Pathos and Pastoralism:
Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Medieval England
By Rita Copeland
I n 1927 Heidegger claimed that there was hardly a better analysis of the emotions than Aristotle’s account in book 2 of his Rhetoric. 1 Here I will consider
how this pronouncement might have rung true for a fifteenth-century English
preacher. My study concerns an unexpected junction of two textual worlds, one
ancient and one medieval, all the more surprising because the connection occurs
in the mind of a fifteenth-century annotator of a manuscript of Aristotle. The
significance of this intersection lies in that vast field that we now call the “history of the emotions.” My argument here will take its departure from a poignant and powerful piece of manuscript evidence that links Aristotle’s Rhetoric
with the poetic effects of Piers Plowman. This evidence opens a window onto
what the Rhetoric meant to readers in medieval England and how it was appreciated for its systematic, rhetorical approach to the passions. The Rhetoric could
serve as a catalyst acting upon two already familiar discourses, poetry and preaching, to tap their common potential as the key repositories of knowledge about
audience emotions.
This essay contributes to our understanding of the reception of the Rhetoric
in late-medieval England by examining its value for pastoral readers and its relevance to the work of preaching. But in order to appreciate its impact on later
medieval readers we must establish the contexts for its earlier reception in the
Arab world and Europe and consider what distinguished Aristotle’s Rhetoric from
other rhetorical texts passed down from antiquity.
1. From Greek to Arabic: The Early Progress of the Rhetoric
and Its Emotional Teaching
Aristotle’s Rhetoric arrived on the Western academic scene in its authoritative
Latin translation by William of Moerbeke in the late thirteenth century. It was
taken up immediately into the fold of Aristotelian studies. But at the same time
I wish to express my thanks to Katharine Breen, Charles Briggs, Martin Camargo, Sheila
Lindenbaum, Andrew Lynch, Costantino Marmo, Nicolette Zeeman, and the two anonymous readers for Speculum for their insightful comments and help with sources.
1
Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1927), 139. In 1924 Heidegger gave
a series of lectures on Aristotle’s philosophy, including the Rhetoric, paying special attention to book
2, on emotions, and stressing Aristotle’s presentation of emotion as a ground of pistis—of deliberation and argumentation in communal life. These 1924 Marburg lectures are now available in English
in Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts in Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Robert
D. Tanzer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); see especially 75–176. The Marburg lectures are studied in Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann, eds., Heidegger and Rhetoric (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2005).
96
doi:10.1017/S0038713413003576
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there was scarcely any available Latin scholarly tradition on Aristotelian rhetoric that could prepare the first Western readers for the actual character of the
text, explain the theoretical framework of the Rhetoric, or give it a practical application. Unlike the long-standing Ciceronian rhetorical tradition, which had
directly inspired practical and theoretical approaches to poetics and to prose
composition, and which had built bridges to logic and other fields of thought,
Aristotle’s Rhetoric represented a new kind of authority that might well leave
Western academic readers baffled and unprepared. Compared with the Ciceronian
rhetorics and the late-classical handbooks based on Cicero, Aristotle’s Rhetoric
is not easy to understand. Its organization is at times confusing, and its explanations of the topics for the various genres of rhetoric would have seemed unfamiliar. It is embedded in Athenian legal practice and political thought, as well
as in an immense terrain of Greek literary culture (much of which is lost to us
even today—thus the Rhetoric now serves as one of our sources for quotations
from otherwise lost works). Many of these cultural and literary references were
unknown to medieval readers in the West, thus compounding interpretive difficulties. Moreover, little in the technical Ciceronian rhetorics would have prepared the first Western medieval readers for Aristotle’s emphasis on the cognitive, ethical, and fluid psychological aspects of rhetoric.
We must first understand the nature and contents of the Rhetoric in order to
appreciate what was at stake in its reception by a medieval audience accustomed
to the Ciceronian tradition of rhetorical handbooks. In Aristotle’s account, rhetoric is a techne, a tool for evaluating discourses. The famous opening sentence
of the Rhetoric announces that “rhetoric is the counterpart (antistrophos) of dialectic” (1354a1) because both are concerned with common knowledge and neither belongs to a specific science. Rhetoric is defined as “the ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion,” no matter what the subject,
so that rhetoric is an art but not a specific subject matter (1355b25).2 There are
three kinds of proof: from the character of the speaker (ethos), from the emotions aroused in an audience ( pathos), and from argumentation itself (logos)
(1356a1). Rhetoric, Aristotle says, is an offshoot of dialectic, on the one hand,
and of politics and ethics, on the other hand (1356a25–27). Book 1 of the Rhetoric
deals with topics that are specific to the three species of rhetoric (political, or
deliberative; judicial, or forensic; and demonstrative, or epideictic). Book 2 of
the Rhetoric represents the earliest account of audience psychology, a comprehensive exploration of pathos, or affect; what arouses emotions in people; and
how a speaker can produce or exploit the emotions of his audience. Aristotle gives
a detailed typology of fourteen emotions relevant to the task of persuading an
audience: anger and satisfaction, or calmness; friendship and enmity; fear and
confidence; shame and shamelessness; favor, or kindliness, and its opposite, ingratitude, or unkindliness; pity and indignation; and envy and emulation. Along
with the passions, Aristotle also classifies character types: young, old, middleaged, wellborn, wealthy, and powerful. The remaining chapters of book 2 give
All English translations of Aristotle’s Greek text will be based on Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory
of Civic Discourse, trans. George Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For the Greek
text see the edition by Adolphus Roemer, Ars rhetorica (Leipzig: Teubner, 1923).
2
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examples of maxims, enthymemes, and common topics. Book 3 deals with style
and arrangement, including the famous discussion of vivid metaphor.
Among the distinctive qualities of Rhetoric, book 2, within the ancient context of emotional theory is Aristotle’s focus on emotions in relation to other
people, not in relation to things (in other words, as merely appetitive). As he
describes them here, emotions come about through social behavior—through responses to people. Compared with other ancient thought, Aristotle’s approach
here is surprisingly nonjudgmental, stressing what beliefs, intentions, and awarenesses actually cause emotions: for example, that the fornicator will feel shame
before friends, relatives, or others who can reveal his shameful actions and whose
opinion he would thus respect, but not before wordless creatures like infants or
animals (1384b20). In the Rhetoric Aristotle is not speaking about how we should
strive for goodness and the mean (as in the Ethics) but rather about how the
orator can understand what produces anger or shame or love so that he can
recognize, evoke, or modify those emotions in an audience. He analyzes the movement of emotions from cause to bodily and cognitive effect. Moreover, the cause
and effect studied here are not related to the orator’s delivery: rather, these are
the conditions that already and continually characterize social and psychic life.
In other words, in Aristotle’s treatment the emotions are not conjured at the moment of speaking through the orator’s mastery of style; they are a resource to
be tapped by a knowing orator, providing the grounds or topics of the arguments he will make. This is a key difference between Aristotle’s approach and
the later classical treatments of emotional delivery in Cicero and Quintilian, who
see the speaker as necessarily charged with the very emotion that he is trying to
convey through a heightened style.3
Although preserved as part of the Aristotelian corpus, the Rhetoric was not
very influential as a teaching text in later antiquity in Greek or Roman rhetorical studies. New technical developments in stylistics and in inventional theory,
from the third and second centuries BC, had altered the doctrine so much as
to make Aristotle’s text seem somewhat antiquated or unsystematic by comparison with the newer rhetorics.4 The earliest Ciceronian rhetorics, De inventione
and the contemporary Rhetorica ad Herennium, which were the standard textbooks during the Middle Ages, suggest only a limited and distant knowledge of
Aristotelian rhetoric.5 While Cicero’s mature De oratore reflects a new familiarity with Aristotle, this late work, like Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, had limited medieval circulation. Thus the sources for ancient rhetorical theory that were
most common in medieval teaching were not the avenues for reception of
Aristotelian doctrine in the West.
Because it was a work by Aristotle, the Rhetoric received due attention from
Islamic scholars, who incorporated it into their accounts of the organization of
Cicero, De oratore 2.44.185–2.53.214; Quintilian, Institutio oratoria 6.2.
George Kennedy, “The Composition and Influence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” in Essays on Aristotle’s
Rhetoric, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 416–24.
5
W. W. Fortenbaugh, “Cicero’s Knowledge of the Rhetorical Treatises of Aristotle and
Theophrastus,” in Cicero’s Knowledge of the Peripatos, ed. W. W. Fortenbaugh and Peter Steinmetz,
Rutgers University Studies in Classical Humanities 4 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
1989), 39–60.
3
4
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the sciences. Following a tradition from the Alexandrian commentators of Greek
late antiquity, Arabic scholarship classified the Rhetoric and Poetics with the logical sciences of the Organon, thus treating rhetoric as a lesser tool of logical proof.6
From as early as the eighth century it had been translated into Arabic in several
versions (of which only one survives).7 Even though rhetoric would have been
considered among the lowest and least reliable forms of logical proof, the Arabic
tradition of commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric was rich and significant. The
greatest Islamic scholars—al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes—all interpreted the
text, and their treatises and those of others survive in varying conditions of completeness.8 Predictably, given the classification of rhetoric as a branch of logic,
the commentaries devote their greatest attention to the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic, that is, to the logical properties of rhetorical proof.
But these commentators nevertheless understood the ethical and emotional dimensions of Aristotle’s conception of rhetoric.9 Al-Farabi’s Didascalia on the
Rhetoric is striking in its efforts to explain the power of rhetoric and to apply
the performative techne of rhetoric to the demonstration of religious law.10 Both
6
It is now accepted that this model was in place in late-antique Greek thought before being spread
through Syriac and Arabic scholarship; see Richard Walzer, “Zur Traditionsgeschichte der aristotelischen Poetik,” Studi italiani di filologia classica, n.s., 11 (1934): 5–14, repr. in Richard Walzer, Greek
into Arabic: Essays on Islamic Philosophy (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1962), 129–36. For more detailed discussion of the Alexandrian background see Deborah L. Black, Logic and Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”
and “Poetics” in Medieval Arabic Philosophy, Islamic Philosophy and Theology 7 (Leiden: Brill, 1990),
17–51. One of the Arabic articulations of this classification model that had great influence in the
Latin West was the treatise known (from its Latin translations) as De scientiis, which was translated
twice in the twelfth century, by Gerard of Cremona and by Dominicus Gundissalinus; see the recent
editions (both with German translations) by Franz Schupp, Über die Wissenschaften/De scientiis, nach
der lateinischen Übersetzung Gerhards von Cremona (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2005), and Jakob Hans
Josef Schneider, De scientiis secundum versionem Dominici Gundisalvi/Über die Wissenschaften: Die
Version des Dominicus Gundissalinus (Freiburg: Herder, 2007).
7
The history of these translations is examined in detail in Uwe Vagelpohl, Aristotle’s “Rhetoric”
in the East: The Syriac and Arabic Translation and Commentary Tradition, Islamic Philosophy,
Theology, and Science 76 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), esp. 39–61. See also John W. Watt, ed., Aristotelian
Rhetoric in Syriac: Barhebraeus, Butyrum sapientiae, Book of Rhetoric, Aristoteles Semitico-latinus
18 (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 3–10 (this is an edition of a thirteenth-century Syriac translation). For an
overview see Maroun Aouad, “La Rhétorique: Tradition syriaque et arabe,” in Dictionnaire des philosophes antiques, ed. Richard Goulet, 1 (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1989),
455–72; Averroès: Commentaire moyen à la “Rhétorique” d’Aristote, ed. and trans. Maroun Aouad,
Textes et Traditions 5, 3 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 2002), 1:1–2. The extant Arabic version is edited by
M. C. Lyons, Aristotle’s “Ars rhetorica”: The Arabic Version, 2 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Pembroke
Arabic Texts, 1982).
8
For titles of lost works, and for editions of surviving works, see Aouad, “La Rhétorique, ” 460–
72. Substantial representations of the commentaries will soon be available in English: Lahcen E.
Ezzaher, Three Arabic Treatises on Rhetoric: The Commentaries of al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes
on Aristotle’s “Rhetoric” (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, forthcoming). See also Lahcen
E. Ezzaher, “Alfarabi’s Book of Rhetoric: An Arabic-English Translation of Alfarabi’s Commentary
on Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” Rhetorica 26 (2008): 347–91.
9
On ethos in the Arabic tradition see Frédérique Woerther, “L’interprétation de l’ēthos aristotélicien par al-Farabi,” Rhetorica 26 (2008): 393–416.
