Abstract This essay offers a reassessment of the reception history of the Latin translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric in the universities and mendicant studia of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. While it accepts James J. Murphy's assertion, originally made in 1969, that Aristotle's Rhetoric was studied as part of moral philosophy, it presents new manuscript and textual evidence of how this work was actually used. It argues for its popularity and importance among later medieval scholastics and suggests we take a more nuanced view of what they understood rhetoric to be.

This essay offers a reassessment of the reception history of the Latin translation of Aristotle’s Rhetoric in the universities and mendicant studia of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. While it accepts James J. Murphy’s assertion, originally made in 1969, that Aristotle’s Rhetoric was studied as part of moral philosophy, it presents new manuscript and textual evidence of how this work was actually used. It argues for its popularity and importance among later medieval scholastics and suggests we take a more nuanced view of what they understood rhetoric to be.