Magic and Rhetoric from Antiquity to the Renaissance: Some Ruminations

Author(s): John O. Ward

Source: Rhetorica, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter, 1988), pp. 57-118
Published by: University of California Press
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 John O. Ward

Magic and Rhetoric From Antiquity to the

Renaissance: Some Ruminations

he conjunction of magic and rhetoric, proposed in recent

1 years for certain periods or social situations between
_I Graeco-Roman and Renaissance times, promises inter
esting insights into both authorized social and intellectual power
structures during that epoch (the intellectual, institutional and
procedural world of "licensed" school, Studium, magister, summa,
auctoritas, facultas, disciplina) and unauthorized ones (the intellectual
world of the literate courtier or secular cleric, notary, practicing
professional in the market-place). The interplay between these
structures has not received the attention it deserves in our cultural
histories, and the very nature of unauthorized structures has to
some extent been obscured by the lack of validation accorded them
by the orthodox or dominant institutions and structures of their
day. Hence the present enquiry seeks to chart some aspects of
the history of rhetoric as, on the one hand, "control" and, on the
other, as "unreason" or "irrational
disruption," and to examine the
circumstances in which the latter, including magic, appeal to differ
ent individuals and groups. In the background of my enquiry is the
cultural history of Western Europe, seen either as a progression
from the rhetorical humanism of antiquity, through the dialectical
scholasticism of the medieval period, to the revived rhetorical hu
manism of the Renaissance, or as the advent of a "modern," "ra

? The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Rhetorica, Volume VI,
Number 1 (Winter 1988)

57
 58 RHETORICA

tional" cultural mentality (c. 1050 A.D. onwards) an

superseding
archaic, superstitious, ritual culture (c. 500-1050 A.D.). It is not my
project here to comment directly upon these dichotomous se
quences, but I hope that my enquiry will both and
complicate
enrich them.
A starting point is provided by Jacqueline De Romilly's Magic
and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece.1 De Romilly proposes a link between
magic and rhetoric thus: apat? or "illusion," is the aim of rhetoric; it
is also the aim of magic. "Anything that is irrational and deprives
you of lucidity is witchcraft, "goet?ia."2 All arts of illusion are "goe
t?ia," including rhetoric, Plato argues in the Republic.3
De Romilly also contrasts two conceptions of rhetoric. First,
rhetoric as magic: logos or speech as a "great lord" (dunast?s megas),
as (entheos epoidos), as "magical
"divinely inspired enchantment"
power" (dunamis), as "sorcery" (go?teia), to use Gorgias' terminol
ogy. Second, rhetoric as techn?: "rules, mode, way of gaining some
particular end." The first notion of rhetoric is that put forward
by
the sophists, especially Gorgias, for whom the magical, poetic,
rhetorical, musical power of language was the only reality.4 The

Cambridge, Mass., 1975. The original version of the present paper was deliv
ered as the Borchers Lecture in Communication Arts at the Third Biennial Meeting
of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Madison, Wisconsin, 1981.1
would like to thank Deirdre Stone, David McRuvie, lulian Holland, and Conal Con
dren for intelligent comment on various drafts. A random selection of reviews of De

Romilly's book reveals little to my purpose: Rev. des Et Grecques 91 (1978), p. 217; Rev.
de Philol. 51(1977),p. 281; Class. Journal 74(1978-79), pp. 170-71; Revue Belge de Philol.
56(1978), pp. 442-43, where we are reminded that for Gorgias too, rhetoric was a
techn?; Richard Enos, Philos, and Rhet. 10(1977), pp. 199-202, remains unconvinced
that rhetoric-as-magic is magical. In the present rewriting of my paper, somewhat
shortened for publication, the lines of the original remain, but I have fur
thought
ther about its themes, particularly in connection with literature that has appeared
since 1981.
2Ibid., pp. 26-27, 30.
3Ibid., p. 31.
4M. Untersteiner, The Sophists, trans. K. Freeman (Oxford, 1954), pp. 107, 119
(for the homogeneity of rhetoric, poetry, music, and the parallel with medicine),
128, etc.; Nancy Stuever, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970),
pp. 10-15, esp. p. 13: "Gorgias compared the power of words to that of drugs which
could induce either health or sickness/7 There is much of value on the two concep
tions of rhetoric here inMichael Leff, 'The Frozen Vic
expressed Image: Sulpicius
tor and the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition/' (Ph.D. diss., University of California,
...
1972.) For Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, 2.4, "Poetry is nothing else but rhetori
cal composition set to music": A. Preminger, O. B. Hardison, K. Kerrane, eds., Clas
sical and Medieval Literary Criticism, Translations and Interpretations (New York, 1974),
Magic and Rhetoric 59

second notion represents Aristotle's neutralization of rhetoric as

magic, his denial of the centrality of logos, and his demotion of
rhetoric to the status of one among many skills, the skill of observ
ing and mastering the persuasive factors that any situation pre
sents, with no privileged status in regard to factual reality. The link
between the first of the above conceptions of rhetoric and magic
does not, in Plato's eyes at least, preclude a link between magic and
"reason." Paradoxically, perhaps, against the "magic" of rhetorical
illusion, Plato placed the Socratean "magic" of "reasoning and dis
cussion, when devoted to the search for truth." However, the ar
gument between Plato and Gorgias, continues De Romilly, was not
so much a conflict between the magic of Socratean reasoning and
attitude towards "the deceiving . . . the
the Gorgian power of style
choice and arrangement of arguments which could create at will
any kind of emotion," as itwas a conflict about the nature of techn?,
or "lucid knowledge." Thus, it centered on such issues as whether
Gorgias' description of rhetoric as a techn? was valid, or whether
medicine was analogous to rhetoric. In his search for some certain
ties in the world of flux and perception, Plato almost succeeded in
the "arts of illusion" from the canon of arts.
banishing legitimate
Out of this quarrel between plausibility and certainty emerged
the notion of rhetoric as a legitimate techn?, purged of its magical,
illusory associations.5 This rhetoric emphasized "the reasoning on
which the proof rests,"6 as opposed to "irrational means" of gain
ing approval, which are "unscientific and [have] nothing to do with
the real techn?."7 With Aristotle, rhetoric acquired "the safe and
unquestionable quality of theoretical knowledge;" it emerged as a
techn? to Plato's own art, dialectic,8 "a full grown
legitimate parallel
techn? with respectable companions, including dialectic, ethics and
politics."9 Rhetoric was no longer Gorgias' rhetoric. It had "gained
in lucidity," it had been promoted "toward reason and austerity."

p. 434. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Sprat, in his History of the Royal Society of
London ascribed occultic superstition to Homer, Vergil, Ovid and linked it
actually
with humanism, poetry and ancient philosophy, B. Easlea, Witch Hunting, Magic,
and the New Philosophy (Harvester, 1980), pp. 4, 212.
5De Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric, p. 55, and earlier, p. 37. For useful back

ground,
see Helen North, "Inutilis sibi, perniciosus patriae: a Platonic Argument
Against Rhetoric," Illinois Classical Studies 6 (1981), pp. 242-71.
Sophistic
6De Romilly, p. 60.
7Ibid., p. 59.
8Ibid., pp. 60-61.
9Ibid., p. 65.
60 RHETORICA

"The magic of speech, the magic of style no longer had a place in

the new rhetoric"10 of the fourth century B.C. The theorists of that
century "had disregarded the irrational impact of oratory, the poet
ical strangeness in style, and any reliance upon inspiration. They
had made a choice."11 "The defence of rhetoric as techn? had meant
a divorce from its seductive and attractive marvels."12
Two comments on De Romilly's argument must be permitted at
this stage. In the first place, it seems clear that the opposition she
outlines is in essence one that has been commented on in a number
of forms?perhaps most lucidly by Samuel Ijsseling in his Rhetoric
and Philosophy in Conflict.13 It amounts to the acceptance, or non
acceptance of a different order of reality for and
language "things:"
at one end of a sliding scale, to so speak, lies language as a medium
of technical communication, with as few eddies and coruscations
as emanating from its own substance and existence. At the
possible
other end of the scale lies linguistically induced hypnosis, where
audience impact is inseparable from and integrally bound up with
the form and delivery of the language itself. One could mention as
an illustration, Richard Lanham's "serious" view of reality, involv
use of and a "rhetorical" view, involving
ing "ordinary" language,
literature, poetry and rhetorical prose.14
Second, De Romilly's examination of Aristotle's "magic-less"
rhetoric15 makes clear that what is at stake is control of discourse
within "rational bounds." This notion of control of discourse?
rhetoric as techn? (distinct from the older Gorgianic or pre-Gorgianic
notion of rhetoric as magic)?will emerge in medieval culture as a
dominant element in the struggle between different groups for
control of knowledge.
In her final chapter, De Romilly advances the thesis that the
more one emphasizes the "irrational power and impact" of speech,
"the more one may be prone to acknowledge irrational powers in
other fields as well."16 In the first and second centuries A.D., the

10Ibid., pp. 65-66.