10
Didascalia, as known through the Latin translation by Hermannus Alemannus, in Al-Farabi: Deux
ouvrages inédits sur la “Rhétorique,” ed. J. Langhade and M. Grignaschi (Beirut: Dar el-Mashreq,
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Avicenna and Averroes gave detailed comments on book 2 of the Rhetoric and
its account of the emotions.11 Avicenna’s account of the “natural dispositions and
affections of the soul” is a brief exposition of the chapters on the emotions in
Rhetoric, book 2. Avicenna sees logic as the core of rhetoric and pathos as a secondary approach: while the most effective and rhetorically authentic means of
persuasion is syllogistic argument, arousing emotions is another possible mechanism and thus merits attention.12 In his Middle Commentary Averroes stays close
to the structure of the Aristotelian text (which he knew in its Arabic translation). In his exposition of book 2 he not only appreciates but even elaborates the
rhetorical orientation of the emotional aspect of Aristotelian psychology: the
speaker must understand the causes of the passions and the conditions under
which they are aroused and experienced, specifically so as to be able to provoke
the desired emotion in the hearer and select the opportune moment for this (cf.
1378a).13
2. The Rhetoric in Latin Scholastic Culture and
Receptions of Its Teaching on the Emotions
By the middle of the thirteenth century there were two Latin translations of
the Rhetoric: one of them by the much-maligned Hermannus Alemannus, who
used an Arabic version as well as the commentaries by al-Farabi, Avicenna, and
Averroes; the other an anonymous translation (the Vetus) from the Greek.14 But
1971), 150 and n. 3; English translation of the passage in Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language
Arts and Literary Theory AD 300–1475, ed. Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), 741.
11
On Avicenna’s commentaries see Vagelpohl, Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the East, 193–96; Dimitri Gutas,
Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition: Introduction to Reading Avicenna’s Philosophical Works,
Islamic Philosophy and Theology 4 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 87–93; Aouad, “La Rhétorique,” 466–68.
12
“Al-Ahlāq wa-l-infi©ālāt an-nafsāniyya,” edition and French translation by Denise Rémondon,
in Miscellanea, Mémorial Avicenne 4 (Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1954), 19–30.
Ezzaher’s forthcoming book (see n. 8 above) presents a translation of Avicenna’s Compendium on
the Rhetoric, which, while confined to book 1 of Aristotle’s text, devotes some attention to emotional appeal.
13
Aouad, ed. and trans., Commentaire moyen à la “Rhétorique” d’Aristote, 1:146, 2:140. Cf.
Rhetoric 2.1.8, 1378a, where the application to the rhetorical composition of emotional knowledge
is only implicit; see Kennedy’s note, Aristotle on Rhetoric, 122. See also Vagelpohl, Aristotle’s
“Rhetoric” in the East, 196–201; and Charles E. Butterworth, “Averroes’ Platonization of Aristotle’s
Art of Rhetoric,” in La “Rhétorique” d’Aristote: Traditions et commentaires de l’antiquité au XVIIe
siècle, ed. Gilbert Dahan and Irène Rosier-Catach (Paris: Vrin, 1998), 227–40. Averroes’s Middle
Commentary was translated into Hebrew in 1337 by Todros Todrosi; this Hebrew translation was
the basis for the Latin translation of the Middle Commentary by Abraham of Balmes in the early
sixteenth century.
14
On Hermannus’s use of different copies of this translation see the introduction to the Didascalia
by Grignaschi in Al-Farabi: Deux ouvrages, 134–37; and see Luigi Bottin, Contributi della tradizione greco-latina e arabo-latina al testo della “Retorica” di Aristotele (Padua: Antenore, 1977), 75–85.
Roger Bacon famously complained of the “vile” translation of the Rhetoric by Hermannus Alemannus:
see Roger Bacon, Opus maius, ed. J. H. Bridges, 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1900), 71.
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William of Moerbeke’s translation, produced about 1269, swiftly superseded the
older Latin versions. Moerbeke’s translation is extant in more than one hundred
manuscripts, over half of them from the fourteenth century.
Given the wide circulation of Moerbeke’s translation of the Rhetoric, we might
assume that it had a profound impact on the pragmatic study of rhetoric and
that its teachings would have supplanted, or have competed strongly with, the
Ciceronian tradition. But there seems to have been relatively limited disciplinary
assimilation in this sphere. The explanation for this lies with the more general
fate of rhetorical study. At the secondary level of education—where rhetorical
training was bound up with the teaching of Latin style and composition—the arts
of poetry and of letter writing had dominated the curricula since the end of the
twelfth century. These arts were based in the Ciceronian tradition of rhetoric and
the Horatian tradition of ars poetica. While the medieval rhetorical arts had successfully displaced their classical models as the teaching texts of choice, they also
effected a conservative pull towards the familiar Roman, and especially Ciceronian,
tradition.15 At the tertiary level, on the other hand, the teaching of rhetoric had
no clear place in the required curricula of northern universities in the thirteenth
and even fourteenth centuries. The early statutes of the universities of Paris and
Oxford are silent or at best ambiguous about the place of rhetoric in the curriculum.16 Beyond the statutory regulations there is evidence for some broader study
of rhetoric by masters and students, either the Ciceronian rhetorics and book 4
of Boethius’s De topicis differentiis or, later, Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Among modern
scholars, John Ward in particular has argued strongly for the likelihood of rhetorical teaching at Paris and Oxford outside of ordinary, or prescribed, lectures.17 The proliferation of theoretical classifications of the sciences and disciplinary overviews, such as the famous “student guide” in Barcelona, Arxiu de la
Corona d’Aragó, MS Ripoll 109, provides a larger picture of how rhetoric was
understood, either in a system of scientific relations or in terms of the internal
character of the art.18 But while these show an interest in the pragmatic dimensions
15
Even the composite manual Tria sunt, a “professional” rhetoric developed during the fourteenth
century in the milieu of Oxford University, is based in the Ciceronian tradition; see Martin Camargo,
“Tria sunt: The Long and the Short of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Documentum de modo et arte dictandi
et versificandi,” Speculum 74 (1999): 935–55; and also Camargo’s translation of a section of Tria
sunt in Copeland and Sluiter, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, 670–81.
16
H. Denifle and E. Chatelain, eds., Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis (Paris, 1891–99; repr.,
Brussels: Culture et civilisation, 1964), 1:78; Strickland Gibson, ed., Statuta antiqua Universitatis
Oxoniensis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 26.
17
John O. Ward, “Rhetoric in the Faculty of Arts at the Universities of Paris and Oxford in the
Middle Ages: A Summary of the Evidence,” Archivum Latinitatis medii aevii (Bulletin du Cange) 54
(1996): 159–231; P. Osmund Lewry, “Rhetoric at Paris and Oxford in the Mid-Thirteenth Century,”
Rhetorica 1 (1983): 45–63.
18
See the studies and texts in Claude Lafleur, ed., Quatre introductions à la philosophie au XIIIe
siècle (Montreal: Institut d’études médiévales, 1988); and see Claude Lafleur and Joanne Carrier, eds.,
L’enseignement de la philosophie au XIIIe siècle: Autour du “Guide de l’étudiant” du ms. Ripoll
109, Studia Artistarum 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1997). Some of these issues are summed up in Gilbert
Dahan, “L’entrée de la Rhétorique dans le monde latin,” in La “Rhétorique” d’Aristote, ed. Dahan
and Rosier-Catach, 65–86.
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of rhetoric as an art of persuasive speaking or eloquent composition, they do not
indicate formal (“ordinary”) teaching of the art; and the sparsity of thirteenthcentury university commentaries on the Ciceronian and Boethian rhetorics makes
it difficult to judge how deeply this interest penetrated.19
After the arrival of Moerbeke’s translation, the influence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric
in terms of its rhetorical doctrine is reflected in university cultures in some narrow contexts, such as in the epideictic flourish in one of the Oxford graduation
speeches edited by P. Osmund Lewry: “Sicud dicit Philosophus primo Rhetorice,
‘laus est sermo elucidans magnitudinem virtutis’” (“As the Philosopher says in
the first book of the Rhetoric, ‘Praise is speech that illuminates the greatness of
virtue’”; cf. 1367b26).20 The Oxford statutes of 1431 list rhetoric as an obligatory course of study and give Aristotle’s Rhetoric as reading for the subject, along
with Cicero, Ovid, and Virgil; but the relation of this statute to actual teaching
is unclear, and its significance as real evidence for curricular expansion has been
interpreted quite skeptically.21 The manuscript groupings of the Rhetoric provide what is probably a more accurate picture of its broad reception. While it
was widely copied and circulated, it does not typically appear with other rhetorical writings but rather with other texts of Aristotle, most commonly the Ethics
or the Politics or both.22 This does not mean that it was read only as an adjunct
to ethics and politics, but it does indicate that it was not seen as specific to the
art of rhetoric.23
Taken together, these different kinds of evidence point to a somewhat limited
contribution of Aristotle’s Rhetoric to rhetorical study per se, even though the
text came to be well known. At the secondary level it did not displace the familiar Ciceronian tradition of rhetorical manuals, which lay behind the popular medieval genres of the ars dictaminis and ars poetriae; and the official university
curricula in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries did not give formal scope to
rhetorical study, so it is difficult to judge how the reception of the Rhetoric might
have altered what teaching may have taken place.
19
K. Margareta Fredborg, “Buridan’s Quaestiones super Rhetoricam Aristotelis,” in The Logic of
John Buridan, ed. Jan Pinborg, Opuscula Graecolatina 9 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 1976),
47–59, at 49–50.
20
P. Osmund Lewry, “Four Graduation Speeches from Oxford Manuscripts (c. 1270–1310),”
Mediaeval Studies 44 (1982): 138–80, at 168; see also Lewry, “Rhetoric at Paris and Oxford,” 59
n. 54.
21
Gibson, ed., Statuta antiqua, 234; Ward, “Rhetoric in the Faculty of Arts,” 183–86. The most
skeptical view is that of J. M. Fletcher, “Developments in the Faculty of Arts 1370–1520,” in The
History of the University of Oxford, 2: Late Medieval Oxford, ed. J. I. Catto and Ralph Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 315–45, at 323–24.
22
A count of major manuscript groupings of the Rhetoric was first compiled by James J. Murphy,
Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 100. Charles F. Briggs
adds some further manuscripts to Murphy’s original census; see “Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the Later
Medieval Universities: A Reassessment,” Rhetorica 25 (2007): 243–68.
23
Further evidence for this reception is that, while the Rhetoric was known at Oxford, it was not
used as a source of rhetorical doctrine in Tria sunt, the most popular treatise to have emerged from
rhetorical teaching at Oxford (even though Tria sunt mentions Aristotle’s Poetics); see Camargo, “Tria
sunt, ” 941–42.
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But the Rhetoric did make its impact. It was taken up and studied across a
number of intellectual fields, as witnessed by the important commentaries on the
text. The largest and best known of these was by Giles of Rome, written about
1272, not long after the text was translated. This is a massive commentary whose
influence persisted into the sixteenth century. Giles’s coverage is as thorough as
his commentary is large. He devotes much attention to the implications of rhetoric’s relation with dialectic, thus ushering Aristotle’s text into a mature Scholastic
discourse of disciplinary classification.24 He also expands on the relations between rhetoric, ethics, and politics, which were to remain important subjects.25
His analysis of the emotions in book 2 establishes a groundwork for Scholastic
response to Aristotle’s treatment. Unlike Averroes, who gestures towards a pragmatic application of understanding the emotions, Giles does not take up the compositional implications, perhaps because this is itself only implicit in the surviving form of the Aristotelian text (1378a19–24), which says that it is important
to classify the emotions because it is through them that people modify their judgments. Rather, Giles’s interest in the emotions, as Costantino Marmo has shown,
is taxonomic and philosophical.26 He draws his basic understanding of the emotions from Aquinas’s treatments of the “passions of the soul.” While he makes
his own contributions, clarifying the logical bases of Aquinas’s distinctions among
the passions (and adding a twelfth passion to Aquinas’s eleven by proposing
“meekness” as an opposite to “anger”), he processes the Aristotelian discussion
through a traditional framework that had its own authority, even reclassifying
some of the pairs of emotions listed by Aristotle so that they fit his own inherited scheme (notably he classes shame and shamelessness under fear and confidence [Venice 1515 ed., 59vb]). Thus, in his long introduction to book 2, Giles
is at pains to define the passions as motions of the sensitive appetite (both concupiscible and irascible; 1515 ed., 49rb–va) and to codify the order of the emotions based on these distinctions (1515 ed., 50rb).
The two major commentators who followed Giles of Rome, the fourteenthcentury Parisian scholars John of Jandun and John Buridan, were similarly philosophical and taxonomic in their interests, depending greatly on Giles’s commentary for their own expositions.27 Both are sensitive to the role of the emotions
in rhetoric, although they tend to pursue this in philosophical or moral terms,
24
Aegidius Romanus, Commentaria in Rhetoricam Aristotelis (Venice, 1515; repr., Frankfurt:
Minerva, 1968). For background and translation of selected passages see Copeland and Sluiter, eds.,
Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric, 792–811. On the Scholastic context see Costantino Marmo,
“Suspicio: A Key Word in the Significance of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Thirteenth-Century Scholasticism,”
Cahiers de l’Institut du moyen âge grec et latin 60 (1990): 145–98.
25
Ubaldo Staico, “Rhetorica e politica in Egidio Romano,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 3 (1992): 1–75.
