PIMSPontifical Institute
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Mediaeval Studies

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.

Author

Martin Camargo is Emeritus Professor of English, Classics, and Medieval Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and has held previous appointments at the University of Alabama (1979–1980) and the University of Missouri (1980–2003). An award-winning teacher of undergraduate and graduate students, he also served as head of three different departments and as a dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The principal focus of Camargo’s teaching and scholarship has been literature written in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. His research on vernacular poetry, especially works by Geoffrey Chaucer, and on medieval Latin rhetoric has received fellowship support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, All Souls College, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has published five books and more than sixty articles and has maintained an active research program since retiring in 2021.

Endorsements

“In A Renaissance of Rhetoric in Late Medieval Oxford, Martin Camargo makes available a remarkably diverse collection of Latin rhetorical treatises on the ars dictaminis created at Oxford at the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Little known to all but specialists in medieval rhetoric, these treatises present a rich body of reflections on Latin writing, figures of speech, and the musicality of letters. A wide-ranging introduction across five chapters, contextualizes them in the history of rhetoric and the teaching of writing practices in England; annotated editions and commentaries illuminate the textual cultures of the authors; and the accompanying translations and commentaries allow modern readers to enter into the complex, refined world of the great English masters of late-medieval rhetoric. The book should prove a crowning achievement to Martin Camargo’s scholarly career.” — Benoît Grévin, L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales

“Martin Camargo’s book on rhetoric in Oxford during the late medieval period is a stunning achievement. The author surveys the development of rhetorical theory at Oxford in the later Middle Ages in numerous important treatises heretofore rarely examined. The introduction to the volume clearly and succinctly places these texts in their intellectual milieu.  The editions that form the heart of the volume, most of which are based on manuscripts written in an Anglicana script difficult to decipher, reveal Camargo’s absolute command of the genre. The commentaries and translations provide scholars and students with further valuable materials. A Renaissance of Rhetoric in Late Medieval Oxford should be on the bookshelf of all those interested in medieval rhetorical theory and the intellectual life of Oxford in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.” — Frank T. Coulson, The Ohio State University

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