The possibility that Augustine reintroduced the Rhetorica ad Herennium to the classroom is curious. Though he is sometimes credited with a didactic, Greek-influenced work on classical rhetorical theory, he is particularly famous for his De Doctrina Christiana, which has been called ‘‘the first manual of Christian eloquence, a kind of Christian De Oratore’ (Conley 1994: 77). Despite its author’s great familiarity with the Greco-Roman tradition, and despite his own intentions, De Doctrina Christiana introduces a new kind of tension between ‘‘truth’’ and ‘‘rhetoricity,’’ thus marking out the territory of medieval rhetoric in ways that are potentially very different from the field in which that tradition operated. Indeed, Augustine’s treatise, often erroneously described as the first of the medieval ‘‘arts of preaching,'' is in some senses a revolutionary work as it attempted to divert rhetorical attention away from Greco-Roman technical precepts, toward imitatio based on persuasive and exemplary biblical models. The venerable Bede (ca. 673-735 ce), attempting in his De Schematibus et Tropibus ( Concerning Figures and Tropes) to illustrate the ‘‘figures of speech and thought’’ (the colores verborum et sententiarum of the fourth book of the Ad Herennium) from the Bible rather than from secular texts, represents but one continuation of the Augustinian ‘‘revolution.’’ Another representative is Rabanus Maurus, a pupil of Alcuin (730-804), whom Charlemagne met at Parma in Italy. Alcuin himself, master of the cathedral school at York, England, was on a diplomatic mission to Rome when Charlemagne, the most powerful ruler in the Europe of his day, invited him to his own court at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen). Alcuin wrote his Disputatio de Rhetorica et de Virtutibus (Discussion Concerning Rhetoric and the Virtues) for Charlemagne’s benefit, in particular to accustom him to the exercise of justice in the palace court according to the principles of Roman law, as set out in Cicero’s De Inventione and lulius Victor’s Ars Rhetorica (probably fourth century ce). As Charlemagne is alleged to have admitted at the opening of this book, rhetoric concerns ‘‘civil questions,’’ and it makes little sense for one such as Charlemagne, confronting civil questions daily, not to know as much about the art as possible. The verse preface announces it as praecepta concerning civiles mores (‘‘precepts concerning the habits of civil society’’), thus situating it on the side Augustine himself abandoned in his De Doctrina Christiana.
On the same side, too, was the section on preceptive rhetoric in the encyclopedic Etymologies of Isidore (ca. 560-636 ce), bishop of Seville in Spain. The relevance of this rhetorical section of what must have been intended as a comprehensive Roman educational text for the Spanish episcopacy, becomes apparent when one realizes that the bishops in Spain enjoyed a privileged judicial and political position. Not only did the Germanic (Visigothic) rulers of post-Roman Spain regularly use episcopal councils as legislative bodies for their kingdom, but, by the provisions of the 589 Council at Toledo, they made the bishops the judicial overseers of the secular judges (iudices) in the realm. These provisions were subsequently repeated. The Roman bishops in Spain were thus involved in the process of legal and political decision-making to a degree unknown in the contemporary Germanic kingdoms. Since Roman rhetoric grew up in a predominantly judicial-legal-political context, it is not surprising that Isidore should have desired to include a brief digest of classical rhetorical theory in his encyclopedia.
Back in Carolingian Europe, however, the tide seems to have turned a little. Alcuin’s pupil Rabanus Maurus Magnentius (ca. 780-856), a learned German abbot and archbishop, returns in his De Clericorum Institutione (On the Training of the Clergy) to Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana for the necessary learning in the art of communication. Betraying little classical influence, his work illustrates the tension inherent in early medieval rhetorical studies between the practical precepts of the Ciceronian tradition and the model moral behavior based upon biblical imitatio and oriented toward the preaching practicalities of the Augustinian ‘‘revolution.''