26
See Costantino Marmo, “‘Hoc autem etsi potest tollerari . . .’: Egidio Romano e Tommaso
d’Aquino sulle passioni dell’anima,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 2 (1991):
281–315.
27
On their dependence on Giles see Marmo, “John of Jandun’s Commentary on Aristotle’s
Rhetoric,” in A Companion to John of Jandun, ed. Vasileios Syros (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). I
thank Professor Marmo for providing me with his essay in typescript.
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posing and answering the question whether the “passions of the soul” pertain
to rhetoric, given that rhetoric is to be defined (insofar as it is related to dialectic) as a “ratiocinative science.” 28 Both also focus on the judge or juryman as
the audience of rhetorical discourse, and here they grapple with the moral question of how emotional appeals may sway the opinions of a judge (building on
Aristotle’s statements about this problem at 1.1.4–5, 1354a).29
The commentary by John of Jandun, produced (in two versions) between 1310
and 1326, offers some specific ideas about the uses of emotional rhetoric in actual speaking situations, including those of preaching. Although he does not fully
approve of appealing to the passions, he recognizes the usefulness of providing
some levity or comforting distraction:
Expedit etiam aliquando uti sermonibus passionantibus, cum iudex et auditores sint
iam fatigati seu fessi de sedendo uel stando et quasi contristati et amplius nolunt audire litigantes, tunc enim bonum est interponere aliqua passionalia, utpote aliqua solaciosa seu risibilia et delectantia uel mirabilia, non ut per hoc iudex inclinetur ad iudicandum pro uel contra per se inmediate, sed ut uelit audire rationes litigantium bene
et diligenter.30
28
John of Jandun, Questiones super Rethoricorum tres libros 2.q.2, “ad istam scientiam pertineat
considerare passiones animi,” in Marmo, “John of Jandun’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Rhetoric,”
appendix; John Buridan, Questiones in Rhetoricam Aristotelis 2.q.1, “Utrum ad rhetoricam pertinet
determinare de passionibus,” in Fredborg, “Buridan’s Quaestiones,” 57.
29
For example, John of Jandun, Questiones 1.q.3: “Est tamen intelligendum quod ipsi sermones
passionantes aliqualiter possunt considerari a rethorico, non ut eis principaliter et in pluribus utatur,
sed ut sciat eos uitare et soluere. Sunt enim aliqui litigantes qui assueti sunt dicere tales sermones
iudicibus et per hoc uenire ad intentum; unde ne bonus orator ignoret uirtutem talium sermonum et
ne uincatur per eos, bonum est eos cognoscere aliqualiter (Nevertheless we should understand that
these emotional discourses may in some way be considered by the rhetorician, not so that he should
use them principally and in most cases, but that he should know them so as to avoid and neutralize
them. There are some lawyers who habitually proffer such discourses to judges so as to achieve their
purpose; so in order that a good orator not be naive about the power of such speeches and not be
defeated by them, it is good to know something about them),” ed. Costantino Marmo, “Retorica e
motti di spirito: Una ‘Quaestio’ inedita di Giovanni di Jandun,” in Semiotica: Storia, teoria, interpretazione. Saggi intorno a Umberto Eco, ed. Patrizia Magli et al. (Milan: Bompiani, 1992), 39. Cf.
John Buridan, Questiones 1.q.5, reasoning that emotional speeches do not pertain to rhetoric according to its primary and principal purpose (cf. Rhetoric 1.1.3–5, 1354a): “Prima sit hec: rethoris intentio principalis non est peruertere iudicem sed sermones passionales uel nichil faciunt uel peruertunt iudicem; 2a est, quia principalis intentio rethorice est causam suam ostendere quod non faciunt
sermones passionatiui. Et confirmat[ur] Aristotiles signo et in aliquibus ciuitatibus optime legibus
ordinatis prohibentur tales sermones et illa debet fieri in parlamento regis aut pape (First [according
to Aristotle], the principal intention of rhetoric is not to corrupt the judge, but emotional speeches
either serve no purpose or they corrupt the judge. Second, the principal intention of rhetoric is to
prove its cases, which emotional speeches do not do. Aristotle’s reasoning is confirmed by [logical]
proof and by the fact that in certain cities these kinds of speeches are properly prohibited by laws
[see Rhetoric 1.1.5], and this ought to be the case in the court of the king and the pope),” quoted by
permission from the unpublished transcription of Buridan’s Questiones in Rhetoricam Aristotelis by
Bernadette Preben-Hansen; cf. Buridan, Questiones 2.q.1.
30
1.q.3, text edited by Marmo, “Retorica e motti di spirito,” 39–40. Buridan, Questiones in
Rhetoricam Aristotelis 1.q.5, makes a similar exception, although Buridan’s exceptional case is less
precisely realized than John of Jandun’s.
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[Sometimes it is expedient to use emotional speeches, as when the judge and the audience are tired or worn out from sitting or standing and are fed up and want to hear no
more from the lawyers; then it is good to allow in some appeals to emotion, such as
something comforting or funny or pleasurable or wondrous, not in order that the judge
should shift his judgment pro or con directly on account of that, but so that he should
be inclined to hear the reasoning of lawyers with good will and attentively.]
It is not surprising that in this context John of Jandun also invokes the De
inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium:31 the exceptional circumstances that
he imagines for using an emotional appeal (audience fatigue) are those that the
Ciceronian rhetorics give for deploying the device of insinuatio, or indirect approach, in the exordium. Perhaps the most practical realization of emotional appeal in John of Jandun’s commentary comes under his exposition of delivery (hypokrisis) in book 3 (3.1.3–8, 1403b–1404a). Here he elaborates an understanding
of delivery as a factor that determines the emotional valuation of a mental concept, so that we associate good or bad (and the appropriate emotion) with the
thing to which the utterance refers:
Et ulterius, cum ex conceptionibus anime cognoscitiue oriantur affectiones seu affectiones appetitus sensitiui, ut communiter dicitur—appetitus enim fit in actu a uirtute
cognoscente bonum aut malum, 3 o De anima et in De motibus animalium—rationabile
est quod alius et alius modus proferendi uocem exteriorem significat alium et alium
modum affectionis seu desiderii interioris. Et cum unum proportionalium sit quodam
modo signum alterius, rationale est quod uox modeste et ordinate et le具n典te prolata significat modestiam et ordinationem et constantiam conceptus et affectus interioris. Unde
etiam Seneca dicit in 40 Epistula ad Lucilium quod philosophi pronuntiatio sicut et
uita, debet esse compta.32
[And moreover, when the affections of the cognitive soul or the affections of the sensible appetite are moved by a mental concept, as is commonly understood—for appetite
is set into motion by virtue of knowing the good or the bad, as in De anima 3 and De
motibus animalium 33 —it is reasonable that one or another way of delivering the exterior voice signifies one or another kind of feeling or interior desire. And since one proportionally is a sign of the other, it is reasonable that a voice speaking modestly, with
restraint, and slowly, signifies the modesty, restraint, and firmness of the mental concept and the inner feeling. Whence Seneca says in his Epistle to Lucilium that the philosopher’s speech and life ought to be in mutual accord.]
As Marmo has shown, this triangulation of delivery, interior emotion, and the
valuation of the thing referred to allows John of Jandun to link emotional appeal with Aristotle’s notion of ethical proof through the character of the speaker.34
Text edited by Marmo, “Retorica e motti di spirito,” 40.
3.q.1, quoted from the text in Costantino Marmo, “Carattere dell’oratore e recitazione nel commento di Giovanni di Jandun al terzo libro della Retorica,” in Filosofia e teologia nel Trecento: Studi
in ricordo di Eugenio Randi, ed. Luca Bianchi, Textes et Études du Moyen Âge 1 (Louvain-la-Neuve:
Fédération internationale des instituts d’études médiévales, 1994), 17–31, at 26–27 n.
33
See De anima 431a–b; De motu animalium 701a25–b1.
34
“Carattere dell’oratore,” 27, 29–30.
31
32
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Aristotle’s Rhetoric in England
3. Aristotle’s Rhetoric in England, 1:
Peterhouse MS 57 and Its Readers
This is the intellectual context for the reception of the Rhetoric in the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The presence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in England
and its incorporation into rhetorical outlooks, whether academic or pragmatic,
still represent new fields of inquiry.35 The English manuscript that I will focus
on here can thus reveal some spectacular intersections, almost like a circuit conductor between several apparently unrelated currents: the rather specialist
Scholastic discourse of Aristotelian science, especially logic and ethics; the
Peripatetic rhetoric of ancient Athens and the peculiar Platonic-sophistic interface of Aristotle’s rhetorical theory; and the very English tradition of vernacular
preaching and pastoral literature, along with the literature of religious and political polemic, all combined in the Piers Plowman tradition.
The manuscript is Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 57, a collection of the works
of Aristotle: Metaphysics, Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric (thus a fairly typical grouping of the Rhetoric with other Aristotelian works). This collection was copied
ca. 1300, thus about thirty years after the Moerbeke translation of the Rhetoric.
According to George Lacombe’s description of codices for the Aristoteles Latinus,
the hands that copied the texts in Peterhouse 57 are English.36 There are many
glosses on the texts, especially on the Metaphysics and Ethics, as well as a good
many on the Rhetoric. The glosses represent various periods, from hands contemporary with those of the copyists to fifteenth-century hands. We know that
the manuscript was owned by Peterhouse at some point not long after it was made
because of a note on a flyleaf: “iste liber est communitatis scholarium domus s.
Petri Cantebrigiensis [sic] ex legato M. Walteri de Blacollisley, quondam vicarii
Wisebeeche, cuius anime propicietur deus. Amen (This book belongs to the community of scholars of the house of Saint Peter in Cambridge from the bequest of
Master Walter de Blacollisley, formerly of the vicarage of Wisbech, may God keep
his soul. Amen).” Walter de Blacollisley incepted for the Cambridge master of
arts in 1291–92 and was vicar of Wisbech, in Cambridgeshire, by 1318, a post
he resigned in June of that year to become rector of Sudborne, in Suffolk.37 We
35
Much of this research has been undertaken by Charles F. Briggs, whose scholarship is cited
throughout this article; also relevant is his book Giles of Rome’s “De regimine principum”: Reading
and Writing Politics at Court and University, c. 1275–c. 1525, Cambridge Studies in Palaeography
and Codicology 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). The reception in England of
Aristotelian logic, natural science, epistemology, and ethics has received more sustained attention;
among recent work see the important collection edited by John Marenbon, Aristotle in Britain during the Middle Ages, Rencontres de Philosophie Médiévale 5 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1996).
36
Aristoteles Latinus, 1, ed. George Lacombe et al. (Rome: La Libreria dello Stato, 1939), 354,
no. 249. Cf. Montague Rhodes James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of
Peterhouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), 76–77.
37
A. B. Emden, A Biographical Register of the University of Cambridge to 1500 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1963) (henceforth BRUC), 64; F. R. Chapman, ed., Sacrist Rolls of Ely,
2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 2:8.
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can assume that the book was donated when he took up the rectorship in Suffolk
because he is referred to as “formerly” of Wisbech.
Thus in this manuscript we have evidence of successive generations of readers
in England dealing with Aristotle’s Rhetoric. Apparently these readers made their
forays into the text without the direct benefit of the commentary by Giles of
Rome, although Giles’s commentary could have been available to readers at
Peterhouse, even close at hand: the late-thirteenth-century Peterhouse MS 82,
owned by Peterhouse from at least the early fifteenth century, contains Giles’s
commentary (noted in the Peterhouse Library catalogue of 1418).38 But I have
found no significant connections between Giles’s elaborate and learned commentary and the comparatively simple glosses and comments on the text of the
Rhetoric in Peterhouse 57. Predictably there is no evidence that the later glossators of Peterhouse 57 had knowledge of the Rhetoric commentaries of John
of Jandun or John Buridan, which were not widely circulated and appear not to
have penetrated to England. Thus this manuscript shows readers engaging the
text more or less independently of the philosophical biases of the Continental
commentators, whose interests in the Rhetoric were not usually pragmatic.
What does this manuscript tell us about how readers—apparently without an
authoritative commentary to guide them—made sense of the rhetorical theory of
fourth-century Athens? First of all, the glossing (marginal and interlinear) is heaviest at the beginning of the Rhetoric, book 1, chapters 1–10, which are the parts of
the text that deal most with rhetoric and dialectic. There is a great deal of interlinear glossing in an early hand,39 and on the first page is an exposition of the main
points that follow from the opening statement, “Rethorica assecutiva est dialectice” (rendering Aristotle’s famous “rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic”). Here
the early annotator seems to be trying to digest Aristotle’s arguments, to follow
the ideas about the functions of rhetoric (the means of persuasion) versus dialectic
(the means of deduction), about the formation of syllogisms, and about the differences between dialectic, rhetoric, and sophistic. It is clear that glosses such as these
represent an attempt to outline an unfamiliar argument about a subject that perhaps the annotator thought he knew well, either through the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition or through Aristotelian logic. Perhaps this is why the glosses wane
after the middle of the first book: this annotator was probably better prepared to
deal with this section because the study of rhetorical topics was often used to supplement the study of dialectical topics and because Cicero’s De inventione was often read as an adjunct to such works as Aristotle’s Topics on dialectical syllogisms. At any rate, this first annotator loses interest before the end of book 1.