"Ibid., p. 70.
^Ibid., p. 66.
13The Hague, 1976.
14
The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric and the Renaissance (New York, 1976).
Cf., too, Eco's notions of "uncercoding" and "over-coding," U. Eco, A Theory of
Semiotics (Indiana U.P., 1979), pp. 133ff.
15De Romilly, pp. 70-75.
16Ibid., pp. 69-70.
Magic and Rhetoric 61

period chosen by De Romilly to study the return of "magical rheto

"
a revival of magic . . . the
ric," there is evident magic of the magos
and of the sacred healer, the Pythagorean . . .Even
magic. among
and rhetoricians we find several people accused of practic
sophists
"The sophist Aristides was an adept in . . . sacred
ing magic."17
magic."18 Rhetoricians such as Longinus long "for high style and
the magic of speech" and move closer to the notion of enchantment
ecstasy and irresistible power in sublime speech; the rhetors of the
Asian influenced "second sophistic" went further in the direction
of rhetoric?as magic: "With a revival of the irrational in life and
thought came a revival in the attempt to restore to speech its irra
tional impact and power."19 The "Asianism" of the second sophis
tic "reveals, in the full light of history, an obstinate longing toward
something that had been lost for several centuries under the weight
of overintellectual methods," a which amounts to an as
longing
pect of the "struggle between the spell of the irrational and the de
sire to master it by means of reason," a struggle which "could . . .
be followed not only in Greek and Latin prose . . .but in all litera
tures and at all times."20
Ages, De Romilly seems to imply, move between one tendency
and the other,21 but it is not until her own day that she feels the
exact reversal of Aristotle's "rationalism" has come about, and a
full return to Gorgianic or pre-Gorgianic . . .
"magic and inspi
ration" can be spoken of. Today, "writing has become a sacred
and mysterious operation; the words themselves seem to haunt
the writer, like magic formulas coming from nowhere. Ultimately
people say that language itself is the real speaker. Both the author
and his subject-matter are, so to speak, absorbed by its irrational
domination."22 Rather surprisingly, De Romilly continues, rhetoric
has come in for a revival ("a new rhetoric"23), in a far
though

17Ibid., pp. 76, 81.

18Ibid., p. 77.
19Ibid., pp. 79, 84.
20Ibid., p. 85.
21
Cf. Ibid., p. 88, "The pendulum oscillates from one excess to the other."
^Ibid., pp. 86-87.
23Ibid., p. 87; cf. Ch. Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities (Reidel,
1979); R. Barilli, Po?tica e Retorica (Milan, 1969-1984), pp. 5-38; W. B. Horner, ed.,
The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Rhetoric (U. of Missouri
Contemporary
Press, 1983); J.O. Ward, "Artificiosa Eloquentia in the Middle Ages." (Ph.D. Diss.,
Toronto, 1972), ch. I.
 62 RHETORICA

broader sense than that in which Aristotle understood the art. In

fact, "classical rhetoric is treated as obsolete ... as obsolete as faith
in the very transparence and objectivity of language."24
Such a presentation of trends in twentieth century modernism
and culture generally is not without a certain resonance. Not
only
is ours in some senses the age of "deconstruction," of a "Diony
sian" reversal of the nineteenth century "Appollonian" construc
tion of positivist/empiricist, "rational" certainties in the arts and
sciences, but it is an age in which some have detected an
alarming
rise in interest in the supernatural. The contemporary Australian
poet A. D. Hope, for example, refers to

The increase of superstitions and superstitious practices masquerad

as sciences. of nonsense like
ing Dying pieces astrology, numerology,
black magic, and witchcraft, which one would have expected towither
away with the increase of knowledge and the spread of education,
have a new lease of life and new sorts of nonsense like Scien
gained
tology have been springing up. It is as though many people were no
longer able to tell the rational from the absurd because they don't
want to. nonsense to sense. . . .The real crisis of this
They prefer age,
I believe, lies not in any specific problems such as the atom bomb or
overpopulation or the destruction of the environment but in the fact
that the greatest adventure of all time, the adventure of reason, is now
threatened its own a to re
by partial success?by growing tendency
treat now into barbarism.25

Another contemporary critic writes:

man, tortured ... turns to new

Contemporary by self-consciousness,
cults and therapies not to free himself from obsessions but to find
meaning and purpose in life, to find something to live for, precisely to
embrace an obsession, if only the ma?tresse of itself. . .
passion therapy

24De Romilly, p. 87.

25Quoted in David Tribe, The Rise of theMediocracy (London, 1975), p. 53. See
also Allan Megill's remarks on the implications of Foucault for the contemporary

historiographical project, Journal ofModern History 51(1979), pp. 451ff, and Journal of
the History cf. too B. Stock in New
of Ideas 48(1987), pp. 117-41; Literary History
5(1974), pp. 527-47. On the "disappearance see Foucault,
of the author,"
Language,
Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed., D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca,
1977), pp. 113ff; and on the influence of Nietzsche, Megill (JMH as above, pp. 471ff ).
On the "deconstruction" of scientific see The Dancing Wu-Li
positivism, Gary Zukav,
Masters, An Overview of theNew Physics (Fontana, 1984). The furor created by Edward
Said's Orientalism (1979) is perhaps a measure of our age of "deconstruction."
Magic and Rhetoric 63

the hero of a recent novel renounces free choice and lives to

according
the dictation of dice. . . .Whereas earlier to substitute
ages sought
reason for arbitrary dictation both from without and within, the twen
tieth century finds reason, in the debased contemporary form of
ironic self-consciousness, a harsh master; it seeks to revive earlier
forms of enslavement. The life of the looks in our own
prison past
time like liberation itself.26

The of the present paper is not the validity or social sig

theme
nificance of these statements, nor even the accuracy of De Romilly's

presentation of the nature of Gorgianic and Aristoteleian rhetoric.

Rather it is the significance for medieval and Renaissance cultural
history in the West, of her assertion first that a os
chronological
cillation between a tendency to view rhetoric as magic and a ten
dency to view it as techn? is demonstrable in history from the time
of Gorgias to that of Victorinus, and, second, that an oscillation to
wards rhetoric as magic is accompanied by a broader cultural inter
est in the "irrational." Iwish to ask specifically whether such os
cillations can be detected in medieval and Renaissance cultures,
whether they are in any sense chronological, whether they are
"epoch wide" or class/group specific, and whether they enrich or
sharpen our appreciation of cultural change in these periods. I thus
hope to comment usefully on a threefold convergence of topics that
enjoy some currency: the nature of the twelfth century and Italian
"Renaissances,"27 the nature of rhetoric,28 and the historical dimen
sion of an interest in magic and witchcraft.29 The links among all
three need underlining and comment beyond what is so far to be
found in the literature.

The Culture of Narcissism: American an

26Christopher Lasch, Life in Age of Dimin
ishing Expectations (New York, 1979), pp. 178, 258; M. Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft,
and Cultural Fashions. Essays in Comparative 1976), pp. 58ff dis
Religions (Chicago,
cusses the occult of the 1960s and 1970s, and pp. 52, 63-64 sees revolt
explosion
against "the establishment" expressed through it.
27The bibliography here is enormous, but note Warren ed., Renais
Treadgold,
sances Before the Renaissance (Stanford, 1984).
28See note 23 above, and James J.Murphy, La Retorica nel Medioevo, trans. V.
Licitra (Liguori, 1983).
29
See, for example, my reviews of recent work in Journal of Religious History
13(1984), pp. 92-113, 14(1986), pp. 218-222. Among the misprints in the former ar
ticle, the following should be noted as after
seriously affecting comprehension:
"against" in second last line of text, p. 107, add "heretics Cathars), or the
(especially
pattern of accusation against."
64 RHETORICA

II

Our first step is to examine De Romilly's assertions a little more

closely and critically. Aristotle's "clearance," his reduction of rheto

ric to techn?, is in a sense an over-intellectualized approach to the
subject, appropriate to the institutionalized environment of an

