This article contributes to the study of medieval poetics and rhetoric by reassessing the Arabic-Aristotelian influence in the Poetria and Testa nucis of Matthew of Linköping (c. 1300–1350). In the Poetria Matthew applied a dichotomy between essential and accidental aspects (essencialia-accidentalia) which provided him with a historical, theoretical, and cultural perspective on conventional poetics. The appeal of the (Parisian teaching of) Arabic-Aristotelian poetics lay not merely in its theoretical ideas, but also in its novel multilingual and cultural aspects that differed from the self-conscious Latin legacy of the older medieval poetics based on Horace and Cicero.

This article contributes to the study of medieval poetics and rhetoric by reassessing the Arabic-Aristotelian influence in the Poetria and Testa nucis of Matthew of Linköping (c. 1300–1350). In the Poctria Matthew applied a dichotomy between essential and accidental aspects (essencialia-accidentalia) which provided him with a historical, theoretical, and cultural perspective on conventional poetics. The appeal of the (Parisian teaching of) Arabic-Aristotelian poetics lay not merely in its theoretical ideas, but also in its novel multilingual and cultural aspects that differed from the self-conscious Latin legacy of the older medieval poetics based on Horace and Cicero.