), Beatrice Gründler (Freie U Berlin), Stephen Halliwell (St Andrews), Lara Harb (Princeton), Philip Hardie (Cambridge), Bernhard Huss (Freie U Berlin), Ian Johnson (St Andrews), Casper de Jonge (Leiden), Pauline LeVen (Yale), Martin McLaughlin (Oxford), Alastair Minnis (Yale), Glenn W. Most (Chicago/MPWG Berlin), Stratis Papaioannou (Crete), Aglae Pizzone (Southern Denmark), Filippomaria Pontani (Venice), James Porter (UC Berkeley), Panagiotis Roilos (Harvard), Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (KCL), Peter T. Struck (Pennsylvania), María José Vega (U Autònoma de Barcelona), Zhang Longxi (City U of Hong Kong), and Jan Ziolkowski (Harvard)
Please direct all queries to poeticsbeforemodernity@gmail.com.
Free registration via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sources-in-early-poetics-launch-and-roundtable-tickets-247177995037
'Sources in Early Poetics' publishes primary sources in literary criticism from Greco-Roman antiquity to the Enlightenment. Cutting across established period and disciplinary divides, the series emphasizes both the essential continuity and the inventive range of over two millennia of criticism in the West and its neighbouring traditions. From the Levant to the Americas, from Greek and Latin to Arabic, Hebrew, and the rising vernaculars, Sources in Early Poetics provides a forum for new materials and perspectives in the long, cosmopolitan history of literary thought.
The series publishes editions of single works as well as collections of shorter texts by one or more authors, with facing-page English translations provided for all non-English texts. We also publish English translations of works available in adequate editions elsewhere, but unavailable in authoritative and accessible English renderings. Special attention is given to unpublished, unedited, and untranslated sources, especially those remaining in manuscript.
The series has its origin in Poetics before Modernity, an international project founded by the General Editors in 2016. In addition to sponsoring _Sources in Early Poetics_ and other publications, the project also organizes events and collaborates with affiliated institutions, and is backed by an extensive Advisory Board, featuring some of the most distinguished scholars in the field.
General Editors
Vladimir Brljak (Durham) and Micha Lazarus (Warburg)
Editorial Board
Baukje van den Berg (CEU), Elsa Bouchard, (Montreal), Bryan Brazeau (Warwick), and Andrew Kraebel (Trinity)
Advisory Board
Gavin Alexander (Cambridge), Jan Bloemendal (Huygens), Rita Copeland (Pennsylvania), Anders Cullhed (Stockholm), Pierre Destrée (U catholique de Louvain), Kathy Eden (Columbia), Roland Greene (Stanford), Beatrice Gründler (Freie U Berlin), Stephen Halliwell (St Andrews), Lara Harb (Princeton), Philip Hardie (Cambridge), Bernhard Huss (Freie U Berlin), Ian Johnson (St Andrews), Casper de Jonge (Leiden), Pauline LeVen (Yale), Martin McLaughlin (Oxford), Alastair Minnis (Yale), Glenn W. Most (Chicago/MPWG Berlin), Stratis Papaioannou (Crete), Aglae Pizzone (Southern Denmark), Filippomaria Pontani (Venice), James Porter (UC Berkeley), Panagiotis Roilos (Harvard), Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (KCL), Peter T. Struck (Pennsylvania), María José Vega (U Autònoma de Barcelona), Zhang Longxi (City U of Hong Kong), and Jan Ziolkowski (Harvard)
Please direct all queries to poeticsbeforemodernity@gmail.com.