"academy," with its concern for "truth" and "certainty," its insula
tion from the conditional world of the market-place, its lack of in
terest in the "subjective," the "emotional," the "irrational," in
"magic."30 How is it, then, that "even among sophists and rheto
ricians [under the Roman Empire] we find several people accused
of practising magic?"31 No answer is given by De Romilly other
than to point to the Asian origin of the second sophistic32 and to
suggest the causal primacy of "a revival of the irrational in life and
thought" which in some unannounced way precedes and predeter
mines the oscillation of the pendulum in the specified direction.33
One of the initial difficulties, therefore, of De Romilly's thesis is
that it is cast in terms of an entire culture, with no indica
simply
tion of any mechanism that might explain changes of attitude or
one way or the other.
mentality
We are therefore left in search of factors which may account for
the oscillatory peaks of rationalism and irrationalism indicated by
De Romilly in her survey. Some initial groundwork here may be
established a consideration of what, in the medieval and Re
by
naissance context, may be meant by rhetoric as magic and rhetoric
as techn?.
In somerespects the distinction is that between "theory" and
the ars considered "intrinsically," as a body of precep
"practice,"
tive lore, and "extrinsically," as a certain set of discursive prac
tices.34 Thus, we might define rhetoric/ techn? in such way as to
focus interest on such texts as the Ad Herennium and Cicero's De

^R. McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York, 1941), p. xiv, and as an
illustration, Aristotle's discussion of dreams, pp. 618ff.
31De Romilly, p. 76.
32Ibid., p. 82.
33Ibid., p. 88.
34
Victorinus, on Cicero's De inventione in Rhetores Latini Minores,
Commentary
ed. C. Halm (Leipzig, 1863), p. 170; and cf. discussion in Viator 3(1972), p. 254 etc.
See George Kennedy's remark in his review of De Romilly (C/ 74, above note 1,

p. 170).
Magic and Rhetoric 65

inventione, the rules of dictamen, the ars poetriae, the ars predicandi
and the theory and classification of the colores, and define rhetoric/
magic so that it indicates a primary interest in Ciceronian periodic
prose style, the composition of poetry, letters and dialogue, the
practice of oratory and other practical embodiments of rhetoric.
The distinction between the two, however, must be a blurred one,
for in any period in which a sudden upsurge of interest is detect
able in the art and practice of rhetoric, a concern with the acqui
sition of a rhetorical capacity (i.e., the rules) must surely pre
cede any demonstration of this capacity in practice.35 This will
be even more certainly the case in a culture where literate dis
course takes place in an artificially promoted and culturally anach
ronistic language such as Latin in medieval and Renaissance cul
ture, where access to literacy in the vernaculars was initially at least
via the anachronistic language, and where widely known and
accessible praecepta for acquiring rhetorical skill existed in the same
anachronistic language.36 In fact, we may be tempted to associ
ate rhetoric/magic with oral performance or primitive
specifically
cultures, and rhetoric/ techn? with standards of verbal performance
as set by writing and literacy. Plato, in his Ion, specifically associ
ates rhetoric/magic with the poetic utterances of rhapsodists "in a
state of inspiration . . . a spirit not their own"37 and
possessed by
the link with primitive societies is suggested by some recent an
thropological research.38 The concept of the poet as a divinely in
spired prophet-seer is not absent in medieval and Renaissance
culture: John of Salisbury asserts in a well-known passage that "po
etry is the cradle of philosophy" and much of the inspiration be
hind the Latin cosmological poetry of the twelfth century derives
from the belief that poetry by its allusive metaphoric, illusionistic
nature can approximate better to truths that cannot be framed

35See, for example, on Gerbert of Rheims, J. J.Murphy, ed., Medieval Eloquence

(U. of California Press, 1978), p. 45; and on Adalbero of Laon, G. Duby, The Three
Orders, trans., A. Goldhammer (U. of Chicago, 1980), p. 44ff.
36Cf. the discussion in E. Breisach, ed., Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiog
raphy (Kalamazoo, 1985), p. 133.
37Plato, Ion, ed., A. D. Lindsay, Five Dialogues of Plato Bearing Upon Inspiration
(London, 1910), pp. 6-7 ?533-534. See C. M. Bowra, Inspiration and Poetry (London,
1955), especially p. 10. De Romilly, pp. 4-13.
381 refer here to the unpublished research of Raechelle Rubinstein on Balinese

poets such as Ida Pedanda Made Sidemen (d. 10/9/1984).

 66 RHETORICA

in lucid prose. This is also an essential insight of the Renaissance

humanists.39

Thus, a workable line of approach for medieval and Renais

sance cultures may well entail an association between rhetoric/
techn? and "control," and on the other side, an association between
rhetoric/magic and "emotional power." "Control," exercised by
and through officially authorized classes, professions, texts, disci
plines, implies restriction of persuasive rhetorical capacities to ap
proved channels; emotional "power" implies both the disruption
of rational preceptive systems that derives from the incantatory,
metaphoric, poetic mode,40 and the challenge to authorized classes
and disciplines that derives from traffic with occult systems, in par
ticular those areas of occult systems regularly proscribed by au
thorized groups and persons within the period. There is here both
a difference of "interpretive strategies"41 and a difference of socio/
vocational position: we may expect the practitioners of rhetoric/
magic to be less well rewarded by the cathedral school/proto
universitasl' universitas-studium system of benefices and more depen
dent upon miscellaneous court patronage; a measure of free float
ing between these two cultural environments is not impossible for
individuals, but texts will be characterized by one rather than an
other. A close link between the fortunes of rhetoric and magic can
be expected precisely because rhetoric as a form of "control" devel
ops as a counter to rhetoric as a threat to the kind of knowledge
that "control" has a vested interest in; so too does the clerical attack

39Iohn of Salisbury, Metalogikon 1.22, trans. D. D. McGarry (U. of California

Press, 1982), p. 63; cf. R. McKeon, "Poetry and Philosophy in the Twelfth
Century:
The Renaissance of Rhetoric," Modern Philology 43(1945-46), pp. 217-34, reprinted
in Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern, ed., R. S. Crane 1952),
(Chicago,
pp. 297ff. For the humanist upon poetry and metaphor as "truth," see E.
emphasis
Grassi, Heidigger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism (Binghamton, 1983), espe
cially pp. 29, 57, 71, 76.
40
"It is here that the gap between poetry and oratory (rhetoric/ techn?) becomes
most because so much poetry is notoriously unclear." M. Murrin, The Veil
apparent,
1969), p. 8. On metaphor as par excellence the distur
of Allegory (Chicago/London,
bance of the established between outer sign and meaning,
"prosaic" relationships
see Renate Lachmann in P. Steiner et al., eds'., The Structure of the Literary Process
1982). Vergil's was an
(Amsterdam, Philadelphia, epic "polyvalency" important leg
acy to the medieval and Renaissance practitioners of allegorical, poetic, rhetoric/

magic: Murrin, The Allegorical Epic (Chicago/London, 1980), pp. 19ff.

41See B. Stock in New Literary History 16(1984-5), pp. 27-28.
Magic and Rhetoric 67

on sorcery, demonology, and witchcraft derive from the threat

such views of the power of the sorcerer imply for the clerical estab
lishment's control of the supernatural. An interest in what is de
scribed in authorized discourse as the irrational will characterize
those seeking to nullify the power of the "free" rhetor and sor
cerer, just as itwill characterize the rhetor and the sorcerer them
selves, and where the power struggle between these groups is
most intense, there will our conjunction be most obvious. An inter
est in rhetoric as magic stimulates an interest in rhetoric as techn?,
in rhetoric as mode of control, and the interaction serves to focus
attention on the irrational on the part of both practitioners and
controllers. The location of the free rhetor and the sorcerer in the
same sociological context (courts, dependency, the margins of es
tablishment society) and an inevitable focus upon rhetoric as the
major resource of polemical vocabulary complete the convergence.
A further point must precede a fuller exposition of these
themes. Ifwe posit on the one hand an "objective" order of things
external to a person observing or experiencing such things, and, on
the other, a "subjective" order of things, a register of explicit or im
or sense impressions in the mind, then a text
plicit cogitations
(whether letter, history, summa, or other) will lie
speech, poem,
somewhere between the two. It represents for us, today, the only
access we have to the order of things in past times. It represented
for contemporaries in those past times an ordered manifestation, a
"realization," fixing, a transmission of some aspects of
welling-up,
the order of things, a conjuring up for the specific purpose of trans
mitting, at a moment in time, an aspect of the order of things. The
text may function "minimally" that is, in such way as to transmit
"things" as efficiently as possible, or itmay impede transmission,
arrest the would-be decoder, waylay him/her in the opacity of its
own texture. In the first instance the text can throw its emphasis
upon either order of things, as it draws upon a shared code, or set
of previously agreed upon rationes?rules of proceedure, defini
tions of terms, in regard to the interpretation of the order of things?
accepted by writer and putative audience. Such a situation will
exist where writer and audience are linked by institutional valida
tion; that is, they circulate within an environment where an estab
or system of
lished institution, discipline, thought, has sorted out
and instilled in advance some agreed rules of communication. On
the other hand, where the cohesion of group and shared classifi
68 RHETORICA