But the attention of another, later annotator, writing in a fifteenth-century hand,
has fixed on something else, deep inside of book 2 of the Rhetoric, where Aristotle
38
James, Descriptive Catalogue, 14 (table for the “Old Catalogue” of 1418, no. 196) and 99.
Another collection, Peterhouse MS 208, of the fifteenth century, which contains notabilia from Giles’s
commentary, was noted in the Thomas James catalogue of 1600 but not in the earlier catalogue of
1418; see James, Descriptive Catalogue, xi (table of the 1697 and 1600 Peterhouse Library catalogues), no. 33 in the Thomas James catalogue, and 249–50.
39
On the hand see Aristoteles Latinus, 1, ed. Lacombe, 354.
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is providing maxims (gnōmai, that is, sententiae) as modes of persuasion. These
can be epigrams or proverbs. According to Aristotle, maxims are enthymematic,
but they give only a part of the enthymeme, that is, either a conclusion or one of
the premises. This later annotator has clearly found something of interest in some
of the pithy maxims that Aristotle quotes as examples and has extracted five of
them, which he has copied out at the end of the volume: “Non est vir qui in
omnibus felicitet” (1394b1; “No man may be happy in all ways”); “cognosce te
ipsum” (1395a20; “Know thyself”); “nichil valde” (1395a21; “Nothing to excess” [Aristotle classes the last two among trite maxims to be deployed artistically when appealing to extreme emotions, as in the case of bitter complaint and
high indignation] ); “ne invidiam pati oportet” and “ne otiosum esse” (both at
1394b30; “One should not be the object of jealousy” and “Do not be idle”).40 It
is clear that the complex argument that Aristotle is making here about the occasions for the deployment of certain maxims and their relationship to enthymematic proof is less interesting or intelligible to this annotator than the fact that
there are some good maxims here that can be copied out as a kind of ready reference for future use (they are written in a neat column on the last blank folio of
the book).
What might that future use be? It would surely be preaching. The maxims
chosen for copying out, among all those that Aristotle provides, are those that
offer basic moral advice; and the annotator has stripped away all the surrounding complexities and qualifications that Aristotle gives. Even stronger evidence
in favor of preaching is to be found within the sermon tradition itself. The use
of maxims or proverbs to punctuate and divide sermons was a basic technique of
both Latin and vernacular preaching, as mentioned, for example, by Robert of
Basevorn and Thomas Waleys, although this technique often remains theoretically unremarked.41 While the use of proverbs did not receive much explicit attention at the level of the ars praedicandi, considerations of the value of using
proverbs surface elsewhere, for example, in the advice that Jacques de Vitry gives
for delivering ad status sermons.42 Interestingly, in Peterhouse 57 the same hand
40
Moerbeke’s Latin translation at 1394b30 reads: “velut si quis dicat: ‘ego quidem igitur, quoniam neque invidiam pati oportet neque otiosum esse, non dico oportet erudiri’”: Rhetorica: Translatio
anonyma sive vetus et translatio Guillelmi de Moerbeka, ed. Bernhard Schneider, in Aristoteles Latinus,
31/1–2 (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 260. In context this is an example of using a maxim that includes a
supporting reason ( postlucutio): see 1394b5–10.
41
Robert of Basevorn, Forma praedicandi, in Th.-M. Charland, Artes praedicandi: Contribution
à l’histoire de la rhétorique du moyen âge (Paris: Vrin, 1936), 282; also Thomas Waleys, De modo
componendi sermones, ibid., 357. See Franco Morenzoni, “Les proverbes dans la prédication du
XIIIe siècle,” in Tradition des proverbes et des exempla dans l’Occident médiéval/Die Tradition der
Sprichwörter und exempla im Mittelalter: Colloque fribourgeois 2007/Freiburger Colloquium 2007,
ed. Hugo O. Bizzarri and Martin Rohde (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 131–49; Claude Buridant, “Les
proverbes et la prédication au moyen âge: De l’utilisation des proverbes vulgaires dans les sermons,” in Richesse du proverbe, ed. François Suard and Claude Buridant, 2 vols. (Lille: Université
de Lille III, 1984), 1:23–54.
42
Prologus in sermonibus vulgaribus, in Jean-Baptiste Pitra, ed., Analecta novissima spicilegii
Solesmensis, 2 (Paris: Typis Tusculanis, 1888), 193. A French translation of this prologue, based
on a better manuscript text, gives a more accurate reading: see Jean-Claude Schmitt, ed., Prêcher
d’exemples: Récits de prédicateurs du moyen âge (Paris: Stock, 1985), 52.
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that copied the maxims has also copied out from book 3 (Aristotle’s treatment
of style) a short phrase from the discussion of the oral style appropriate for speaking in front of a large crowd: “quanto enim maior fuerit populus, remotius intellectus” (fol. 80v, 1414a9–10; “The larger the crowd, the more remote the perception”). This phrase had become something of a medieval commonplace after
Giles of Rome used it as a theme in the first book of his De regimine principum, in his discussion of the statesman’s responsibility to convey understanding to a broad public, thus justifying figurative language as a teaching aid.43 The
application of this idea to preaching is obvious. From another section of book
3, the discussion of metaphor by analogy, the annotator has also copied the phrase
“intellectum deus lumen accendit in anima” (fol. 79v, 1411b10; “God illuminated the understanding as a light in the soul”), which could also serve as a
maxim.44
In themselves such annotations may be mundane or even simplistic responses
to Aristotle’s text. But Aristotle in fact tells us that maxims are to be used for
simple effects, so that the orator can connect with uncultivated minds (1395b1).
Judging from the general moral character of this reader’s annotations in Peterhouse
57, the most likely objective of this activity is the storing of simplified commonplaces for use in preaching.
4. Aristotle’s Rhetoric in England, 2:
Pastoral Provenances and Owners of the Work
The application to preaching is also consistent with what we can tell of the
patterns of ownership of the Rhetoric in England. This evidence is rather sparse:
there are only four surviving copies of the complete Rhetoric that were in England
during the Middle Ages, and one more of likely English provenance; and there
are five extant manuscripts of medieval English provenance containing extracts
43
“Sed pauci sunt vigentes acumine intellectus, propter quod dicitur 3. Rhetoricorum, quod quanto
maior est populus, remotior est intellectus”: De regimine principum libri III (Rome, 1607), 1.1.1,
p. 4. As a maxim this was sufficiently well known for William Butler, a Franciscan opponent of the
Wycliffite heresy, to cite it as a proof in his determination against Bible translation; see Margaret
Deanesly, The Lollard Bible and Other Medieval Biblical Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1920), 406. Butler appears to quote Giles rather than Aristotle directly.
44
A parallel to this interest in the Rhetoric as a source of homiletic maxims is found in Lincoln
Cathedral Chapter Library, MS 234 (English, late fourteenth century), which is a compilation of
sermons and sermon materials probably bound together at some later point; see R. M. Thomson,
Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer,
1989), 193–94. One section contains miscellaneous homiletic materials, including (fols. 163–67) notes
towards a sermon on the commandment “honor thy father and thy mother.” The writer cites many
sources, including English verses from the Fasciculus morum, the pseudo-Boethian De disciplina
scholarium, Aristotle’s De animalibus, the pseudo-Aristotelian De plantis, and Seneca. At fol. 166r
there is a paraphrase from Rhetoric, book 1, 1367a (topics for epideictic rhetoric) on who is to
be honored (“those who have conferred benefits, for that is just”): “dicit aristoteles p o retorice.
illi maxime iuste honorandi sunt qui beneficia parant . . . et parentes maxime dant filiis beneficia.”
Here the interest is not in Aristotle’s discussion of epideictic topics but in a useful commonplace
that the writer can extract as a moral maxim for use in a sermon, in this case on the honor owed
to parents.
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or notabilia from the Rhetoric. 45 Nevertheless, what evidence we do have paints
some interesting pictures. In addition to Walter de Blacollisley, vicar of Wisbech
and rector of Sudborne, most of the other owners or donors of copies of
Aristotle’s Rhetoric (in whole or in extracts) whose names are known to us also
had active pastoral careers in some capacity. Of the other extant manuscripts
containing the whole Rhetoric or extracts, notabilia, or commentary, four
can be connected with the names of donors, and all these men had pastoral
appointments. London, Gray’s Inn, MS 2, which has a substantial alphabetical
table of the Ethics, Politics, and Rhetoric, carries the name of one of its scribes
or compilers, Ralph Wyche, who gave this book to the Franciscan convent
at Chester in the late fourteenth century.46 The Oxford graduate Thomas
Eborall, doctor of theology by 1443, occupied various rectorships in Yorkshire,
Sussex, and then in London until his death in 1471 and was a well-regarded
preacher.47 Along with two books containing the Gospels and Epistles in
Latin and English (which do not survive) and a copy of Pore Catif, 48
Eborall owned an impressive miscellaneous codex, now London, British
Library, MS Royal 5.C.iii, consisting of many texts relevant to preaching but
also including a section of notabilia from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Physics, De
anima, Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, and Poetics, as well as from Seneca’s Moral
45
The surviving copies of the complete Rhetoric of known medieval English provenance are
Cambridge, Pembroke College, MS 130; Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 57; Oxford, Balliol College,
MS 250 (contains only the Rhetoric, in England by the late fourteenth century); and Oxford, Oriel
College, MS 25. A surviving copy of probable English provenance is Rouen, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 923, possibly in England or used by English scholars but at the abbey of Fécamp by the
early fifteenth century (Lacombe notes English hands among the glosses: Aristoteles Latinus, 1:600,
no. 746). Manuscripts of English provenance that contain extracts or notabilia from the Rhetoric or
a table of its contents are the following: Cambridge, Peterhouse, MS 208 (with notabilia from Giles’s
commentary); Hereford, Cathedral Library, MS P.III.6 (chapter summaries along with an anonymous commentary); London, British Library, MS Royal 5.C.iii ( propositiones from the text); London,
Gray’s Inn, MS 2 (tabula of contents); and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Digby 55 (extracts, along
with an anonymous commentary; this collection also contains two of the graduation speeches edited
by Lewry, “Four Graduation Speeches from Oxford Manuscripts”). Peterhouse MS 82 (mentioned
above) contains Giles’s commentary, and Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 462/735, contains a tabula of Giles’s commentary. Not all of these manuscripts containing the Rhetoric or extracts from it should be considered preaching collections: Digby 55, for example, is a learned collection for university study rather than for pastoral uses. Moreover, the transmission of the Rhetoric
must be seen as part of a larger picture of collecting materials in moral philosophy, especially the
Aristotelian canon. See the study and census of Aristotelian manuscripts by Charles F. Briggs, “Moral
Philosophy in England after Grosseteste: An ‘Underground’ History,” in The Study of Medieval
Manuscripts of England: Festschrift in Honor of Richard W. Pfaff, ed. George Hardin Brown and
Linda Ehrsam Voigts, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 384 (Tempe: Arizona Center for
Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2010), 359–88.
46
N. R. Ker, Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries, 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 51–
52; Briggs, “Moral Philosophy in England,” 369.
47
A. B. Emden, Biographical Register of the University of Oxford, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1957–59) (henceforth BRUO), 1:622–23.
48
London, Lambeth Palace, MS 541. On Eborall as a clerical owner of vernacular English texts,
and with a recorded interest in Lollard scripture, see Ralph Hanna, London Literature, 1300–1380
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 308–12.
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Epistles. 49 The Oxford graduate Owen Lloyd bequeathed to Hereford Cathedral
a codex, now Hereford Cathedral Library MS P.III.6, containing chapter summaries of the Rhetoric and an anonymous commentary (using Giles’s exposition) as well as Boethius’s Consolatio philosophiae with Nicholas Trevet’s commentary.50 Lloyd took a bachelor’s degree in canon and civil law in about 1449
and became a doctor of civil law in 1458. But he had a varied career, first practicing in the chancellor’s court and then, until his death in 1478, holding a number of rectorships and other ecclesiastical offices, notably those of canon at Exeter
Cathedral (where he was most active) and nonresident canon and prebendary
of Hereford.51 Lloyd left some thirty books to Hereford (of which twenty-five
survive), half of which were legal works and the rest an assortment of classical
learning—such as the codex containing the Rhetoric commentary—with works
of theology, pastoral care, and books that could provide materials for popular
preaching, such as Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius moralizatus, the Legenda aurea, the
De proprietatibus rerum of Bartholomeus Anglicus, and notably Giles’s De
regimine principum. 52 Thomas Wryght, fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge,
from 1465, doctor of theology in 1479/80, was vicar of Marske in Cleveland,
Yorkshire, from 1464 until his death in 1488. Among the books that he bequeathed to Pembroke was a fourteenth-century collection containing Aristotle’s
Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, and Magna moralia, along with the Secreta secretorum, now probably Pembroke MS 130.53
49
An inscription at the end, now lost, but noted by David Casley, the eighteenth-century deputy
keeper of the King’s Library, once read: “Liber T. Eyburhale, emptus a Iohanne Pye [London bookseller] pro 27s.6d. Do Henrico Mosie, quondam scolari meo, si contingat eum presbyterari; aliter
erit Liber Domini Iohannis Sory, sic quod non vendatur, sed transeat inter cognatos meos, si fuerint
aliqui inventi; sin autem, ab uno presbytero ad alium”: George F. Warner and Julius P. Gilson, British
Museum Catalogue of the Western Manuscripts in the Old Royal and King’s Collections, 4 vols.
