A Renaissance of Rhetoric in Late Medieval Oxford

This book documents an unprecedented effort to produce new treatises on rhetoric at Oxford that began in the second half of the fourteenth century and continued through the first half of the fifteenth century.

Part 1 of the book includes chapters on the origins and causes of this "renaissance" of rhetoric, the new textbooks and their authors, tradition and innovation in their rhetorical precepts, the pedagogical contexts in which the textbooks were deployed, and the diffusion and eventual decline of this efflorescence. Part 2 consists of Latin editions and facing English translations of eight works by seven authors, each with an accompanying commentary. Six of these works are by Benedictine monks, such as Thomas Merke, or grammar masters, such as John of Briggis and Simon Alcock, who taught rhetoric in association with the university's Arts curriculum. The remaining two are by the prolific "business teacher" Thomas Sampson, whose pedagogy in some respects overlaps and in others contrasts with that of the self-styled rhetoricians. In addition, important textbooks by two anonymous rhetoricians are discussed at length in Part 1: an art of poetry and prose called by its opening words Tria sunt (late fourteenth century) and a complementary pair of treatises that begin Duo enim sunt oratoris officia (before 1431) and Preterea si dictantes (1434-1437).

As a result, every fourteenth- and fifteenth-century rhetorical treatise produced at Oxford that was either composed by a known author or that survives in more than a single manuscript copy is described in detail in Part 1, if not also edited and translated in Part 2. Four of the Latin texts in Part 2 have never been printed before, and all eight of them are translated here for the first time.