The encyclopedic tradition of summarizing classical rhetorical theory for the benefit of contemporary users is, in fact, older than Isidore of Seville. The sixth-century civil servant under the Germanic (Ostrogothic) ruler Theodoric in Italy, Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator (ca. 480-575 ce), the author of a collection of government letters and edicts called the Variae, also summarized rhetoric in his monastic encyclopedia, the Institutiones Divinarum et Humanarum Lectionum (Instruction in Divine and Human Letters). From the very beginning of the Carolingian period though, much fuller rhetorical instruction was available. For example, the question-and-answer Artis Rhetoricae Libri Tres (Three Books on the Art of Rhetoric), written by the late Roman Gaius Chirius Fortunatianus some time in the second half of the fifth century ce, appears in full in the celebrated early Carolingian manuscript Paris Bibliotheque Nationale lat. 7530. This manuscript was written in Beneventan script at the abbey of Monte Cassino between 779 and 796 CE and contains some fifty-eight separate items of mainly grammatical import, including the praeexercitamina (‘‘preparatory exercises’’; progymnasmata in Greek) that were ascribed to the second-century ce Greek rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus (160-225 ce), and translated into Latin by the early sixth-century Latin grammarian Priscian. The text proved a popular aid, especially in the ninth and fifteenth centuries, to certain types of composition at the crossover between rhetoric and grammar. In the ninth century, contemporaries paid a lot of attention to the late Roman encyclopedist Martianus Capella (fl. ca. 400 ce?), book 5 of whose De Nuptiis Mercurii et Philologiae ( On the Marriage of Mercury and Philology) contained a sophisticated summary of rhetorical theory as taught in the later Roman empire. These kinds of texts were matched by attempts to expand the art of rhetoric into areas ill served in the antique manuals, such as letter-writing (a note De Epistolis, describing propriety and elegance in epistolary communication, appears in the same Beneventan manuscript as Fortunatianus’ treatise). The full reach of Carolingian ambitions is suggested by the important surviving manuscript of Cicero’s De Oratore, a text not much used during the Middle Ages, copied in the early ninth century by the Carolingian Abbot Lupus of Ferrieres (manuscript London, British Library Harley 2736), but we have no way of knowing what he or his contemporaries made of such a text since they do not otherwise refer to it. Far more sophisticated scholars than Lupus tell us in the twelfth century that the De Oratore was generally absent from the rhetorical schools of the day.
From as early as Merovingian times (France from the fifth to the eighth centuries), there is evidence that bishops involved in difficult court cases before the kings looked to classical rhetorical devices to help them win cases. This is not unusual since bishops were mainly of Roman descent in Merovingian Gaul until quite late. This tendency to make use of the legal categories of classical rhetorical theory only grew more pronounced, with the result that an outlying figure like Notker Labeo could take care to set down the details of rhetorical persuasion in early eleventh-century Germany. Similarly, Gerbert of Rheims (940/50-1003) - who had studied in the monastery at Aurillac in France, taught at the cathedral school of Rheims, was for a time abbot of Bobbio (in northern Italy) and finished his career as Pope Sylvester II (999-1003 ce) - could develop a considerable interest in rhetorical issues and figures, which he sought to put to use in the political/ecclesiastical imbroglios in which he became involved. He formed himself and trained his students in classical poetic modes of locution, which represented for him a necessary preliminary ad oratoriam artem. This training seemed to involve close study of and practice in rhetorical topics as found in Boethius’ De Topicis Differentiis. Training was perhaps by way of some sort of exercise approaching in format the controversiae of antiquity, and considerable direct study of preceptive rhetoric itself as found, for instance, in the Rhetores Latini Minores (Halm 1863) - that is, if manuscript Munich Staatsbibliothek (CLM) 14,436 represents, as is claimed, his teaching.
Jaeger (1994) has shown how an emphasis upon proper courtly behavior among bishops and leading ecclesiastics placed a priority in the eleventh century upon a system of education that stressed morals and effective communication. So long as such emphases lasted, classical moral and rhetorical texts retained their place in educational circles. Such emphases indeed picked up pace in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and this circumstance in part explains the survival in around a hundred manuscripts of some twenty-two catena commentaries on the Ciceronian juvenilia from the time of Lawrence of Amalfi to the fourth Lateran Council (1215 ce).
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