Christian and Literary Rhetorics of the Early Middle Ages

Chapter 2 considers the fortunes of stylistic teaching about emotion in late antique and early Christian literary rhetoric: Augustine’s De doctrina christiana, Macrobius’ Saturnalia, and Cassiodorus’ psalm commentary. Here the teaching can explicitly articulate an ethical dimension of style, where the teacher/speaker calls attention to his investment in the emotional charge of the text. But when that ethical value is merely assumed, not overtly stated, as in many monastic and clerical rhetorics over the following centuries, the force of the ethical defense of rhetoric diminishes. The chapter traces this “naturalization” of the ethical defense in the rhetorics of Isidore of Seville, Bede, Rupert of Deutz, and the twelfth-century cathedral master Onulf of Speyer.