cations, rules, or is weak, the text becomes a tour

procedures42
de-force guaranteed only by the charisma of its author or the par
ticular attractiveness of its presentation, or the mystic promise of
"occult" knowledge for which, again, the writer is the chief guar
antor. However viewed in detail, the "opaque" text represents an
intensified act of imposition of self upon the disorder of event and
a creating act. The important aspect
reality; it is personal, unifying,
of magic and the occult for this paper is that it represents a particu

larly forceful imposition of self; it offers the possibility of a mastery

over nature and the future as a result of individual or personal
knowledge and skills acquired and guaranteed by the writer. This
is a possibility denied to the Christian priest who ismore of a help
less executor through established rituals, or an observer of the will
of God. Mastery of rhetoric offers similar possibilities to those
offered by magic and the occult. The point is underlined when we
remember the touchiness of medieval Christianity towards the sec
ular arts of language and science: too great a reliance on the "self
service" aspects of the secular arts threatened the acquisition of sal
vation and grace which were at the disposal of God alone, working
through his clerical hierarchy on earth. Dante's Virgil and Beatrice
a as did the Liberal Arts
represented compromise here, portal of
Chartres Cathedral and St. Augustine's simile of plundering the
Egyptians.43 I would suggest, therefore, that the ultimate signifi

42
Readers
may recall here the notions of "grid and group" in the writings of
see D. in History
Mary Douglas; Oldroyd of Science 24 (1968), pp. 145-71, and Eco's
notions of "overcoding" and "undercoding"?above note 14.
43
Viator 3(1972), pp. 243-44; Augustine, De doctrina Christiana 11.40.60, trans.
D. W. Robertson, Ir. (New York, 1958), pp. 75-76. In the late antique "secret dis
course on the mountain of Hermes to his son Tat," F. Yates, Giordano
Trismegistus
Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
(London, 1964), pp. 28f, it is stated that "truth" can
not be perceived the senses: it can be known the effects of its and
by only by power
for example, a and known,
energy, by "conjoining" of knower sign and signified.
or "rational"
By contrast the scholastic, unrhetorical, "reasoned" interpretive strat
an external can be
egy works by disjoining, by positing reality that perceived by the
senses. Inherent, therefore, in Hermetic discourse, is closer assimilation between
man and God (truth) than is permissible to all but the most mystically oriented
members of the orthodox medieval catholic a
community. Memory represents
powerful aid to the conjoining of knowerand known, which may explain its signifi
cance for the rhetorical/occult (see below note 188). Note H. Caplan,
project Of Elo
quence (Cornell, 1970), p. 226 for a late antique rhetor who trained his pupils in
mnemonics by the aid of Chaldaean magic! More extensively, F. Yates, The Art of

Memory (Penguin, 1969), pp. 54-57,130-133.

Magic and Rhetoric 69

canee of the link between rhetoric as magic and magic itself is that
both to individuals and classes located outside or on the
appealed
of the intellectual or establishment for whom the
margins political
urge to subordinate the flux of phenomena to the creative self as a
focus of meaning was rendered urgent by their possession of liter
ary skills and by the social consequences of their location outside or
at some distance from the center of intellectual or political power.44

Conversely, for those located closer to the center of shared clas

sification systems, text or discourse assigns, allocates, divides and
classifies, parcels up, "controls." Rhetoric/ techn? provides limited
access for to the arsenal of language persuasive
approved purposes
tricks and constructs, assists the devising and circulation of a view
of magic as heresy and of witchcraft as the work of the devil (a pro
claimed loser to God)45 and insulates by safe classification, assign
ment, and condemnation.
To summarize the proposal of my paper, therefore, I aim to pur
sue in brief, suggestive outline, the notions of rhetoric as techn?, as
control, and of rhetoric as magic, as surrender, and to explore the
links between both and a broad interest in what is termed "the irra
tional," from late antiquity to the Renaissance. I do so not to sug
gest so much the oscillation between one age and another that I
take to be De Romilly's leading idea, as to suggest the somewhat
more sinister between groups, between and
struggle orthodoxy
heterodoxy, between authorized (validated, legitimated) discourse,
and unauthorized (or self-authorized) discourse, between insiders
and outsiders, winners and losers. The fact that in certain periods
we may be more conscious of the discourse of rhetoric as magic
may suggest not that such periods were or were not this or that,
but that within such periods a particularly acute struggle can be de
tected for control of discourse, a
struggle which gave unauthorized

44
See Norbert Elias' emphasis upon "self-detachment" and "self-conscious
ness," discussed at the end of the present paper. On the "Renaissance man" as

magus and "medieval man" as spectator, see Yates (above note 43), pp. 104,110,144.
Mircea Eliade (above n. 26), p. 65 links occultism and humanism. There are also in

teresting remarks on witchcraft as a

"primitive vocabulary of individualism," rheto
ric as analogous to magic, and the verbal element in both in K. Burke, A Rhetoric of
Motives (New York, 1950), pp. 40ff.
45
See Peter Brown, "Sorcery, Demons, and the Rise of Christianity: From Late

Antiquity Into the Middle Ages," in his Religion and Society in the St.
Age of Augustine
(London, 1972), pp. 119-46, esp. p. 135 and R. Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials their
Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300-1500 (London, 1976).
 70 RHETORICA

discourse temporarily greater profile in the corpus of literary traces

surviving from the periods in question.

Ill

I proceed now to illustrate my theme in two ways. In the first

way I look at my theme with an upon the
synchronically, emphasis
ways in which rhetoric/ techn? functions to control, upon analogies
with the exercise of control in the areas of magic and other "irra
tional" arts, upon links between magic and certain conceptions or
functioning modes of rhetorical discourse, upon the ways in which
the clerical caste exerted control in the period, upon the socio
vocational areas in which an interest in and
rhetoric/magic magic/
the irrational/the occult develops. In the second way I return to
a more chronological or diachronic perspective, to illus
explicitly
trate my first way, and to summarize what is left of De Romilly's
approach as itmay be seen to apply to the medieval and Renaissance
periods.

The Synchronie View

At the outset, itwill be immediately apparent to the observer

how the medieval church periodically proscribed not only sorcery,
divination, and beneficial magic, as a threat to the power of saints
and clergy,46 but also other sources of irrational persuasion or
power, such as art, rhetoric, and polyphony. The condemnation of
rhetoric is perhaps most explicit in St. Augustine's De doctrina Chris
tiana. There Augustine addresses himself not to rhetoric in its less
harmful guise of techn? (an art for summing up possible persuasive
elements in a situation) but in its alluring and pleasurable guise of
ornamented and artistic discourse. Augustine recommends careful
of verba cultiora,47 advocates a "more modest
neglect eloquence,"48
and equates eloquentia and suavitas with dementia;49 gravitas and

^See J. B. Russell, Witchcraft in theMiddle Ages (Ithaca, London, 1972), ch. 3,

and for example Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks, trans. L. Thorpe (Penguin
Books, 1974), pp. 484-85.
De doctrina Christiana, ed. J. Martin,
47Augustine, Corpus Christianorum Series
Latina 32 (1962), p. 132 line 2 of IV. 10.24.
^Ibid., p. 138 line 28 of IV. 14.31.
49Ibid., p. 137 line 16 of IV. 14.30.
Magic and Rhetoric 71

pietas on the part of the speaker are worth more than the art of the
orator; rhythmic clausulae threaten gravitas. Augustine's notion of
the grand style is not a matter of complex classical periodic sen
tence structure with classical word order and variation in clause
a matter
length, not of complex colores like homoeoptoton, parono
masia, continuatio, gradatio, conversio, complexio, traductio,
exclamatio,
contentio, correctio, etc., but rather a matter of simple, forceful com
binations of devices like repetitio (used frequently, with simple
words like ecce, in, per, an, qui) and isocola involving very short
sermo humilis has thus excluded many of the
phrases.51 Augustine's
resources of rhetorical discourse, and the metaphor of the woman
using cosmetics as an insult to God is employed to suggest the dis
placement of stylistic grandeur in favor of clear statement of ap
proved content.52
Rhetoric thus, like use of the occult, represented a threat to
a clerical of minds and knowledge. This latter aspect
monopoly
emerges clearly in the attitude of twelfth century intellectuals to
sciences such as astrology. Magic commonly embraced astrology in
the medieval perspective,53 although certain writers in the period
were at pains to point out that only the radical edges of astrology,
where a concentration on foretelling restricted free will, were magi
cal.54 John of Salisbury,55 whose commitment to the primacy of elo
quence lined him up against the more scholastically minded of his
objected to astrology not on the grounds that
contemporaries,56
much of itwas invalid, but on the grounds that it tended to "exceed
the bounds of reason" and encouraged the astrologer to infringe
the powers of God in claiming knowledge of the signs, powers,
courses, places, and times of the stars. Oneiromancy, he said, was
an "irrational" art, unlike the liberal arts which had their "source in

^Ibid., pp. 138 and 148.

