Nottingham Medieval Studies

In this essay, I investigate the use of colour as a rhetorical device in the Middle English Pearl in an effort to shift the focus away from traditional discussions of colour symbolism in the poem and provide an alternative framework with which to understand the poet’s imaginative world. My work analyses the poet’s systematic deployment of colour in Pearl in terms of the rhetorical device of ductus, which pertains to the flow, or ‘way through’ a composition, showing how colours structure Pearl’s three landscapes and determine the outcome of the Dreamer’s spiritual quest.

This paper explores parallels and differences between the status of verbal and musical texts with respect to content, grammar, and rhetoric. It considers the role that memory and personal apprenticeship played in the performance of unwritten or incompletely notated music, which was not necessarily ‘improvised’. Now we have only the notated texts, which has often obscured how composed music, written or not, was then inseparable from its now unrecoverable performative rhetoric, or actio. Fifteenth-century manuals not only on music but on painting and dance were self-consciously modelled on rhetorical treatises to establish their status as liberal arts.

This paper suggests that some of the drawings in the celebrated portfolio of Villard de Honnecourt shed light on medieval notions of the difficulty, as well as the ease, of invention. Frequently, Villard’s drawings are seen as disconnected ‘studies’, but it is argued here that in some cases their relationships are thoughtful, and may be understood by reference, rhetorical in origin, to wrestling as a metaphor for intellectual or artistic struggle. Though artistic invention was not discussed in the Middle Ages as much as it was in the Renaissance, it is suggested that Villard’s use of the imagery of fierce action belongs to a phase of heroic attainment in Gothic architecture particularly, in northern France around 1200.

Throughout his career Geoffrey of Vinsauf composed highly rhetorical poems that dramatized and thus memorialized the emotions associated with England’s (and his own) greatest triumphs and tragedies. His most frequently quoted poem, the lament for King Richard I, probably began as just such a composition. Geoffrey’s occasional pieces clearly and succinctly embody the grand poetic ambitions behind his Poetria nova. This essay sheds light on the ten shorter poems that have been attributed to Geoffrey both by identifying their characteristic rhetorical strategies and by translating them into English for the first time.

As academic Latin material began to cross over into the vernacular, in late fourteenth-century France, artists sought to help the new readership adapt to the demanding content. A unique iconography developed for copies of Jean Corbechon’s 1372 translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’ De proprietatibus rerum seems to have drawn on the arts of memory practised by learned readers, in order to entice lay audiences into the text. This programme of illustration alternated a recurring scene of a master teaching students with ever more imaginative, non-realistic pedagogic scenes that can be interpreted as visualizing to the students, and the miniatures’ viewers, the phantasmata stored in the learned master’s mind.

This essay explores how the recovery of Cicero’s Brutus affects discussions of style in the early sixteenth century. More precisely, it assesses how this ancient text, by treating style as historically conditioned, encourages Renaissance debates over style that give a fuller hearing than ever before to the concepts of individuality and self-expression.

Hildegard of Bingen’s antiphon series for the 11,000 Virgins is found solely in two notated manuscripts that present the repertory as liturgical music destined for the service of Lauds. The two most recent and influential critical editions of these texts treat them as a single, unified poem, one relegating the rubrics to the critical commentary and the other presenting speculative liturgical assignments within the text. This study proposes an alternative reading of the antiphon series that fully acknowledges the prompts given by the liturgical rubrics and preserves the logic of its rhetorical structure.

Middle English drama was variously summarized in the cycles’ proclamation banns and in archival lists such as York’s Ordo paginarum. This essay analyses and proposes innovative readings of the at times enigmatic forms some of these summae took. Based on renewed readings of a few of the Medieval Latin terms (sedula, pagina) employed to describe the plays and on the investigation of the surfacing in these texts of rhetorical strategies such as brevitas, amplificatio, allusion, and imagines agentes, I suggest that the entries might be used practically as mnemotechnical devices and as instruments of communal, typological memoria.

In the fourteenth century, some innovative thinkers began to treat vernacular texts - as written either by themselves or their contemporaries - with the same sort of respect that for generations had been the prerogative of Latin ‘set texts’, as studied in medieval schools. My essay explores the part manuscript illumination played in one such project: the Documenti d’Amore of Francesco da Barberino (1264-1348). Here theorization lags far behind sophisticated practice, as Francesco denigrates the figurae which he himself designed - and which are vital to his ambitious commentarial enterprise - as having low epistemological status and hence suitable for the ‘vulgar’ rather than the learned.

This essay examines closely a chapter of Goscelin of St Bertin’s advice book to the anchoress Eva (c. 1083), dealing with meditation practices, based on a reflection of the Ark of the Covenant as described in Exodus. In his theory of meditation, Goscelin counterpoints an image-poor tradition (from both Exodus and the Desert Fathers) with an image-rich one, and he plays productively on paradoxes of interior and exterior, small spaces and infinite inventio. The anchoritic topos of the cell as both a protecting shelter for the anchoress and a metonymy of her own body and mind allows him to develop a notion of self-building and collaborative literary authorship. To pinpoint Goscelin’s particular stance on the anchoress’s meditative work, I contrast his reflections with both Aelred of Rievaulx and the Ancrene Wisse, as well as texts from the Desert Fathers tradition.

Composed against the backdrop of the Second Crusade, Marcabru’s song is rich in topical references and moral pronouncements. Like other troubadour songs, music is provided for the first stanza of text. It is carefully wrought, mirroring and articulating the complex design, syntax, rhetoric, and message of the stanza. When it delivers the other stanzas, I suggest, it refers the listener back to stanza 1, adding a layer of associations and commentary that a reading of the text alone might not reveal. I speculate on the nature of the musical text, on how a singer might have responded to the design and content of the different stanzas in the notationless milieu in which this song, like other early troubadour lyrics, doubtless originated.

In her discussion of medieval florilegia in The Book of Memory, Mary Carruthers explains that such compilations equipped preachers to compose sermons like the one praised by one twelfth-century listener as being ‘adorned with flowers of words and sentences and supported by a copious array of authorities’. This essay gathers flowers from a distinctio in Peter the Chanter’s Summa Abel that could have served as a source for a sermon on the diversity of Christ’s followers, for it ‘distinguishes’ eight attributes of Ecclesia by means of as many flowers and herbs: roses, lilies, violets, crocuses, ivy, frankincense, myrrh, and aloe.

The Biblical Concordance made for the Arrouasian Abbey of Augustinian Canons at Dorchester, near Oxford (now Trinity College, Dublin MS 65) during the abbacy of John de Sutton (1333-49) is illustrated with initials for each letter of the alphabet, each enclosing the ‘portrait’ of one of the then-living members of the monastic community, all identified by name. The study links the manuscript with the three large windows in the abbey church chancel, unique combinations of figural stone tracery and stained glass that were installed during the same years.

Compared to images in prose, the images of lyric poetry are more penalized by the inevitable reduction to literalness implied by illustration, and this is one of the reasons why we have few examples of canzonieri with a structured set of visualizations of the single poems. Despite that, the imagery and the conceits of Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta are the basis of love emblems which exploited them pictorially in different forms. Through the analysis of some examples of emblematic visualizations of Petrarch’s Fragmenta, this essay explores the visual dimension of Petrarchan poems. All these documents testify to a Renaissance way of reading Petrarch’s work, a ‘reminiscing cogitation’ in which the images, as expressions of the amplificatio, deal with the dimension of enargeia, that is, of the text’s connection to the ‘perception-imaginatio-memory-invention’ chain.