Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400–1500 by Matthew Kempshall, and: Orosius and the Rhetoric of History by Peter Van Nuffelen
Abstract
216 RHETORICA del fratello di Guizzardo, i Flores veritatis gramatice di Bertoluccio (sopra ricordato), conservata anche in altri due manoscritti (e attribuita a Gentile da Cingoli in un altro ms.). Lo studio di quest'opera che, secondo il giudizio di Gian Carlo Alessio, è "un manuale costruito coi modelli della grammatica speculativa", sarebbe molto intéressante perché potrebbe costituire il legame tra la tradizione di riflessione grammaticale, importata probabilmente tra i maestri delle arti e medicina di Bologna da Gentile da Cingoli (il maestro di Angelo di Arezzo), e la tradizione di insegnamento della grammatica e della retorica (dictamen) di ámbito giuridico-notarile che convivevano a Bologna, non sempre in buoni rapporti. COSTANTINO MARMO, BOLOGNA Matthew Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400-1500, Manchester University Press, 2012, x + 627 pp. ISBN 9780719070310 Peter Van Nuffelen, Orosius and the Rhetoric of History, Oxford University Press, 2012, viii + 252 pp. ISBN 9780199655274 In recent years, scholarly attitudes towards writers of history in the late antique and medieval period have undergone a fundamental series of trans formations. It is no longer sufficient to describe these individuals as mere imi tators of a glorious classical historiographical tradition, using tools that they only barely understood with limited success. Nor can they be unreflectively dismissed simply as polemicists and moralizers, subject to the particular pressures that attended an overly-literal reception of Biblical themes and models. The two books under review here add further fuel to a revisionist reading of medieval historiography by focusing upon the ways in which authors could strategically utilize techniques of argumentation and presenta tion drawn from the training in rhetoric and grammar that underpinned the literary culture of the period. Matthew Kempshall's Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400-1500 is a magisterial, synthetic introduction to the subject, aimed principally at students and scholars new to the field and encompassing some 550 pages of elegantly written, exhaustively supported argumentation. In his Orosius and the Rhetoric ofHistory, meanwhile, Peter Van Nuffelen offers a collection of carefully drawn interpretative vignettes which seek to engage scholars of both historiography and Christian literature of the period, and, in the process, to redirect the focus of Orosian scholarship by placing him within the context of secular, as well as Christian, historiography of the fifth and sixth centuries. Both projects are, therefore, explicitly rehabilitative in nature: Kempshall's to demonstrate that medieval historiography was neither crude nor credulous nor conceptually unsophisticated" (536), and Van Nuffelen's to deliver Orosius from the accusation that he was an unimaginative, unintelligent theologian who fundamentally misunderstood the works of his patron, Augustine of Reviews 217 Hippo. Both authors go about their projects by emphasizing the close and enduring relationship between the writing of history and the practices, concerns, and techniques of classical rhetoric. In particular, both acknowledge and build upon existing arguments about the extensive and substantial influ ence of manuals of rhetoric (particularly Cicero, Quintilian, and the pseudoCiceronian Rhetonoi iid Hei'eniiiimi) on the education that authors of the period received. For Kempshall, the pervasiveness of classical rhetoric in medieval thought and literature should not be understood as a black mark against the veracity, reliability, or integrity of practitioners of the period. On the contrary, the principles of deliberative, judicial, and demonstrative rhetoric provided the writers of history with the tools that thev needed in order to fulfill the tripartite objective of history: to teach, to move, and to please. After first outlining the immense diversity of texts that are collected together under the rubric of medi eval historiography and the fundamental forms and objectives of the three types of classical rhetoric that authors of those texts might be expected to be familiar with, Kempshall proceeds to explore in detail the principles and tech niques of classical rhetoric, and the texts and contexts in which they can be found in historical writing of the period. In the process, he also questions and begins upon a deconstruction of the tendency to identify the 12th and 15th centuries as w atershed moments in the history of medieval historiographv . While he agrees that the intellectual and cultural developments of those centuries do mark significant points in the dev elopment of medieval...
- Journal
- Rhetorica
- Published
- 2016-03-01
- DOI
- 10.1353/rht.2016.0019
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