(London: Longmans, Green, 1921), 1:107. The whole of Giles’s De regimine is included, with many
notes in another hand. This collection exemplifies how the Rhetoric was used: more important than
its status as a rhetorical treatise are its position among works of Aristotelian natural and moral science and the apparent relevance of that whole grouping to the work of preaching. My assumption
here is that the manuscript in its current totality was owned by Eborall, as suggested by Eborall’s
concern for its good use by future generations of priests. On Eborall see also J. A. F. Thomson, “The
Continuation of ‘Gregory’s Chronicle’: A Possible Author?” British Museum Quarterly 36/3 (1972):
92–97. I am grateful to Sheila Lindenbaum for sharing with me her knowledge both of this manuscript and of the career of Eborall.
50
R. A. B. Mynors and R. M. Thomson, Catalogue of the Manuscripts of Hereford Cathedral
Library (Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 86; Charles H. Lohr, SJ, “Aristotelica Britannica,”
Theologie und Philosophie 53 (1978): 79–101, at 91; Briggs, “Moral Philosophy in England,” 367.
51
Emden, BRUO 2:1153–54.
52
Mynors and Thomson, Hereford Cathedral Library, xxiii–xxiv. On learning and books at Hereford
Cathedral see also David Lepine, “‘A Long Way from University’: Cathedral Canons and Learning
at Hereford in the Fifteenth Century,” in The Church and Learning in Later Medieval Society: Essays
in Honour of R. B. Dobson, ed. Caroline Barron and Jenny Stratford (Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2002),
178–95. The copy of De regimine principum is now Hereford, Cathedral Library, MS P.V.7 (Mynors
and Thomson, 98).
53
Emden, BRUC 653–54; Damian Riehl Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge, 1: The
University to 1546 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 167; Peter D. Clarke, ed., The
University and College Libraries of Cambridge, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 10
(London: British Library, 2002), no. UC43.74.
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In addition to these extant texts, current knowledge gives us nine records of
copies of the Rhetoric or sententiae from it that were once held by medieval
English libraries.54 Of these, six can be linked to the names of donors, of whom
four were directly engaged in pastoral work.55 Thomas of Findon, abbot of Saint
Augustine’s, Canterbury, from 1283 to 1310, gave a large collection of books to
the abbey; he may be identified with the “Abbot Thomas” who is listed as the
donor of a volume containing the Politics and the Rhetoric. 56 John Cobbledik,
who received a master of arts from Oxford in 1296 and who was granted license to continue his studies for some years after that, was rector of West Keal,
Lincolnshire, from 1296 until his death by 1337.57 He gave many books to Oriel
College, including a book of “sententie super libros Rethoricorum Aristotelis,”
now lost or unidentified.58 The priest John Bracebrigge joined Syon Abbey in the
1420s after serving as a grammar master in Boston (from 1390) and at Lincoln
Cathedral (from 1406) and being licensed to preach in Lincolnshire from 1409.59
Among his large donation of books, which formed a significant core of the abbey’s collection, was a volume containing the Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, and Magna
moralia. 60 Dr. John Pynchbek, bachelor of theology in Oxford and doctor of
Cambridge, chantry chaplain in London between 1453 and 1457, rector of Saint
Mary Abchurch in London by 1459, and mentioned by a contemporary as a great
preacher in London, joined Syon Abbey in 1459 but left in 1462/63 to join a
See Briggs’s table of lost and unidentified manuscripts, “Moral Philosophy in England,” 382–88.
The remaining two known donors had university careers, which were also compatible with preaching. Thomas Markaunt (ca. 1382–1439), a lifetime fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge,
gave a liber moralis philosophie to the college, which contained both the Rhetoric and Giles’s commentary: see Clarke, ed., The University and College Libraries of Cambridge, 184–90 and no.
UC19.62. Robert Wodelarke (d. ca. 1481), provost of King’s College, Cambridge, and founder of
Saint Catharine’s Hall, gave a copy of the Rhetoric to Saint Catharine’s: see Clarke, 590–93 and no.
UC53.78. Wodelarke was licensed to preach in the York diocese in 1449; see Emden, BRUC 645.
56
B. C. Barker-Benfield, ed., St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury, 3 vols., Corpus of British Medieval
Library Catalogues 13 (London: British Library, 2008), 2:1059–60, no. BA1.1050; Briggs, “Moral
Philosophy in England,” 384. On the problems of identifying “Abbot Thomas” with Findon or other
abbots known as Thomas see Barker-Benfield, 1:lxxx–lxxxii. Barker-Benfield has also reconstructed
the existence in the abbey holdings of a copy of Giles of Rome’s commentary on the Rhetoric (or
sententiae from it), there by the early fifteenth century (when the library catalogue was compiled);
see St Augustine’s Abbey, 3:1758, no. IDX 1354.
57
Emden, BRUO 1:449–50.
58
William J. Courtenay, “The Fourteenth-Century Booklist of the Oriel College Library,” Viator
19 (1988): 283–90, no. 78. Briggs, “Moral Philosophy in England,” 387, indicates this was likely
based on Giles’s commentary. Cobbledik has been linked with the copy of the Ethics in Oxford, Oriel
College, MS 25, fols. 1r–77v (see Emden, BRUO 1:450; Courtenay, “Fourteenth-Century Booklist,”
no. 11), which is now a compilation of Aristotelian works including the Rhetoric, although he has
not been linked with this copy of the Rhetoric. On other books of Cobbledik see M. B. Parkes, “The
Provision of Books,” in The History of the University of Oxford, 2, ed. Catto and Evans, 407–83, at
409 and 459 n.
59
Vincent Gillespie, ed., Syon Abbey, with A. I. Doyle, ed., The Libraries of the Carthusians, Corpus
of British Medieval Library Catalogues 9 (London: British Library, 2001), xxxix, lvii–lviii, 570; Emden,
BRUO 1:239–40; Marios Costambeys, “Bracebridge, John (Fl. c. 1420),” Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3286 (accessed 15 October 2013).
60
Gillespie, ed., Syon Abbey, 61, no. SS1.163; Briggs, “Moral Philosophy in England,” 387.
54
55
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mendicant order.61 Among other books, Pynchbek left Syon an omnibus volume
of logical, ethical, and political writings by Aristotle and other authorities, consisting of complete texts or extracts, tabulae, or notabilia and including the
Rhetoric. 62
Thus, of nineteen copies of the Rhetoric (in whole or in extracts) known or likely
to have been in medieval England, eleven can be traced to names of donors or owners, and nine of these are men who had active pastoral careers. Of course, this evidence is limited and only suggestive. Preachers owned many kinds of books, and
the Rhetoric does not predominate among pastoral holdings; conversely, many
kinds of learned men, not just preachers, might own a copy of the Rhetoric among
the various books they collected.63 Nevertheless the evidence that we have for owners of the Rhetoric does offer an interesting pattern: preachers seem to have been
interested in the Rhetoric, at least as part of a larger study of moral philosophy.
These general tendencies of English ownership, along with the internal features of
sermon literature, provide the large context for understanding what appear to be
the pastoral concerns of the later annotator of the Rhetoric in Peterhouse 57.
5. Peterhouse 57 and Its English Gloss:
The Emotions in Rhetoric, Preaching, and Poetics
If preaching was a pragmatic platform for medieval reception of the Rhetoric,
what more can Peterhouse 57 tell us about the activation of these interests? The
answer to this lies in a most remarkable gloss in the manuscript. This is in a hand
certainly contemporary with, and perhaps the same as, the hand that copied the
maxims. This gloss was noted (but not quoted) in the manuscript description by
Lacombe but until recently was otherwise unremarked.64 It is a gloss in English,
a rhymed couplet, and it occurs in Rhetoric, book 2, in the catalogue of the emotions, in the section where Aristotle is describing the emotion of philia, or friendly
61
Gillespie, ed., Syon Abbey, 584–85; Emden, BRUC 466; J. I. Catto, “Theology after Wycliffism,”
in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. Catto and Evans, 2:263–80, at 274.
62
Gillespie, ed., Syon Abbey, 53–55, no. SS1.145 ee; Briggs, “Moral Philosophy in England,” 387.
63
In this account of copies of the Rhetoric in England I have not included manuscripts containing
the Parvi flores (Auctoritates Aristotelis), a florilegium of sententiae from the Aristotelian texts and
supplementary works in logical, natural, and moral sciences, compiled for university study in the years
around 1300 and widely diffused, although not in a stable form. See the edition by Jacqueline Hamesse,
Les Auctoritates Aristotelis: Un florilège médiéval (Louvain: Publications universitaires, 1974). Including
the few copies of the Parvi flores that are traceable to medieval England would give a slightly larger
body of evidence for some contact with the Rhetoric, which—in the complete forms of the
florilegium—is represented in seventy-one sententiae (ed. Hamesse, 263–68). But ownership of the compendium as a whole does not indicate a special interest in moral science or in rhetoric. On the copy
made by a fifteenth-century Oxford Cistercian (London, British Library, MS Royal 8.A.XVIII) see
Antonia Fitzpatrick, “London, British Library Royal MS. 8 A. XVIII: A Unique Insight into the Career
of a Cistercian Monk at the University of Oxford in the Early Fifteenth Century,” Electronic British
Library Journal (2010), http://www.bl.uk/eblj/2010articles/article13.html (accessed 15 October 2013).
64
In 2003 I called this gloss to the attention of Linne Mooney, whose expert assistance with the
text of the gloss I acknowledge here. Professor Mooney has since added it to her online Index of
Middle English Verse, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/imev/record.php?recID=4025 (accessed 15 October 2013).
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feeling (amicitia in Moerbeke’s Latin); the characteristics that produce friendliness, that is, the kind of people we like to like; and the conditions that produce
the emotion of philia.
Here is the context from Aristotle’s text:
Quos autem amant et odiunt, et propter quid, amicitiam et amare diffinientes dicamus.
Sit itaque amare velle alicui que putat bona, illius gratia, sed non sui, et secundum posse
activum esse horum. . . . Et eos qui fecerunt bene amant . . . et quoscumque putant velle
bene facere. Et amicorum amicos et amantes quos ipsi diligunt. Et dilectos a dilectis
sibi. . . . Adhuc beneficos in pecunias et salutem; propter quod liberales et fortes honorant et iustos; tales autem putant non ab aliis viventes; tales autem qui ab operando, et
horum qui ab agricultura, et aliorum qui ipsimet operantur maxime. 65
[Let us declare whom people like and whom they hate, and for what reason, once we
have defined “friendship” and “to be friendly.” Let “to be friendly” mean wanting what
one thinks are good things for someone for his sake but not for one’s own sake, and as
much as one can, to be the means of bringing these things about. . . . . And people are
friendly to those who have treated them well . . . also to those whom they think want to
treat them well. And people are friendly to the friends of their friends and to those who
show friendship to those whom they themselves like. And [they are friendly to] those
who are liked by those whom they themselves like. . . . Moreover [they like] those who
are beneficent in matters of money and safety; for this reason people honor those who
are generous and strong and just. They hold this opinion of those who do not depend
for their livelihood on others; such are those, moreover, who live by their labor, especially those who live by working the land and others who do manual labor.]
This passage is typical of Aristotle’s approach throughout the section on the emotions. Emotions come about through social behavior because they are responses
to people. Feelings, in this case friendliness (amicitia), are defined and analyzed
according to the ways in which they are socially exhibited. Each account of emotion in book 2 begins with a definition and then gives the causes for the emotion, describes the state of mind of the one who feels it, and characterizes the
people who are the objects of the emotion. Here, friendly feeling is a social fact,
and its causes and social expressions will be useful knowledge for the orator. As
is the case throughout the analytic of the emotions, there is nothing normative
in the account of friendly feeling: there is no form of social behavior being recommended, nor any particular emotional disposition promoted, although the high
public opinion of virtuous character (generosity, strength, and fairness, or justice) is recognized. Thus the emphatic example of those who live by their labor
working the land acknowledges the appeal of agricultural labor to the popular
moral instincts of ancient Greek audiences.66
But it is this last example of the appeal of agricultural laborers that has caught
the attention of the fifteenth-century annotator of Peterhouse 57. On folio 65r,
Rhetorica, ed. Schneider, in Aristoteles Latinus, 31/1–2:228–29 (1380b35–1381a25), emphasis
added.