51See Martin (above n. 47), p. 149, lines 125ff.
52Martin, pp. 155-56.
53L. Thorndike, A History ofMagic and Experimental Science (New York, 1929), II

pp. 973ff.
54
cen
Cambridge Medieval History VIII, ch. 22. Curiously, in the mid fourteenth

tury, when lohn Ashenden wished to stress the "respectable" side of astrology (as
distinct from magic, necromancy,
geomancy, etc.), he urged the shunning of ver
(Thorndike, n. 53 above),
III, p. 334.
bosity
55Policraticus (below n. 187), pp. 118ff.
11.19. See Carey
56Cf. lohn of Salisbury, Metalogikon 1.1, trans. McGarry, pp. 9-12 etc., and
G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology (Oxford, 1980), pp. 46ff, for twelfth century
emphasis upon a dialectical and rhetorical method for theology.
72 RHETORICA
nature and
their development in experience and reason."57 The
oneiromancers were those vouchsafed this power by
only genuine
God. What John was protecting here is the source of oc
approved
cult knowledge (the Bible), the class dedicated to its cultivation (the
clergy), and the systems of knowledge elaborated to explain it (the
exegetical and liberal arts). Thus, an addiction to the occult could
be proscribed as an attempt to manipulate or anticipate natural
means use of rituals and devotion
by to lore proscribed by the ec
clesiastical/monarchic power structure of late antique and medi
eval Europe.
John's concerns in this regard are evident enough in his thir
teenth century scholastic successors. These too express a basic an
tipathy to the idea that rhetoric, like sorcery, can or should, have
any autonomous effects on our minds of
persuasive independent
the "things" to which words refer, and which can be controlled by
scientia vera. It was no anomaly for them that magic could be de
fined in terms of its rhetorical features, in terms of the peculiar, ir
rational, rhetorical power that words, symbols, and rituals have in
summoning supernatural powers or mo
producing supernaturally
tivated developments. Bert Hansen58 notes as one of the distinctive
features of magic its use of words and symbols to produce effects
that do not appear logically or discernibly related to the words and
symbols themselves. This circumstance set scholastics like Thomas
and William of Auvergne a problem, as indeed it did Mar
Aquinas
tin Luther. Thomas believed that "words, in so far as they signify
something, have no power except as derived from some intellect."
William of Auvergne, a thirteenth century Paris theologian, argued
"that if spoken words possessed [magic power] they must derive it
either from the material of which they are air, or from
composed,

57Iohnof Salisbury, Polieraticus, trans. J. B. Pike, Frivolities of Courtiers and

Footprints of Philosophers (Minneapolis, 1938; repr. 1972), p. 86. On oneiromancy and

see et al., ed., Aspects de laMarginalit? au
its place, Guy H. Allard Moyen Age (Mon
treal, 1975), pp. 126-27.
58Bert Hansen, "Science
and Magic" in Science in theMiddle Ages, ed. David C.

(University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 484, 487-88. See also R. S. Kins
Lindberg
man, ed., The Darker Vision of the Renaissance: Beyond the Fields of Reason (University of
California Press, 1974), pp. 102-03. De Romilly points out that once an author be
came fascinated itwas hard to draw lines dividing
by the irrational power of speech,
the occult from the "glamour of (poetic/oratorical) inspiration" (p. 70, cf pp. 14ff).
F. Yates, Giordano Bruno (above n. 43), pp. 104ff notes the importance of incanta
tions, and rites for occultic doctrines (the Cabala, Neoplatonism, Hermeti
hymns,
cism, etc.).
Magic and Rhetoric 73

their form, sound, or from what they signify."59 Not, note, from
their effect on the minds of auditors, or from the many rhetorical
resources discussed from the time of Gorgias. In other words, the
essentially "rhetorical" aspects of magic were alien to the northern
scholastics, with their emphasis upon dialectic and the duality of
reality and language; magic must take its effect from the powers
invoked rather than the words themselves (Thomas), or from
something intrinsic to the substance of the words themselves
rather than from their rhetorical effect on an audience (William). So
too, in the same period, the Aristotelian scholastic mentality?ac
cording to many?and the Catholic Church itself, denied to the
sorcerer any independent power, ascribing all effects of sorcery to
the devil (rather than to the art or the practitioner).60
The attitude
scholastic towards "word power" and sorcery is
understandable for the very reason that "word power" is so impor
tant a part of magic. There is, after all, no extra-verbal guarantee
of the efficacy of the magician's powers beyond the degree of hyp
nosis?of self or other, or both?induced by the formulas, in
cantations and rituals. Even in man's relationship with God, rhe
torical invocation plays a major part. Anselm of Canterbury's novel
eleventh century prayers are highly rhetorical,61 and William of
Auvergne himself wrote a special treatise on the rhetorical art
of prayer, called the Rhetorica divina. This work opens: "In sacred
or sacred-related practices, the dignity and superior excellence of
speech is clear to all who are able and willing to see it. The first
reason for this is simply that every sacrifice, every blessing, every
oath and everything that is done ceremoniously in divine worship,
is either in the form of speech or is carried out through speech or is
completed in speech."62 William goes on to stress the need for con
tinual prayer and dips into the rules of classical rhetorical theory to
provide a systematic guide to prayer. William's interest in the rhe
torical aspects of invocation is matched by his interest in the irra
tional and the occult: Lynn Thorndike in his History ofMagic and

59Thorndike (above n. 53), II p. 352.

aJ. B. Russell (above n. 46), pp. 142-147; Ch. Hopkins, The Share of Thomas Aqui
nas in the Growth of theWitchcraft Delusion (Philadelphia, 1940); Kieckhefer and Brown

(above n. 45).
61R.W. Southern, St. Anselm and His Biographer (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 41ff.
621 translate the opening
from of the Rhetorica Divina in the Paris 1674 (reprint,
Frankfurt, 1963) edition of William's Opera Omnia I, pp. 336ff. Cf. Untersteiner
(above n. 4) p. 128: "The term 'epoid?' is ritual, in that it expresses the words of
a prayer is fortified."
magic power with which, for instance,
74 RHETORICA

Experimental Science allocates him thirty-three pages,63 a not incon

siderable allocation?more, for example, than Frederick II's cour
tier Michael Scot, famed for his knowledge of magic and the occult,
receives.
In the late Middle Ages the same situation prevails. The strong
est castigators of the occultare the later medieval northern univer
sity theologians, whose cast of mind and profession predisposed
them against rhetoric in any guise. This was the very class that was
in large part responsible for later medieval fascination with the
power of Satan in society, for Satan was "deified" as a more man

ageable alternative than the unfathomable and unpredictable power

of the autonomous sorcerer. The tide of interest in witchcraft in the
later medieval period has thus much to do with the growing plu
ralism of society and the threat to the social and intellectual mo
nopoly of the clergy that this presented. Where this pluralism was
more deeply rooted, in later medieval and early Renaissance Italy,
for example, there rhetoric as magic and an interest in all aspects of
sorcery and magic surface strongly.
There are three further compelling reasons for the strong asso
ciation between the medieval clerical castes and magic and rheto
ric, between rhetoric as control (with cross reference to discourses
to control magic and the "irrational") and rhetoric as
seeking
magic/disruption. In the first place, both rhetoric and magic flour
ished among the learned class of this period, because both were
bookish sciences, replete with elaborate systems, tables, concor
dances, and lore.64 There is, in fact, a desperate, umbilical relation
ship between practitioners of magic and practitioners of eloquence
in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
In the second place, we need to note the metaphorical consis
tency between the methods of rhetoric and those of the occult arts.

Astrology, alchemy, and divination relied greatly upon analogies,

correspondences, correlations, and "sympathies" between adja
cent parts. For example, Venus influences the working of copper
since both the goddess and the mineral ore derived originally from
The whole art of divination was a matter of recognizing
Cyprus.65

^Thorndike (above n. 53), pp. 338-71.

64Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 8 (Cambridge, 1936), p. 676.

n. on in
65Lindberg (above 58), p. 493 "analogies" astrology; Ch. Trinkaus, "The
Cosmos and Rhetorical Culture of Giovanni Gioviano Pontano," Re
Astrological
naissance Quarterly, 38 (1985), pp. 450ff.
Magic and Rhetoric 75

useful concordances and coherencies between different orders of

symbol and reality. Oneiromancy, according to John of Salisbury,66
provides the clearest analogy with the processes of rhetoric: dreams
present signs standing for something else, that is, in the language
of the rhetorical colores, translatio (Ad Herennium 4.34.45). Rheto
ric and poetry get much of their effect from metaphor and me
tonymy, from the association and contrast of things and ideas, and
from evocations not normally so associated or contrasted. Nicolas
Oresme, court scholar to Charles V in fourteenth century France,
university theologian and bishop, says that the rules of astrology
are founded upon "poetire et sus rethorique, c'est a dire, sus fables
et sus persuasions" which cannot, he says, be accepted in natural
science.67 It is perhaps not purely coincidental that the friars of the
mendicant orders, so closely associated with the medieval ars predi
candi and its rhetorical techniques of amplificatio, should have been
"the chief producers . . . codifiers and of alchemy to the
purveyors
Latin West."68

My third reason
for associating the clerical caste, rhetoric as
control of magic and the
(and control "irrational"), and rhetoric as
magic/disruption is a fundamental and closely connected one.
Edward Peters already has observed that magic in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries was considered a peculiarly volatile threat to
the intellectual dominance of the clergy.69 We have here almost a
matter of professional a class. The most literate sec
jealousy within
tions of the clergy, those most affected by, and responsive to, the
evocative power of language in its most elaborate form (classical
Latin) were the ones most interested in magical phenomena and
the ones most responsible for determining the literary form with

"Policraticus II, 15-16, trans., Pike, pp. 75ff.

67G.W. Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers: A Study of His 'Livre De Di
Coopland,
vinations' Mass., 1952), p. 87. Bonaventure considered that "maledicta
(Cambridge,
curiosita," characterizes "rhetoricians, philosophers, mathematicians, astrologers,
alchemists, grammarians, and canon "Curiosity"
lawyers." is appropriate in fields
or the outcome
where reality is unknown, inquiry uncertain
of (information from
Professor E. Peters after the delivery of his paper to the 1981 meeting of the Medieval
an Idea").
Academy of America: "Curiositas: the Medieval Shape of
68E. H. Duncan, "The Literature of Alchemy and Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's
Tale: Framework, Theme and Characters," p. 635. In general, see
Speculum 43(1968),
B. Vickers, ed., Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984),
p. 9.
69
E. Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the haw (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press,
1978), ch. 2.
 76 RHETORICA

which such phenomena should be described. As a consequence,

the class most in charge of "word processing," so to speak, plays a
crucial role in the depiction of the newly threatening phenomena
of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. Anselm of B?sate is a good ex
ample of his class: dictator in the chancery of the German ruler
Henry III in the eleventh century.70 Historians?most of them
trained in rhetoric?also fall within this class: Guibert of Nogent,
William of Malmesbury, Ralph of Coggeshall, William of New
are among our most important sources for the occult in the
burgh
twelfth century. Literate courtier-administrators like Walter Map
and Gervase of Tilbury similarly stand out.71 These members of the
clerical-administrator class used all the resources of language to
build up a picture of sorcery, magic, and proto-witchcraft that is far
more a rhetorical presentation of an anti-force than it is a chronicle
of facts. Not only, then, was the lore of magic learned and bookish
our first
by nature, and hence open only to the literate in Latin, but
picture of the occult in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is to a
extent an elaborate rhetorical fiction.
large
A further consideration is relevant here. There is considerable
evidence that the earliest practitioners of heresy and the occult
to have drawn the enraged fire of the clerical establishment in
the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries were themselves
clerics. The first major outbreak of "Manicheanism" in the medie
val West occurred among the canons of the Church of the Holy
Cross at Orleans in 1022 A.D.72 An earlier recorded heresy, c. 970
A.D., at Ravenna, involved a certain Vilgard, a devoted classical
scholar in literature who began to put himself and his knowledge

70Ibid., and cf. H. E. J. Cowdrey in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 23(1972),

pp. 115ff.
71
On both classes of writers, see the sources marshalled inW. L. Wakefield and
A. P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (Columbia University Press, 1969), and
E. Peters, A. C. Kors, eds., Witchcraft In Europe: a Documentary 1110-1700
History
(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972). Nancy Partner, Serious Entertainments: The

Writing of History in Twelfth Century England (University of Chicago Press, 1977),

pp. 66-67 discusses William of Newburgh's "rational" rejection of Geoffrey of Mon
mouth on Merlin and divination, but reveals in ch. 5 that William had a sizeable
interest in the supernatural. For William of Malmesbury, dreams an
play important
part in his history. See, for example, pp. 102-03, 157, 344 in the translation by I. A.
Giles of his Gesta Regum (London, 1847) and pp. 175ff for his stories about Gerbert of
Rheims and magic.
^Wakefield-Evans, pp. 74ff.
Magic and Rhetoric 77

above that of the local clergy and to usurp their role. The monastic
chronicler who tells us of the episode, Ralph Glaber, says Vilgard
was visited by demons in the likeness of the poets Vergil, Horace
and Juvenal?a very neat equation between magic and rhetoric!73
In this connection, we need to note that many of the most learned
scholars of the Middle Ages acquired a reputation for sorcery: Dun
stan, Gerbert of Rheims, Thierry of Chartres, Abelard, and Dante,74
to name but a few. Most episodes of heresy that we know of stress
the above-average ability of the heretics to communicate, to "ap
pear learned," to engage in learned disputes, to know the pro
cesses and failings of the clerical profession.75 Tanchelm, an
early
twelfth century priest or monk in the Low Countries, "preached in
hidden places and in bedrooms, upon rooftops and delivered his
sermons in the open fields"?people on his words.76 If we
hung
run the outbreaks of heresy described in the classic source
through
book for the period, Wakefield and Evans' Heresies of the High
Middle Ages, our picture is strengthened: the Trier heretics of the
first quarter of the twelfth century were priests; Arnold of Brescia
was a Paris educated abbot, clerics formed the entourage of a num
ber of heretics, one heretic pretends to be a deacon, another was
called a bishop, and yet another was an ex-monk.77 Although many
heretics were not and did not pretend to be clergy, or literate, the
phenomenon of the heresiarch was sufficiently close to their own

73Ibid., p. 73. For recent of both episodes, see B. Stock, The Im

interpretation
plications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the 11th and 12th
Centuries (Princeton, 1983), 93ff.
^Cambridge Medieval History VIII p. 667; Thorndike (n. 53 above) I p. 773, II
pp. 119-20; William of Malesbury, Gesta Regum 11.10 (trans. Giles?above n. 71?

175ff), ed. Stubbs (Rolls series, London, 1887) I pp. 193ff and cf. p. lxvi; N. M. Har
ing "Thierry of Chartres and Dominicus Gundissalinus," Medieval Studies 26(1964),
p. 278. Note also the case of Roger Bacon: W. H. L. Ogrinc, "Western and
Society
Alchemy from 1200-1500," Journal ofMedieval Studies 6(1980), p. 107.
75Wakefield-Evans, pp. 72, 83ff, 87, 96, 98-99.
76Ibid., p. 98.
77Ibid., pp. 105, 112, 114, 128, 125. We might
146ff, cite, by way of illustration,
William of Newburgh's description of Eon de l'Etoile: "eratque per diab?licas praes
tigias tarn potens ad capiendas animas ut, ex muscis ara
simplicium tanquam
nearum irretitis, seductam sibi multitudinem . . . ludificatione
opere aggregaret
daemonum ita dementatus ... vir . . . idiota . . . diab?lico,
pestifer spiritu plenus
astutia tarn multos seduxerat. . . fretus numero," C. John
praestigiali sequentium
son, ed., Selections From the Historia Rerum Anglicarum of William of Newburgh (Lon
don, SPCK, 1920), pp. 16-19; for English translations, Wakefield-Evans, 143ff.
78 RHETORICA

