The fading influence of the medieval ars dictaminis in England after 1400

Rhetorica - Journal of the History of Rhetoric

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 225-247

  Richardson, Malcolm ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33644977718     PISSN: 07348584     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rh.2001.19.2.225     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. Laura Wright, "On the Writing of the History of Standard English", in Francisco Fernández, Miguel Fuster, and Juan José Calvo eds, English Historical Linguistics 1992: Papers from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994) pp. 105-15.
2. Instances can be found, for example, in Florence E. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs, 2nd edn (Stamford: Paul Watkins, 1989).
3. This summary is based largely on Martin Camargo, Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English Artes Dictandi and Their Tradition, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, no. 115 (Binghamton: Center For Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995) pp. 1-11.
4. Emil J. Polak, Medieval and Renaissance Letter Treatises and Form Letters: A Census of Manuscripts Found in Part of Western Europe, Japan, and the United States of America, Davis Medieval Texts and Studies, no. 9 (New York: E. J. Brill, 1994) pp. 257-399.
5. For representative late-medieval English diplomatic documents, the best source is still Thomas Rymer ed., Foedera, etc. (1739-45; rpt Farnborough, Hants, 1967), especially vols. III and IV.
6. Malcolm Richardson, The Medieval Chancery under Henry V, List and Index Society, Special Series, 30 (Kew: List and Index Society (Public Record Office), 1999) p. 14.
7. Guide to the Contents of the Public Records Office (London: HMSO, 1963) I, p. 24.
8. See Charles Everitt, "Eloquence as Profession and Art: The Use of the Ars Dictaminis in the Letters of Gilbert Stone and his Contemporaries, 1300-c. 1450", unpublished dissertation, University of Oxford, 1985.
9. James J. Murphy, "Rhetoric in Fourteenth-Century Oxford", Medium Aevum 34 (1965) pp. 12-29;
10. Camargo, Medieval Rhetorics, pp. 21-30;
11. H. G. Richardson, "Business Training in Medieval Oxford", American Historical Review 46 (1941) pp. 259-80;
12. H. G. Richardson, "An Oxford Teacher of the Fifteenth Century", Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 23 (1939) pp. 436-57. Despite the general theme of the present article, dictaminal training in England continued up until at least the Reformation. An interesting manuscript worthy of further study, British Library Sloane 1584, is partly the work of a student in London in the reign of Henry VIII at a "wryttynge Scole" (fol. 30), with model dictaminal letters in English.
13. James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) pp. 239, 267.
14. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, p. 239.
15. See also N[oel] Denholm-Young, "The Cursus in England", in Collected Papers on Medieval Subjects (Oxford: Blackwell, 1946) pp. 26-55.
16. John H. Fisher, Malcolm Richardson, and Jane Fisher, An Anthology of Chancery English (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984) pp. xv-xvii;
17. John H. Fisher, "Chancery and the Emergence of Standard Written English in the Fifteenth Century", Speculum 52 (1977) pp. 870-99.
18. An interesting collection of very early English-language letters (by a woman) is found in Paddy Payne and Caroline Barron, "The Letters and Life of Elizabeth Despenser, Lady Zouche (d. 1408)", Nottingham Medieval Studies 41 (1997) pp. 126-56.
19. Norman Davis ed., Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, 1976);
20. Alison Hanham ed., The Cely Letters, 1472-1488, EETS O. S. no. 273 (Oxford: EETS, 1975).
21. Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) pp. 13-15.
22. For a fuller discussion of the differences between the formal and "newsletter" styles in fifteenth-century English private letters, see my article "Women, Commerce, and Rhetoric in Medieval England", in Molly Meijer Wertheimer ed., Listening to their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997) pp. 136-38. However, there is more variety in the styles of letters than this article inadvertently implies.
23. Noted briefly by Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) pp. 234-35.
24. H. G. Richardson, "Letters of the Oxford Dictatores", in H. E. Salter, W. A. Pantin, and H. G. Richardson eds, Formularies Which Bear on the History of Oxford, c. 1204-1420, 2 vols, Oxford Historical Society, n.s. 4. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942) II, pp. 331-450.
25. Henry Ellis ed., Original Letters Illustrative of English History, 3 series (London, 1824-1846; rpr. New York: AMS, 1970) especially vol. I of each series.
26. Malcolm Richardson, "The Dictamen and its Influence on Fifteenth-Century English Prose", Rhetorica 2 (1984) pp. 207-26.
27. Examples include what are obviously student exercises, e.g., PROC 47/34/13.
28. Described in David Parker, The Commonplace Book in Tudor London (New York: University Press of America, 1998).
29. F. Douce ed., The Customs of London; otherwise called Arnold's Chronicle; containing, among divers other Matters, the celebrated poem, The Nut-brown Maid (London, 1811) pp. 102-20.
30. H. G. Richardson, "Letters of the Oxford Dictatores", II, p. 331.
31. Carol S. Meale, "The Compiler at Work: John Colyns and BL MS Harley 2252", in Derek Pearsall ed., Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983) pp. 82-103.
32. Muriel St Clare Byrne ed., The Lisle Letters, 6 vols (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981). The originals are mainly in PRO SP 3/1-18.
33. See Byrne's edition, vol. 1, pp. 101-2.