66
On favorable attitudes of the Greeks towards farmers see Kenneth Dover, Greek Popular Morality
in the Time of Plato and Aristotle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), 40, 110, 113–14, 173, 225, 277; see
also Stephen Halliwell, “Popular Morality, Philosophical Ethics, and the Rhetoric, ” in Aristotle’s
Rhetoric: Philosophical Essays, ed. David J. Furley and Alexander Nehamas (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), 211–30.
65
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in the margin next to the last sentence, “tales autem qui ab operando, et horum
qui ab agricultura, et aliorum qui ipsimet operantur maxime,” we find this English
couplet:
O pers plwman. iust is thi life
thw livist of thi labor with owt ani strife.67
Peripatetic rhetoric meets Middle English literary culture explosively, electrically,
in one rhyming verse.
What does this English verse mean here, in this manuscript of Aristotle’s
Rhetoric? We should note, first of all, that the poetic effects and thematic import
of the annotation are in no way accidental: the verse responds to Aristotle’s exemplifications of amicitia with pointed poetic equivalents. The English word
“just,” in a prominently accented position, mirrors the Latin “iustos.” The alliteration of “livist” and “labor” condenses “tales [viventes] autem qui ab operando” into a distinctive sound effect. And the words “life/strife,” a rhyming pair
common in Middle English,68 are used here as ethical contraries to sum up the
opposition between friendliness and hatred (“quos . . . amant et odiunt”): it is a
“just life” without the enmity of strife. The image in Aristotle’s text of those who
we feel are decent and just because they work for their living “ab agricultura” is
made to resonate with a common English pastoral tradition of the honest plowman. We can imagine that Aristotle’s image of the decent plowman could be put
to use in preaching along with some of Aristotle’s pithy moral maxims (those
that were copied out at the end of the manuscript). If Aristotle’s treatment is nonnormative, explanatory rather than directive, the English annotation translates
the exemplification into moral advocacy, an acute and passionate exhortation to
follow the example of a laborer who leads the “just life.”
But why did the annotator invoke the name Piers Plowman at this juncture in
the Rhetoric? Of course, the apostrophe to Piers the Plowman conjures a name
and a vivid presence for the object of friendly feeling, giving another dimension
of poetic effect. But was the annotator invoking the poem itself or a social effect
of the poem, a social epiphenomenon of the so-called Piers Plowman–tradition?
This may strike us as reminiscent of the invocation of the “Piers Plowman” character in the rebel letters of 1381, where the figure of Piers is remembered as a
worker.69 As an apostrophe to “Pers,” the gloss even seems to perform something like the exhortatory preaching attributed to John Ball. But is the annotator’s invocation as specific to the poem Piers Plowman as Steven Justice has argued John Ball’s reference might have been? 70 Why the specificity—whatever its
The same couplet is written again at the bottom right margin of the page.
The Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, compiled by faculty at the University of Michigan,
reveals various examples of the “life” and “strife” rhyme: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/ (accessed
15 October 2013).
69
Henry Knighton, Knighton’s Chronicle, 1337–1396, ed. and trans. G. H. Martin (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995), 222 (Jack Carter’s mention of “Peres the Plowman”); Thomas Walsingham,
Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T. Riley, 2 (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green,
1864), 33–34 (John Ball’s mention of “Peres Ploughman”).
70
Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994), esp. 102–39.
67
68
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specificity—of the name Piers Plowman? If “Piers Plowman” the character or the
social effect had become something of a rallying cry for dissent (for the rebels of
1381 or in the anticlericalism professed in Piers the Plowman’s Crede), is there
any taint of that here, in the context of Aristotle’s discourse on proof by
pathos—on producing and exploiting emotions in an audience? Or
is it simply that the idea of Piers Plowman—the figure—was a way to make
Aristotle’s Rhetoric intelligible to this English annotator, serving as a familiar topos in a field of unfamiliar references to ancient Athenian culture and politics?
In this case, the figure Piers Plowman would be the point of mediation between
Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the English Middle Ages; the gloss would signal that the
poem Piers Plowman and its afterlife in a pastoral literature have opened a window into the intellectual world of the Rhetoric.
But it is also possible, and I believe more important, to see Aristotle’s Rhetoric
as the point of mediation between pastoral discourse and a poetic tradition represented by Piers Plowman, or, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, as a
catalyst acting upon the two traditions to reveal their common ground: as repositories of a pragmatic knowledge of the emotions. It is this special capacity, I suggest, that the annotator recognized in Aristotle’s Rhetoric and intuitively associated with poetic and pastoral discourses. In other words, this surprising annotation
evokes a rhetorical capacity that lies within poetics and that links the affective
poetry of Piers Plowman with the mission of preaching. The annotation on amicitia, with its rhyming and alliterative apostrophe to Piers Plowman as exemplar
of the “just life,” embodies the affective intersection of poetics and preaching.
What would clerical readers of the late Middle Ages have seen in book 2 of
the Rhetoric, especially if these readers, like the later annotator of Peterhouse
57, came to the text without the influence of Giles’s or others’ commentary? I
propose that such readers would find an analytical typology of the emotions that
came closest to what they already knew experientially from preaching: a pragmatic psychology of the emotions. And the more innocent such readers were of
the Scholastic philosophical approach to Aristotle’s Rhetoric, the more receptive
they would likely be to its actual pragmatic contents. Poetics, too, was a repository of such knowledge. We need only recall how much preaching exploited vernacular verse to appreciate how pastoral discourse recognized the affective, persuasive power of poetry, and thus the commonality of its own interests with those
of poetry. But, perhaps surprisingly, neither the artes praedicandi nor the artes
poetriae provided a thorough breakdown of how individual emotions actually
work, of how a speaker or writer effects emotional change in his audience, even
though we have ample evidence of how sensitive both preaching and poetry were
to moving the emotions.
In terms of the preaching arts, some pragmatic knowledge of the emotions is
adumbrated in book 4 of Augustine’s De doctrina Christiana, but not systematically. In Augustine’s well-known theory of the levels of style, the plain, middle,
and grand styles are each linked with the orator’s purpose to teach, to delight,
and to move; each of these purposes in turn depends on the mental or spiritual
disposition of any given audience (4.18.35–38). The grand style moves a hearer
if “he values what you promise, fears what you threaten, hates what you condemn, embraces what you commend, and rues the thing which you insist that
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he must regret, and if he rejoices at what you set forth in your preaching as
something joyful, pities those whom by your words you present to his mind’s
eye as miserable, and shuns those whom with terrifying language you urge him
to avoid.” 71 Thus the grand style shows its effects on the audience by moving
them, not to applause, but to groans, tears, and ultimately conversion (4.24.53).
Yet even with such a catalogue of emotional responses, the focus of Augustine’s
analysis in book 4 is stylistic register and the verbal or rhythmic devices that
can produce the effect of strong feeling. Similarly influential, but also unsystematic in its treatment of the passions, is the catalogue of thirty-six audience types
in book 3 of Pope Gregory the Great’s Cura pastoralis, which includes some
emotional characteristics along with social and institutional classes. Although it
differentiates among types of listeners according to their moral and spiritual needs,
Gregory’s typology is still far from the pragmatic psychological teaching in
Aristotle’s Rhetoric. 72 Rather, like the advice in Augustine’s De doctrina, it offers the potential for a rhetorical understanding of the passions. Such a potential might be activated and brought to the surface by the reception of the
Aristotelian analytic, but the systematic treatment of emotion is not inherent in
the Augustinian and Gregorian preaching doctrine.
Nor, interestingly, do we find extensive calibration of the emotions in the poetic arts. On the contrary, as Nicolette Zeeman has pointed out, the artes poetriae largely seem to evade direct discussions of affects themselves, focusing instead on the figures, techniques, and formal patterning that can produce emotion,
without analyzing what the emotions are.73 Related to this is the aesthetic principle of “sweetness,” which, as Mary Carruthers has shown, defines the formal
mechanisms that can produce the sensual and emotional response of suavitas,
thus moving, converting (as in Augustine’s stylistic precept), persuading, and even
curing.74 But the discourse of “sweetness,” whether in poetics, preaching, or another medium, such as music, does not give an index of the individual emotions
that are involved with the effect of suavitas. As in the artes poetriae, here, too,
emotional response, or strong feeling, is treated generically, and finer distinctions are directed to the formal aspects of the various media that will produce
the intended effects. Along related lines, Scholastic thought about literary language
De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 4.12.27.
The later medieval tradition of ad status sermons offers a useful parallel in social classification.
Jacques de Vitry, for example, divided the potential audiences for sermons into twenty-eight groups,
covering all clerical orders, secular professions and estates, and circumstances. See the overview in
Carolyn Muessig, “Audience and Preacher: Ad status Sermons and Social Classification,” in Preacher,
Sermon, and Audience in the Middle Ages, ed. Carolyn Muessig, New History of the Sermon 3 (Leiden:
Brill, 2002), 255–76; and Nicole Bériou, L’avènement des maîtres de la Parole: La prédication à Paris
au XIIIe siècle, Collection des Études Augustiniennes, Série Moyen Âge et Temps Modernes, 31–32
(Paris: Institut d’études augustiniennes, 1998), 1:293–383, “La société sous le regard des prédicateurs (1272–1273).”
73
Nicolette Zeeman, “The Theory of Passionate Song,” in Medieval Latin and Middle English
Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann, ed. Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (Woodbridge,
UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), 231–51. A valuable account of the precepts for emotional effect that
are to be found in the artes poetriae is Thomas H. Bestul, “The Man of Law’s Tale and the Rhetorical
Foundations of Chaucerian Pathos,” Chaucer Review 9 (1975): 216–26.
74
Mary Carruthers, “Sweetness,” Speculum 81 (2006): 999–1013.
71
72
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apprehends and foregrounds the role of the passions: for example, in linguistic
analysis of emotional interjections or genre classifications of books of the Bible
according to the pious affect that they entail, that is, the reader’s affective response to the biblical “genres” of precept, example, exhortation, revelation, and
prayer.75 But neither do these constitute dedicated and systematic accounts of the
emotions.
By contrast, Aristotle’s Rhetoric provided an exhaustive phenomenological account of the role of the emotions and their individual causes, something that even
the more familiar Ciceronian rhetorics did not supply.76 The work may have been
offputting, difficult to understand (especially without reference to one of the commentaries), and unfamiliar in its cultural references. But a reader who persisted
into book 2 would encounter a systematic classification of the emotions as dynamic properties that can be manipulated, changed, or mobilized in an actual
speaking situation. As a demonstrative account of the causes and conditions of
emotions, Aristotle’s text would have had an unprecedented impact on readers:
it offered a new articulation of knowledge about the passions.
6. Comparanda:
Treatments of the Emotions in Philosophical Psychology,
the Literature of Spiritual Ascent, and Pastoral Literature
The knowledge of the emotions presented in Aristotle’s Rhetoric would certainly have been already embedded and reinforced through the theoretical
presentations available to learned readers of the Middle Ages. But even the rich
and sophisticated medieval traditions of analyzing the emotions offered nothing
quite like Aristotle’s system.
This last is a very great claim, and so it needs to be tested by comparison with
other medieval traditions of describing and analyzing the passions. The three biggest categories for comparison are philosophical literature, the literature of spiritual ascent, and pastoral literature. As noted above, neither preaching nor poetics, the fields most concerned with emotional appeal to general audiences, offered
a systematic theoretical account of how emotions arise, even though poets and
preachers drew on a pragmatic knowledge. Now we turn to other relevant medieval discourses to see whether they offer anything comparable to the analytic
of the emotions to be found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
75
On linguistic analysis see Irène Rosier, “Interjections et expression des affects dans la sémantique du XIIIe siècle,” Histoire, épistémologie, langage 14 (1992): 61–84; and Irène Rosier-Catach,
“Discussions médiévales sur l’expression des affects,” in Le sujet des émotions au moyen âge, ed.
Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet (Paris: Beauchesne, 2008), 201–23. For classification of biblical
genres see Alexander of Hales, Summa theologica, 4 vols. (Quaracchi: Collegio di San Bonaventura,
1924–48), 1.4.1 ad obiecta 2, 1:7–8.
76
Cf. De inventione 1.25.36, on affectio, an emotional or bodily disturbance that is treated as a
character trait (attribute of the person); 1.27.41, on the modus, or state of mind, in which an act
was committed; and 2.53–58, on the classes of virtue, which is an account of arguments on behalf of
the honorable in political rhetoric, not of audience dispositions.
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Philosophical Literature on the Emotions
There is a vast medieval philosophical literature on the emotions, extending
from ancient inheritances to the early Christian era and then through Avicenna
to the influential writings of the Franciscans and Dominicans, in particular Jean
de la Rochelle and Aquinas, and their fourteenth-century successors. We may call
this tradition a “philosophical psychology of the emotions.” It is to this philosophical tradition, in its Christianized development, that Giles of Rome and his
successors in the Parisian arts faculty assimilated Aristotle’s Rhetoric in their commentaries on book 2.
