Emotion in the Rhetorical Arts and Literary Culture c.1070–c.1400

Chapter 3 explores how style itself became an explosive field in the professional rhetorics of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, the ars dictaminis and the ars poetriae. These new pragmatics of rhetorical theory trace their roots back to the epideictic teaching of late antiquity, where the whole range of emotions is a property of style. The arts of poetry and of letter-writing have proved extremely resistant to modern theoretical probing of their affective and aesthetic principles, because they stress the technical dimension of composition. But they also see rhetoric as a performance-oriented enterprise, and for them the obvious resource for generating strong emotion lies in style. This apotheosis of style is the most durable medieval tradition of teaching how to respond affectively to texts and to write affectively oneself. It manifests itself with joyful zeal in all quarters, from lowly classroom poetry and exemplary anthologies to Petrarch’s commanding high style and Chaucer’s parodies of emotive style.