Delicious History

Intro to Med Rhet: 429-49; Intro to Augustine 450-54.

The rhetoric of the Med Rhet introduction is quite intriguing and worth analyzing on its own.  

Firstly, I spotted three minor errors (and there are probably more):  The authors use the term "Dark Ages" (434) without pointing out that no serious scholar uses that term anymore; the authors refer to dialectic as part of the trivium (435) -- I've never heard that term; I've only seen it as "logic"; the authors refer to the Battle of Tours (437), which is often more commonly referred to as the Battle of Poitiers.  At any rate, none of these usages are "wrong" per se, they just come across as very strange choices, especially for a high level college class.

The most striking thing about this introduction is just how teleological it is.  Like the use of the phrase "Dark Ages," this is very surprising to see in this sort of textbook.  Compared to life in modern America, life in the European Middle Ages was not great.  (An oft repeated phrase from that Renaissance thinker Thomas Hobbes comes to mind: life was "nasty, brutish, and short.")(But as our book points out, the thinkers of the Renaissance wanted to dissociate themselves from the previous centuries; this line of thinking was carried on by the Victorians.)

But to just focus on nothing but wars and such seems. . .dishonest.  As if the authors are going out of their way to show just horrible awful terrible life was -- the Greeks and Romans were great, the Renaissance was great -- but the time in-between -- awful, awful.  And the textbook does not do a good job providing links.  Sure, it lists what texts were used.  But even as the Christians derided pagan thought, they continued several rhetorical traditions -- namely, appealing to older/ancient sources and the idea that invention was not exactly about coming up with a new thought.  The medieval rhetoricians remained very Roman in this way.  Even Chaucer, at the cusp of the Renaissance, does this.  And even Shakespeare, firmly in the Renaissance, does it too.

Oddly, the authors do not use the term "Carolingian Renaissance."  They discuss it (437), yes.  They mention the "renaissance of the twelfth century" (438) -- another phrase I have never heard.  Strange.

Also, at the bottom of 445 and top of 446, the authors mention several women "religious."  However, Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe were both lay women; they were not actually part of a convent or anything.  Also, their rhetorical tradition is a bit different from Hildegard's -- Julian and Margery were part of the mystic movement.

Edited to Add:  Oops, I was wrong about Julian .  She was an anchoress.

Meanwhile, Augustine.  I read his Confessions several years ago.  He mentions that Ambrose read silently -- and how weird this was.  It seems like an important thing for our textbook to mention.  Not only did our Classical authors compose out loud, and memorize -- they read out loud.  Everything.  Though, I find it strange this is not brought up much overall.  I did not learn that reading out loud was common until my final year of undergrad.

The moral of the story seems to be: question all textbooks.

--Natasha, BA English, BA Medieval and Renaissance Studies