In Sections 1 and 2 above I considered classical rhetorical traditions on the
emotions and medieval receptions of book 2 of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. I return now
to a historical perspective to consider the emotions in terms of broader philosophical developments, against which we can compare Aristotle’s presentation
in Rhetoric, book 2.
Aristotle stands out from the other classical traditions in taking what has been
called “an inclusive view” of the emotions, recognizing that their cognitive dimensions can play an active role in shaping judgment: in other words, the emotions,
as products of thought as well as of bodily impulses and appetites, are accessible
to reasoned argument and can be sources of information for rational decisions.77
Whereas his treatment of the emotions in both the Ethics and the Rhetoric can be
described as phenomenological, that is, as an effort to understand the causes of
emotions and to acknowledge their centrality in human behavior, only the Rhetoric
takes a nonnormative, pragmatic approach, stressing what beliefs, intentions, and
awarenesses actually cause emotions in order that the orator may know how to
produce or modify them in his audience by means of his arguments.78
This is different from Plato’s view, in which the emotions are seen as misguided reactions to contingent situations, and thus a hindrance to improvement
of the soul through philosophy. In Plato, too, the emotions can have a cognitive
basis because they can originate not only from the appetitive part of the soul but
from the spirited part, which can be trained to serve the rational soul, which is
what is suggested in Republic 4 (440–41).79 But the body-soul dualism that was
also part of Plato’s thought, such as in the Phaedo, gives a more negative picture
of the emotions as bodily impulses that the philosopher should control and repudiate as much as possible (Phaedo 66–67). This asceticism, an ideal of philosophical detachment from the passions (however much some emotions might also
be seen to ennoble the soul), had a strong influence on post-Platonic thought.80
77
W. W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion: A Contribution to Philosophical Psychology, Rhetoric,
Poetics, Politics, and Ethics (London: Duckworth, 1975), 13–17, 21; Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in
Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 29, 37.
78
See Knuuttila, Emotions, 45; Martha Nussbaum, “Aristotle on Emotions and Rational
Persuasion,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Rorty, 303–23, at 305–6.
79
See Knuuttila, Emotions, 5–11.
80
Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 203–27; Knuuttila, Emotions, 13–23.
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While Plato did not see it as possible to eradicate the emotions, later thinkers
equated control of the emotions with extirpating them. What became the dominant Stoic and Neoplatonist traditions saw powerful emotions as potentially harmful things to be extirpated in favor of peace of mind. Stoic and Platonist thought
had the greatest direct impact on Christian culture. The Stoics divided the emotions into four general classes: pleasure and distress (directed to good and bad
respectively and relating to the present) and desire and fear (directed to good and
bad respectively and relating to the future), a classification that remained influential in later antiquity and in the Middle Ages.81 The Stoics also first articulated a difference between the involuntary occurrence of a feeling, or what came
to be called the “first movement,” and voluntary indulgence of the feeling, which
is the mind’s assent to the initial prompting followed by willful action.82 The therapeutic answer to this sequence is to strive for a state of apatheia, the extirpation of spontaneous emotions by retraining the mind to reevaluate mistaken appearances of things, which create harmful emotions in the first place.83
In Neoplatonic thought, these ideas of philosophical detachment turn into a
notion of spiritual progress. For Plotinus, the soul is involved in the affections to
the extent that it is partly responsible for them by being susceptible to false images; thus, to perfect itself and become more like God, the soul must seek freedom from the emotions through philosophy (Enneads 3.6.5).84 Stoic and Platonist
perspectives found their interpretive theological mediation in patristic and later
medieval debates about the primus motus and in Augustinian analysis of emotions, sin, and the will, which can assent to or resist sinful desire.85 The Stoic
model of “first movement” exercised a long influence in Christian monastic traditions of self-discipline. The Neoplatonic notion of freeing the soul from corporeal affections in turn found its place in monastic discourses of spiritual ascent
(which will be discussed further below).
81
These doctrines are preserved in Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4.6.11–4.9.22, and Diogenes
Laertius, Vitae philosophorum 7.110–14.
82
Seneca’s full expression of this sequence is laid out in De ira 2.4.1; see Knuuttila, Emotions,
63–67. On Seneca’s model of three movements as a harmonization of earlier Greek Stoic debates see
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 61–75. Gisela Striker gives a precise account of the difference between the Aristotelian and the Stoic positions: “While Aristotle seems to regard emotion as a spontaneous and natural response to the way things appear to us [citing Ethics 2.5.1105b19–1106a4],
the Stoics maintain that passion arises only when an impression is assented to and accepted as a truth,”
quoted from Striker, “Emotions in Context: Aristotle’s Treatment of the Passions in the Rhetoric and
His Moral Psychology,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. Rorty, 286–382, at 295.
83
Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 4.14.32–4.17.38; Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum 7.117.
See Knuuttila, Emotions, 71–80.
84
E. Emilsson, “Plotinus on Emotions,” in The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. J. Sihvola
and T. Engberg-Pedersen (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), 339–63, esp. 358–59. Relevant passages in the
Enneads are 1.1.1–7, 3.6.1–5, and 4.4.18–21.
85
Augustine gives a summary of Stoic thought on emotions in De civitate Dei 9.4 and 14.5–9 (on
emotions and volition see 14.6–7 and 14.19) and of Platonist thought in 14.5. On patristic and later
medieval debates about the primus motus see Damien Boquet, “Des racines de l’émotion: Les préaffects et le tournant anthropologique du XIIe siècle,” in Le sujet des émotions au moyen âge, ed. Nagy
and Boquet, 163–86; and Knuuttila, Emotions, 172–212.
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The return of a psychology of the emotions with Avicenna’s De anima (written 1021–24, translated into Latin between 1152 and 1166 by Avendeuth
“Israelita” in collaboration with Dominicus Gundissalinus) heralds a new, strong
interest geared towards philosophical understanding of the nature of the soul,
as opposed to the long theological traditions of the early and high Middle Ages.86
Like Aristotle, Avicenna understood emotions as natural behavioral or bodily
products of perception. He considers the emotions of joy, pain, fear, and anger
as reactions to the various powers (concupiscible, irascible, estimative) of the
sensitive soul. But his interest in the emotions was in a broad sense taxonomic,
to arrange them into causal sequences and divide and subdivide them into various powers.87 The tradition that extends forward from the influence of Avicenna’s
work represents increasing refinements of philosophical positioning, working towards a core ethical understanding of human behavior in connection with theories of the soul, the will, and good and evil. The authoritative Summa de anima
by the Franciscan Jean de la Rochelle, who was indebted to Avicenna, gives a
calibrated taxonomy of the emotions as acts of the commanding motive powers, the concupiscible and the irascible, which respond to cognition of sensible
forms and give rise to physiological changes.88 The development of thought reflected in systems like that of the Summa de anima has been understood as an
“anthropology” of the emotions, an attempt to define human nature by its affectivity. At its high points, such as Aquinas’s treatise on the passions in Summa
theologica Ia IIae qq. 22–48, the philosophical psychology is a sensitive exploration of the light and shadows of the soul. But even as Aquinas frequently cites
Aristotle’s Rhetoric from its recent Moerbeke translation, his aim is a theoretical understanding of the emotions as they involve the appetite, the will, and the
intellect—that is, how the soul is structured by its passions.89 The aim of such
understanding is ultimately therapeutic, normative, and morally corrective. Its
goal is not, like Aristotle’s in the Rhetoric, to define a positive or explanatory
86
Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Avicenna’s “De anima” in the Latin West: The Formation of a Peripatetic
Philosophy of the Soul, 1160–1300, Warburg Institute Studies and Texts 1 (London: Warburg Institute,
2000), 10–12.
87
Avicenna Latinus: Liber de anima seu sextus de naturalibus 4–5, ed. S. van Riet (Louvain: Éditions Orientalistes, 1968), 4.4, pp. 54–67; translation from the Arabic text by Ján Bakoš, ed. and
trans., Psychologie d’Ibn Sina (Avicenne) d’après son œuvre aš-Šifā©, 2 vols. (Prague: Éditions de
l’Académie tchécoslovaque des sciences, 1956), 2:137–42. See Simo Knuuttila, “Medieval Theories
of the Passions of the Soul,” in Emotions and Choice from Boethius to Descartes, ed. Henrik Lagerlund
and Mikko Yrjönsuuri (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 49–83, at 60–64.
88
Jean de la Rochelle, Summa de anima, ed. Jacques Guy Bougerol (Paris: Vrin, 1995), 2.104–8,
pp. 253–65; Knuuttila, “Passions of the Soul,” 66–69.
89
On Aquinas’s treatment of emotions in the Summa see Alain Boureau, “Un sujet agité: Le statut
nouveau des passions de l’âme au XIIIe siècle,” in Le sujet des émotions, ed. Nagy and Boquet, 187–
200, and in the same volume, Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Emotion Words,” 93–106, a methodological
essay rich in implications for Aquinas’s medieval synthesis; Peter King, “Aquinas on the Passions,”
in Aquinas’s Moral Theory: Essays in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, ed. Scott MacDonald and
Eleonore Stump (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 101–32; see also the helpful review of the
treatise on the passions by Kevin White, “The Passions of the Soul (Ia IIae, qq. 22–48),” in The Ethics
of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 103–15, and
the references there.
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program for mobilizing the emotions in a situation of speaker and audience. In
his citations, Aquinas seems to use the Rhetoric almost as an extension or paratext of the Ethics, which is not surprising, given the similarity of Aristotle’s style
of exemplification in both works. In the Rhetoric, a medieval academic reader
would recognize a naturalistic approach to the emotions that was already familiar, in some ways, from the Ethics. But as we have also seen in the Scholastic commentaries considered in Section 2 above, the pragmatic specificity of the Rhetoric,
its application to actual persuasion, remains unrecognized when Aristotle’s rhetorical thought is processed through a philosophical taxonomy of the soul.
Emotion in the Literature of Spiritual Ascent
The next field of thought about the emotions that we should consider by way
of comparison is the literature of spiritual ascent from the earlier Middle Ages
to that affective, anthropological turn in the twelfth century. In its monastic form
this field is represented most importantly by Aelred of Rievaulx and Bernard of
Clairvaux. It extends to the familiar Latin and vernacular mystical writings of
the later Middle Ages.90 In terms of its general orientation to the progress of the
soul, this field is close to the philosophical psychology of the emotions, although
its interests are less in taxonomy than in affirming the immediacy of belief. This
literature understands the emotions in dynamic and plastic terms, using them to
provide a program of spiritual self-reflection or affective response. But while this
literature can model emotional response or provide a minute analysis of the moral
mechanisms of the passions, it does not give a pragmatic typology of the emotions in terms of their cognitive causes, their objects, and their social effects—
that is, a group psychology such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric supplies. The short treatise on the emotions embedded in book 3 of the Speculum caritatis of Aelred of
Rievaulx offers a good example. Aelred’s calibration of the kinds of passions—
spiritual, rational, irrational, tied to good works, natural, or carnal—is rhetorically sensitive, alert to the power of narrative exemplification. Each class of passion is illustrated with scriptural examples, often from the Old Testament, or with
appeals to common experience, for example, how affection can arise from hearing or reading of great virtue, such as that of Saint Paul:
Quis enim audiens pericula illa fluminum, pericula latronum, pericula ex genere, pericula ex gentibus [2 Cor. 11.25–28], illam insuper uocem uirtutis, Vbique et in omnibus
institutus sum et satiari, et esurire, et abundare et penuriam pati; omnia possum in eo
90
The earlier tradition is surveyed, with reference to the Dionysian discourse of spiritual ascent, in
Knuuttila, Emotions, 172–76; for the monastic, and particularly Cistercian, tradition of the eleventh
and twelfth centuries see Damien Boquet, L’ordre de l’affect au moyen âge: Autour de l’anthropologie
affective d’Aelred de Rievaulx (Caen: Publications du Centre du recherches archéologiques et historiques anciennes et médiévales, 2005), 103–49. On the apophatic turn in William of St. Thierry
and Cistercian thought see Michel Lemoine, “Les ambiguïtés de l’héritage médiéval: Guillaume de
Saint-Thierry,” in Les passions antiques et médiévales: Théories et critiques des passions, ed. Bernard
Besnier, Pierre-François Moreau, and Laurence Renault, 1 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France,
2003), 297–308.
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qui me confortat [Phil. 4.12], Quis, inquam haec audiens uel legens, in talem uirum
non mirabili moueatur affectu? 91
[Who, hearing about his perils in the waters, perils from robbers, perils from his own
kind, perils from the gentiles, and beyond all this hearing that voice of virtue, “Everywhere and in all things I am instructed, both to be full and to be hungry; both to abound
and to suffer need. I can do all things in him who strengthens me”—who, I ask, hearing or reading these things of such a man would not be moved to wondrous affection?]
This surely captures the moment of affective provocation in meditation or in
preaching. It reaches a high emotional pitch. But it is exemplary, to prompt understanding and inspire imitation. It is not directed prescriptively or pragmatically to a speaker who must work with the ordinary run of human emotions.