34. BL Egerton 2713, etc. Very little scholarly use seems to have been made of this large collection of family papers extending from the early sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Volume I, for example, covers 1509-1598 and contains 511 items.
35. Calendar of the Manuscripts of . . . Lord Sackville, 2 vols, ed. A. P. Newton and F. J. Fischer, Historical Manuscripts Commission, no. 80 (London, 1940) no. 1966.
36. Thomas Madox ed, Formulare Anglicanum; or, a Collection of Ancient Charters and Instruments of Divers Kinds (London, 1702).
37. Lawrence Green, in the new edition of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (forthcoming).
38. Malcolm Richardson, "Rhetoric and Power in the Late Medieval Epistle", presented at the conference of the ISHR, Saskatoon, Canada, 1997.
39. Tzvetan Todorov, "The Origin of Genres", New Literary History 8 (1976) pp. 159-70, p. 164;
40. also printed in his Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp. 13-26.
41. M. Camargo, Medieval Rhetorics, cit. in n. 3 above, p. 34.
42. J. H. Baker, The Third University of England: The Inns of Court and the Common-Law Tradition (London: Selden Society, 1990) p. 9.
43. Malcolm Richardson, The Chancery under Henry V, pp. 56-71.
44. Martin Camargo, "Putting Rhetoric in its Place: Turf Wars in Fifteenth-Century Oxford", paper read at the ISHR conference, Saskatoon, 1997.
45. R. L. Storey, "The Gentleman-Bureaucrats", in Cecil H. Clough ed., Profession, Vocation, and Culture in Later Medieval England (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982) pp. 90-129.
46. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, p. 244;
47. Camargo, Ars dictaminis, p. 18.
48. Francis de Zulueta and Peter Stein, The Teaching of Roman Law in England Around 1200, Selden Society, Supp. Ser. 8 ( London, Selden Society, 1990) p. xvii.
49. The first part of the quotation is from Walter Pullman, Law and Politics in the Middle Ages (London, 1975) p. 99, and the second from Zulueta, p. xiv, the immediate source of the Pullman quotation.
50. William Patt, "The Early Ars dictaminis as a Response to a Changing Society", Viator 9 (1978) pp. 133-55, p. 151 and n. 73.
51. Zulueta, The Teaching, p. xxii.
52. C. T. Allmand, "The Civil Lawyers", in Profession, Vocation, and Culture, cit. in n. 36 above, pp. 155-58.
53. Virginia Cox, "Ciceronian Rhetoric in Italy, 1260-1350", Rhetorica 17 (1999) pp. 239-88 (pp. 253-56), shows how the ars dictaminis, for all its limitations, was generally suitable for oral delivery in Italian courts and municipalities.
54. Nicholas Pronay, "The Chancellor, the Chancery, and the Council at the End of the Fifteenth Century", in H Hearder and H. R. Loyn eds, British Government and Administrative Studies Presented to S. B. Chrimes (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1974) pp. 87-103.
55. The concept of "genre" is of course common in rhetorical studies. Of studies most applicable to this essay, for example, it is a key concept in Ward, Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion and Commentary (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995) where the major chapter divisions are "Definition of the Genre" and "Evolution of the Genre".
56. Genre theory since the Romantic era is summarized most recently by David Duff, editor of Modern Genre Theory (New York: Longman, 2000) pp. 1-24.
57. For example, Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas Huckin, Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1995);
58. Charles Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article Scientific (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988)
59. and Constructing Experience (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994);
60. and, perhaps most influential, John Swales, Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
61. and Carolyn Miller, "Genre as Social Action", Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984) pp. 151-67
62. reprinted in Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway eds, Genre and the New Rhetoric (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994) pp. 151-67.
63. Cox (p. 241) calls the ars dictaminis a "vocational instrument", while Brian Vickers likewise emphasizes the practical nature of dictaminal training in Italy (pp. 234-35). Something similar might be said of the surviving artes dictaminis, i.e., that they are textbooks rather than manuals for working practitioners. The actual documents created by practitioners may be seen in, for example, Rymer's Foedera.
64. Berkenkotter and Huckin, Genre Knowledge, p. 4.
65. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 26.
66. For example, Tzvetan Todorov, "The Origin of Genres", cit. in n. 31 above, especially pp. 160-61.
67. H. R. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, Theory and History of Literature, no. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) p. 108.
68. Duff, Modern Genre Theory, p. 7.
69. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990) p. 20.
70. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, p. 106.
71. An exception is certainly Ward, who observes in Ciceronian Rhetoric that Renaissance rhetorical training "actually continues the incomprehensible mindlessness of medieval education and prepares the Renaissance student for that brand of fluent docility applauded in the proliferating and increasingly tentacular courts of the Renaissance period" (p. 168).
72. Hubert Hall, A Formula Book of English Official Historical Documents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), especially I: nos. 176, 177, 185, and elsewhere;
73. and his Studies in English Official Historical Documents (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908) p. 273.
74. Harmer, Anglo-Saxon Writs, cit. in n. 2 above, for example, pp. 61-73.
75. Hall, Formula Book, I, p. 153.