The larger context of such spiritual teaching is most comparable to the philosophical or theological vocabulary that we are to see a century later in Aquinas’s
Summa theologica, an analysis of classes of emotion (rather than individual emotions) aimed at teaching self-knowledge and self-perfection, rather than teaching
communication.
Pastoral Literature on the Emotions
The final field of thought that offers a comparandum is the treatment of emotion in the genres of pastoral literature: penitentials and confessors’ handbooks,
penitential manuals for laypeople, preachers’ handbooks, and treatises on the
vices and virtues. This large class of texts can give complex and often sensitive
treatments of the emotions in order to show how to extirpate the bad emotions,
such as envy and anger, and cultivate the good ones. These programs can trace
a relation back to Stoicism. The bad thoughts (first movements) that the Stoics
sought to control in order to extirpate destructive emotion and achieve philosophical peace of mind were amplified and reconfigured, by Christian thinkers,
as sins to be remedied.92 Penitential and confessional literature and the related
genre of treatises on the vices and virtues also often focus on acts or deeds or
on the indulgence of the emotion as a kind of deed that requires penance. These
texts have in common with Aristotle’s Rhetoric a pragmatic and indeed persuasive investment in describing specific, lived situations; but their interests are
expressly corrective rather than analytical in the phenomenological sense of
Aristotle’s treatment. Good examples can be found in the Franciscan handbook
Fasciculus morum, covering the vices and their remedial virtues. Here the essential
91
De speculo caritatis 3.12, in Aelred of Rievaulx, Opera omnia, 1, ed. A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot,
CCCM 1 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1971), 120, para. 33, lines 600–605. See Boquet, L’ordre de l’affect,
225–53.
92
A standard account of the early Christian tradition (from the eight bad thoughts listed by Evagrius
to the seven cardinal sins, which first appear in their canonical order in Gregory the Great) is given
in Morton Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept,
with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press,
1952), 43–75; Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 357–71, considers this transformation from a
classical philosophical perspective.
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nature of a negative emotion is not to be found in its possible causes but in its
deleterious effects—for example, that wrath causes a person to return the injury
a thousandfold, hurting not only the injurer but his entire family as well.93 This
class of texts could be described as “moral inventories”: they acknowledge the
inevitable frailty of human nature and give much attention to the experience or
manifestation of negative emotion as part of the larger fabric of sinful behavior.
But in such texts the interest is in reforming given behavior and inducing contrition rather than in manipulating emotions on the spot, that is, in understanding them so as to exploit an audience’s propensity to feel one way or another or
change its mind.
Yet, of course, preachers cared deeply about this rhetorical dimension of the
emotions, and knew well that they must manipulate the passions of an audience.
We see this acutely in the affective, meditative verses associated with sermons
that are meant to cue emotional responses or “script” audience passions, such as
this well-known English poem (based on a Latin commonplace), multiple versions of which survive:
Þe
Þe
Þe
Þe
Þe
minde of Þi passiun, suete ihesu
teres it tollid
heine it bolled
neb it wetth
herte sueteth.94
We see the possibility for mobilizing the emotions in the earthy illustrations provided in penitential works aimed at lay audiences, such as Handlyng Synne and,
even more expansively, The Prick of Conscience: the proverbs, fables, exempla,
and quotidian stories that are designed to evoke pity, laughter, good will, fear,
and similar responses.95 Such works use their psychological repertoire in the service of a close examination of conscience, and so could be said to provide a
93
Siegfried Wenzel, ed. and trans., Fasciculus morum: A Fourteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 118–19. On the persuasive, probative
method of such preaching handbooks see also Siegfried Wenzel, ed. and trans., Summa virtutum de
remediis anime (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984), 6–7.
94
Carleton Brown, ed., English Lyrics of the Thirteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932;
repr. 1950), no. 56, from Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 360, fol. 145r. On this verse and
its embedding in sermons see Siegfried Wenzel, Verses in Sermons: “Fasciculus morum” and Its Middle
English Poems, Mediaeval Academy of America Publication 87 (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy
of America, 1978), 128–29; Siegfried Wenzel, “Unrecorded Middle-English Verses,” Anglia 92 (1974):
55–78, at 71; and Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968), 20–21. See the online Index of Middle English Verse (above, n. 64), nos.
1977 and 3968. The major contribution to this field of devotional “scripting” and performance is
now Sarah NcNamer, Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), esp. chap. 4.
95
For essential scholarship on this large field see the references in Marjorie Curry Woods and Rita
Copeland, “Classroom and Confession,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature,
ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 376–406, esp. 395–98. One interesting attempt to theorize the situational or communicative dimensions of the narrative exemplum
in penitential works is Fritz Kemmler, “Exempla” in Context: A Historical and Critical Study of Robert
Mannyng of Brunne’s “Handlyng Synne,” Studies and Texts in English 6 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr,
1984), 172–92.
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material basis for the rhetorical analysis of the passions. We also see affective
potential in the procedure of distinctio characteristic of fourteenth-century alphabetical handbooks for preachers, which provided capacious and well-organized
archives of materials (both practical and doctrinal) for amplifying any moral
theme, including matters of behavior and temperament, such as patience and humility.96 And we see it in the recorded sermons themselves, insofar as they capture the oral and social “event” of preaching.97
But these genres of pastoral literature did not provide a system dedicated to
analyzing the causes of emotions and thereby showing how to arouse them in
an audience; in other words, pastoral genres did not give preachers a prescriptive rhetoric in which they would recognize what they already did intuitively.
Inventories of the emotions in the various genres of pastoral literature were aimed
at the welfare of the individual soul rather than at the situational relationship
between preacher and audience; that is, they supplied the message of contrition
that the preacher delivered rather than commenting on the dynamic circumstances in which he preached.
7. Conclusion
These three systems—philosophical psychology, spiritual ascent, and pastoral
care—represent powerful keys to the emotions for homiletic uses. These fields
recognized, assessed, and exploited the claims of the emotions on devotional and
intellectual motives, and their combined impact is evident across the pastoral and
literary landscape. But none of them provide the kind of analytic that Aristotle
laid out in the Rhetoric.
Thus a reader coming from any of these traditions to Aristotle’s Rhetoric would
encounter something startlingly new: a vividly realized social psychology of the
emotions, grounded in maxims, poetry, and history to illustrate, nonjudgmentally, how people behave in real-life situations. Just as Aristotle viewed rhetoric
as a kind of practical knowledge (akin to politics), so his treatment of the passions within his Rhetoric is aimed at the practical object of knowing one’s audience under any condition of public speaking rather than at the theoretical object
of knowing the soul. Moreover, if, for Aristotle, the overall purpose of public
rhetoric is a good one—to persuade citizens and juries to do the right thing and
96
See Christina von Nolcken, “Some Alphabetical Compendia and How Preachers Used Them in
Fourteenth-Century England,” Viator 12 (1981): 271–88, which prints a useful example of such a
distinctio from the Middle English version of the Rosarium theologie under the topic ieiunium (285–
88). See further Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Preachers, Florilegia, and Sermons: Studies
on the “Manipulus florum” of Thomas of Ireland, Studies and Texts 47 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute
of Mediaeval Studies, 1979), 188–229.
97
Among recent perspectives on this aspect of preaching in England see H. L. Spencer, English
Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 91–108; and Mary E. O’Carroll,
SND, A Thirteenth-Century Preacher’s Handbook: Studies in MS Laud Misc. 511, Studies and Texts
128 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1997), 156–61. Nicole Bériou has studied
the professional activity of one Parisian preacher, Raoul de Châteauroux, over the course of one year,
as documented in the sermons conserved in two Paris manuscripts: see L’avènement des maîtres de la
Parole, 1:215–91, “Une année de prédication à Paris (1272–1273).”
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make just decisions—the variability of the emotions is not to be censured, for
passions are simply one of the speaker’s instruments for achieving good ends. Even
the self-interestedness of human nature and the emotions that express self-interest,
such as envy and hatred, are described without moral judgment. The Rhetoric
offered a systematic breakdown of what every preacher already knew from experience: how to appeal emotionally to the given mood and self-image of an
audience.
The fifteenth-century annotator of the Peterhouse manuscript, probably reading the Rhetoric with a view to preaching, has seized on something in the section
on the emotions that corresponds to something in his own knowledge: Piers the
Plowman is an appropriate object of the emotion of amicitia. His gloss praising
the “just life” of the honest plowman draws a preacherly moral from Aristotle’s
discussion of amicitia directed towards self-reliant laborers; simultaneously it invokes a familiar literary type to illustrate the very idea of amicitia, as if to appeal
directly to the kinds of friendly emotions that the figure of Piers Plowman evokes.
In making that connection between rhetorical precept on the emotions and the
work of preaching, he has brought in a third field: poetic tradition and the particular affective power that lodges in the figure of Piers the laborer. And he has
rendered his aperçu in verse, thus formally securing the intersection of rhetorical
precept on the passions, poetic affect, and the affective appeal of preaching. As
we know from the rich tradition of “verses in sermons,” it follows on a preacher’s instinct to turn an idea to good use by rendering it in simple, memorable, and
even commonplace vernacular verse, seizing on concrete imagery to drive home
an emotional point. Thus in this English couplet, the “just life” of “Piers Plowman”
gives vivid illustration to the Latin text “liberales et fortes honorant et iustos.”
What has brought poetry and preaching together in the annotator’s mind is not
Piers the Plowman—that is only a happy effect of the synthesis—but Aristotle’s
systematic psychology of the emotions. This is not a revelation but an activation
of the potential shared between two already familiar fields.
I do not think that we can put too much referential pressure on the invocation
of the name Piers Plowman and the poem itself. Perhaps the poem suggested itself because its protean character is like a rhetorical laboratory of the emotions,
from the righteous anger of Piers to the penitent weeping of Haukyn. In its movement from confession to true penitence and virtue, the poem produces a selfcommentary on the emotional efficacy of preaching, a theme that may have carried beyond the poem’s circle of close and attentive readers. The poem’s affective
teaching, through the figure of Will, is in most ways a “traditional pastoral emotion therapy,” illustrating polarized extremes of emotions that can be exemplary
precisely through a corrective dynamic.98 And perhaps this very traditionalism
was what rendered the poem or the figure of Piers a familiar and obvious candidate for glossing an entirely new perspective on the emotions. Perhaps the maxims that the annotator deemed memorable—such commonplaces as “Be not idle”
and “No man is happy in all ways”—resonated with themes immanent in Piers
Nicolette Zeeman, Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, Cambridge Studies in
Medieval Literature 59 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chap. 2, “Powers of
Knowledge and Desire,” esp. 85–89, 100–108.
98
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Plowman and in the moral-polemical tradition beyond the poem itself (for example, the hard-working worldliness of Haukyn or the invocation of Piers the
laborer in the rebel letters), or they may be shorthand for other, more complex
commemorations of this or any literary tradition that could be brought to bear
on preaching. It is possible that the passage of years would have diffused the association of “Piers” with the extremes of anticlerical poetry; but conversely, the
annotator may well have been conscripting those reformist associations to a more
general, orthodox use. These possibilities must remain speculation. Ultimately,
the annotations in Peterhouse 57 do not provide enough information to take us
back to the specifics of Langland’s text nor to indicate that the glossator himself
was even a reader of the poem. The name “Piers Plowman” does not necessarily
lead us back to the poem, but it leads us back to poetry.
As the tradition of homiletic poetry shows, preaching sought to capture the
emotional capacity of poetry by turning to its concrete, affective language. Poetry,
whether in the vernacular or in Latin, was a repository for pragmatic knowledge
of how to mobilize emotions. Even to consider the examples above from the poem
Piers Plowman and its English tradition reveals how poetry can provide a phenomenological access to the passions that would be useful to a preacher seeking
to persuade through emotional appeal. The verse annotation in Peterhouse 57
shows how Aristotle’s account of the emotions could activate that connection in
the mind of a pastoral reader. In its vivid exemplification of the “just life” and
its textured language, the verse responds directly to the discourse on amicitia.
What Aristotle’s Rhetoric provided was not emotion itself but a systematic account of the psychology and social cause and effect of emotional behavior. It did
not offer technical precepts for producing desired emotional effects. Rather, it
gave readers a powerful new articulation of the social conditions behind emotional responses. It brought the emotions out of the theoretical abstractions of
philosophy and theology, and even out of the corrective taxonomies of penitential instruction. In practical rhetorical terms it laid out the real knowledge of affective motivation that poetry already instantiated and that preaching needed to
purvey.
In their totality, the annotations in Peterhouse 57 show that Aristotle’s text
sparked a connection between English poetry and a contemporary cultural application for the Rhetoric, the work of preaching. They also show how Aristotle’s
difficult and culturally unfamiliar theory of rhetoric could be brought home to a
medieval English audience. And above all, the English verse in the margin is witness to a moment of radical appropriation of an ancient discourse, a recovery in
the contemporary image of vernacular preaching and polemical poetry.
Rita Copeland is Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of Humanities and Professor
of Classical Studies, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA 19104 (e-mail: [email protected]).
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