stereotype to alarm members of the clergy and to attract accusa

tions of magic and occult practices. The great moot ground be
tween cleric and heresiarch was the right and ability to preach, and
access to learned descriptions of ancient heresies, such as gnosti
cism and manicheanism. Since both cleric and heresiarch had a
similar view of and reliance upon language and learning, were
often drawn from similar social classes, and occupied similar posi
tion in society, the fascination of one for the other is understand
able, and mutual polemic can be expected; the clergy seek to blacken
the heresiarchs with accusations of heresy, knowledge of the occult
and insanity; the heresiarchs attempt to blacken the clergy with
charges of departing from the canonical clerical mode of apostolic
poverty. In this connection the heretic felt the priest enjoyed power
without responsibility. In the same way the priest often accused
the laity of the same thing. In both cases exclusion from the power
structure of the day was the operative stimulus.
Our understanding of the common social context of magician
and rhetorician can be deepened by consideration of recent work
on courts and the social environment associate
anthropologists
with the production of witchcraft accusations. Peter Brown in a re
cent influential article, entitled "Sorcery, Demons and the Rise of
Christianity: From Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages"78 has pro
posed a close relationship between power and magic at the time of
the sorcery accusations of the mid-fourth century recorded in the
pages of the Roman historian, Ammianus Marcellinus. At this pe
riod in imperial history we have, says Brown, a situation in which
legitimate authority and the formal power system are weakened by
tension between the palatini, the imperial courtiers of humble ori
gin, and the senatores, the ancient, established, part pagan class of
traditional wealth and education. In consequence of the competi
tion for power caused by the rapid rise of the new bureaucracy of
the military emperors, both palatini and senatores fear magical at
tacks on their power and resources; both have recourse to accusa
tions of involuntary (internal) magic and (external) controlled magic
involving spells, curses, charms, formulas, potions, and invoca
tions. Brown, using the writings of the sociologist Mary Douglas,
locates the actual practitioner of sorcery in "interstitial" areas of

78
n. 45 and my
See above critique of Brown's article in "Witchcraft and Sorcery in
the Later Roman Empire and the Early Middle Ages," Prudentia 12(1980), pp. 93-108.
Magic and Rhetoric 79

the social structure?weak areas in between power systems (for ex

the wife in a tribal society that emphasizes the power claims
ample,
of males, or the outer margins of the various clientage systems
within the power structures of both palatini and senatores). There is
a close link between rhetorical education and the possession of "in
formal" power on the part of the senators. The palatini use the sor
cery accusation against the senators as their way of demanding a
check against the informal power and the wealth seen to accrue
from the rhetorical skills and social connections of the senators.
The great Antioch orator of the day, Libanius, actually links his
rhetorical abilities to the presence or absence of sorcery
nullifying
them.79 Sorcery is thus a kind of anti-rhetoric. In fact, both sorcery
and rhetoric are funds of "informal" power which become volatile
when "formal" power structures become fluid. This fluidity lasted
beyond the fourth century A.D. into the early Middle Ages; it is no
accident, for example, that the same class of senators (in their later
guise as became an influential mediator class in Ger
bishops) early
manic society, when formal power structures were completely in
flux. Their power in Merovingian society was founded upon ex
actly the same informal base that drew accusations of sorcery upon
the senators in the later Roman Empire. Thus, expectedly, the epis
copal class from time to time drew upon itself accusations of sor
cery from the palatini of the early Middle Ages.80
Brown's scenario provides a precise sociological locus for the
occurrence of the link between magic and rhetoric proposed by De
Romilly for late antiquity. It is extremely significant that, according
to Peters,81 similar circumstances recur in the twelfth century. The
court environment of the twelfth century A.D. represented a re
turn of the type of environment that characterized sensitive areas

79A.Momigliano, ed., The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth

Century (Oxford, 1963), p. 116.

of Tours, History of the Franks (giving book and chapter common to
^Gregory
all editions and translations?then page number in the translation by L. Thorpe,
Penguin books, 1974); I.5(p. 71), 1.25 (p. 84), IV.16 (p. 212), IV.28(p. 223), IV.40

(p. 235), V.5-6 (pp. 409-12), VII.44(pp. 426-27), IX.6(pp. 483-87), 491
IX.10(pp.
94), 523-26). The case of the Prefect Mummolus (VI.35,
IX.36-38(pp. p. 365),
a
though not involving bishop, should not be ignored in the present context: Mum
molus "often received from (Parisian housewives who) confessed that they were
witches . . . and potions which were to bring him into the good
unguents supposed
favour of the King and Queen ..."
81
cf. n. 69 above.
 80 RHETORICA

within the fourth century Roman Empire. The court had become
the new center of power; the formal position of the older aristoc
racy was under threat from upstarts who commanded literate and
occult resources useful to rulers seeking to establish and retain
large bureaucratic power systems.82 Competition for favor in the
new environment of the court83 encouraged classical conditions for
the flourishing of witchcraft accusations?a descent from what
describes as the high classification social profile to
Mary Douglas
the "small group" social environment, in which "we have social
units whose external boundaries are clearly marked, whose inter
nal relations are confused and which persist on a small scale." In
these units, "we should look for the active witchcraft type of cos
. . .here . . . the a clear external
mology body politic tends to have
boundary and a confused internal state in which envy and favour
itism flourish and continually confound the proper expectations
of members." "In a community in which overt conflict cannot be
contained, witchcraft fears are used to justify expulsion and fis

82cf. C.Erickson, The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception (New
York, 1976), p. 119: "Eager to find loyal servants not driven or
by personal dynastic
ambitions, twelfth-century kings sought advisers in men of low birth, and raised
them to power over the heads of the great vassals of the realm. Thus the son of a
London merchant, Thomas Becket, became chancellor and then archbishop in the
court of Henry II: earlier in the century of Salisbury rose from humbler ori
Roger
at the court of Henry I. Perhaps the most rise from
gins to prominence spectacular
to power came in the France of Louis VI, where the Garlande
obscurity family
to take over every major . . ." It is thus no
threatened post at the Capetian court.
accident that those whom Walter Map in the second half of the twelfth century A.D.
describes as "the sons of rustics," in contradistinction to the nobility, seek social
clerical education. See my comments in L. O. Frappell, ed., Prin
mobility through
and Estates 1979), p. 67. Also F. L. Cheyette, "The In
cipalities, Powers, (Adelaide,
vention of the State" in B. Lackner and K. Philip, eds., Essays onMedieval Civilization

(Univ. of Texas Press, 1978). For a contemporary reference to "Christiani" educating

their sons lucrum," see A. ed., Commentarius in
"propter Landgraf, Cantabrigiensis
e schola Petri Abaelardi 1939), p. 434.
ep?stolas Pauli (Notre Dame,
83Erickson writes again most pertinently (p. 129): "Courtiers of all ranks were
uncertain allies; even the most exalted of them had weaknesses which threatened to
cloud their lord's rule." Writing to Becket, Arnulf of Lisieux described the mentality
of his at the English court with their "disturbed ambition," their competi
colleagues
tive natures, and their perpetual "Their minds squeezed in torment," he
jealousy.
wrote, "their constant aim is to improve their own situation by worsening that of
others, and their usual weapon is hypocrisy. Desperate for praise, anquished by the
they must nonetheless the semblance of gaiety
attention paid to their rivals, keep
their good cheer and kind words were not to be trusted. Tear the sud
(hilaritas);
den of the applauders/ Arnulf advised Becket, 'and the sweet songs of
laughter
adulation.'"
Magic and Rhetoric 81

sion. These are communities in which authority has very weak re

sources."84 Such a court environment divorces words from reality
(flattery) and encourages resort to the occult and rhetoric as the
two major reservoirs of "informal" power. Both practitioners of the
occult and rhetors (dictatores) come from the same social group,
the marginal, disestablished, unestablished or partially established
elements operating within the gravitational field of the power cen
ters of the day (the courts). Both constantly fluctuate between posi
tions of close intimacy with those centers and banishment to the
perimeters, continually drawing the fire of the landed aristocracy,
continually levelling the bitterest accusations at each other.85 It is
this fluid, mobile, literate class in the twelfth century, with its com
mand of rhetoric, classical Latin writings and the liberal arts, that
both provides the image of the sorcerer for the period and delivers
the occult goods that those who participate in the power game
want: oneiromancy, astrology, alchemy, notarial, dictaminal and
administrative skills.
The Count of Flanders, as we learn from the notary Galbert of
Bruges' account of his murder in 1127, lost his life because he culti
vated low-born litterati such as the notary Fromold. In the atmo
sphere of favouritism and competition for administrative positions
that surrounded the Flemish court at this period, sorcery and spell
casting are found. Spells are even cast upon God to ensure suc
cess.86 Ranulf Flambard, the lettered chaplain and right hand man
of William Rufus in England, the son of an obscure priest, was?

^Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 87-88, 138,
139-40.
85 as could be new
From such groups derive, anticipated, departures in the

genre of "Hofkritik," for the courtiers who drew the fire of the litterati were often
the very providers of "occult" or informal influence and power most to
analogous
the (rhetorical) resources of the litterati themselves. See the work of R. Kohn on
Peter of Blois, a trained rhetor, perhaps even the author of a treatise on dictamen:
"Militia Curialis: die Kritik am geistlichen Hofdienst bei Peter von Blois und in der
lateinischen Literatur des 9-121/h," Miscellanea Mediaevalia ed., A. Zimmerman Bd.
12/1 Soziale Ordnungen im Selbstverstandnis des Mittelalters (Berlin/N.Y. pp. 227-57.).
Also C.S. The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of
laeger,
Courtly Ideas (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 54ff, 176ff. Too close an equation between the
twelfth and late antiquity may mislead, as I have indicated in my review of
century
Brown (above n. 78). The informal/formal dichotomy is not only group-specific;
what is "formal" to one is "informal" to another, but needs to be qualified by refer
ence to Mary later writings.
Douglas'
86Cf. J. B. Ross, trans., The Murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, by
Galbert index s.w. "Fromold" and "Sorcery."
of Bruges (New York, 1960),
 82 RHETORICA

according to R. W. Southern87?"the first man of ignoble birth in

English history to climb from the bottom to the top of the social
scale by the backstairs of royal administration." The instrument of
his social ascent was rhetoric?he was the skilled pleader or placita
tor, or king's advocate in local court cases involving royal affairs. He
rose to be Bishop of Durham, but, as a court parvenu, attracted
witchcraft accusations. (Contemporaries record the claim that his
mother was a witch.)88 The contemporary Count of Soissons, ac
cording to Guibert of Nogent, sought his innermost advisers from
heretics guilty of occult practices.89 Stephen, minister of Anjou for
Henry II, consulted a diviner to protect himself from in
possible
quiry into his administrative irregularities following Richard I's re
lease from captivity.90 William of Newburgh, who tells the story,
assumes that divination was a service easily available for a fee and
that demons were quite willing to cooperate with diviners. Thomas
Becket consulted an aruspex and a chiromancer.91 The clergy in the
retinue of Aude, in the Venice IV version of the Song of Roland, are
the experts in oneiromancy, and their service is valued. William
Ruf us remarked that monks "dream for money."92 William of Tu
dela, a Spanish courtier, chapel clerk and magister, learned in ad
vance through geomancy, according to the Chanson de la Croisade
Albigeoise,92 of the devastation that the Albigensian crusades would
bring. Archetypical courtier-rhetor-occultist figures from the same
period down to the time of Dante include the following individu
als. Michael Scot, quoted repeatedly in a fifteenth century medieval
commentary on the Ad Herennium,94 was a courtier for Frederick II

87R. W. Southern, "Ranulf Flambard," Medieval Humanism and Other Studies

(Oxford, 1970), ch. 10.

^Ordericus Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History 10.18, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall (Ox
ford, 1975), pp. 312-13, trans. Th. Forrester (London, 1854), III p. 281. According to
Orderic Ranulf was "sollers et facundus."
^Wakefield-Evans (above n. 71), p. 102.
^Partner (above n. 71), p. 133.
91Thorndike (above n. 53), p. 167.
92See the Venice IV version of the Song of Roland, ed. R. Mortier, Les Textes de la
Chanson de Roland(Paris, 1940-44) II (1941), p. 141 line 4885, p. 142 line 4942 "Li clers
"Li mastre ... Li de gramancie." On
fu sage," p. 139 lines 4800ff Amagin. capell?n
Rufus: William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, trans. J.A. Giles and ed. Stubbs (Lon
don, 1847), IV. 1, p. 345, (1889), II, p. 378.
93E.Martin-Chabot, ed., (Paris, 1960), I pp. 3-4.
Misc. 7 (S. C. 19483), s.xv. fols. Ir et
WMS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon.
rhetorical and occultic works are frequently found in
seqq. Dictaminal, together
later medieval manuscripts.
Magic and Rhetoric 83

and an expert in astrology and alchemy.95 Arnold of Villanova was

a lay alchemist, astrologer, oneiromancer, legist, preacher, physi
cian, specialist in incantations, ligatures and other magic devices
and served popes and monarchs in the time of Boniface VIII.96
Ceceo d'Ascoli was an accomplished astrologer, poet and scholar
in the liberal arts, who became official astrologer to Charles of Cal
abria and was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition in Florence in
1327.97 Peter of Abano was a Lombard university scholar in Dante's
day, a physician to popes and a reputed expert in magic, astrology,
and necromancy.98 Raymond Lull represents the courtier-rhetor
occultist par excellence. A familiar, at various times in his life, of
the courts of Aragon, France, Cyprus, Rome and elsewhere, Lull
developed a logic designed to establish in written form a
language/
universal, logical, systematic representation of all things. His aim
was to provide a unique, memorable, demonstrative control system
for (Christian) knowledge that would allow the exercise of power
over the infidel and "non-believers." His writings on rhetoric
and his reputation for occult knowledge complete the picture of a
courtier-rhetor-occultist, of one who?at least later in his life?
sought to rulers and their courts in a direction favor
manipulate
able to his impassioned projects, rather than to take service in such
courts.99 We are told that the service of such figures was a common
feature of monarchies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.100

95L. Thorndike, Michael Scot (Edinburgh, 1965), chaps. 10, 11, 12.
%H. C. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of theMiddle Ages (London, 1888) III, 52ff;
Thorndike II, ch. 68.
97Lea (n. 96 above), 441ff; Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, p. 677. Dante corre

sponded with him (see below). Thorndike II ch. 71. See I.N. in
Stephens, "Heresy
Medieval and Renaissance Florence," Past and Present 54(1972), p. 33.
%Lea, p. 440; Cambridge Medieval History VII p. 674; Thorndike II, ch. 70.
"See I. N. Hillgarth, Ramon Lull and Lullism in Fourteenth
Century France (Ox
ford, 1971); Selected Works of Ramon Lull 1232-1316, ed. and trans. Anthony Bonner
(Princeton, 1985); Lull's Rethorica Nova will be found in MS Paris BN lat. 6443c fols.
95va-109va.

100J.Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods: theMythological Tradition and Its Place
in Renaissance Humanism and Art (New York, 1961), p. 52; (above n. 67) for
Coopland
Master lean de Dons, a celebrated of Padua, in the pay of the Count of
astrologer
Vertus, mentioned by Phillippe de Mezieres. Thomas, the father of Christine de
Pisan, was official to Charles V. See Ch. lourdain, "Nicolas Oresme et les
astrologer
astrologues de la cour de Charles V," Revue des Questions 18(1975),
Historiques
pp. 136-59, who contrasts the flourishing of judical astrology at the Valois court
with its official proscription at the court of Louis IX. Charles V was
Capetian very
keen on astrology and kept a was considered a subject of great im
large library. It
portance at his court. This situation Oresme to attack it. lourdain uses
inspired
84 RHETORICA

The often discussed spate of sorcery accusations associated

with the papal and the French royal courts in the fourteenth cen
tury involves many such figures. Accusations of sorcery or divina
tion were aimed at rulers (kings, queens, popes), and there were
allegations concerning the practice of occult arts by members of the
clergy (cardinals, bishops, papal clerks, priests, abbots, Domini
cans and Franciscans), court favorites (Piers Gaveston, favorite of
Edward II), royal counsellors, advocates, chamberlains, treasurers,
courtiers, and episcopal servants.101 Among the least clerical would
have been a figure like Enguerrand de Marigny, chamberlain to
IV, whose wife and sister were accused of sor
Philip employing
cery. Enguerrand derived from a middling family many members
of which were in the clerical profession. Although neither an intel
lectual nor a jurist, he had a basic instruction in literacy, left letters
in French, was of "cultivated and intelligent" spirit and was de
scribed by contemporaries as "a beautiful and subtle speaker."102
Certainly, as has recently been the court of Phillip
proposed,103
would have had great use for the service of such courtiers skilled in
verbal and written eloquence, particularly if?as many of them
must have done?they a command of sorcery, witch
professed
craft, and ritual magic. The affair of the Templars, for example,
would not have been possible without courtiers possessing such a
complex of skills. Writing, perhaps with a later court in view,
Nicholas Oresme describes astrologers, alchemists, and oneiroman
cers as rhetorical con-men out to persuade princes and patrons of

sources other than Oresme's Divinacion and that Oresme's

supposes intimacy with
Charles and his own critical view of astrology indicate that in reality Charles did not

place faith in astrological predication.

101
W. R. Iones, "Political Uses of Sorcery in Medieval The Historian
Europe,"
34(1972), pp. 670-87. W. Anderson, Dante theMaker (London, 1980), pp. 226-67;
Margaret Harvey, "Papal Witchcraft: the Charges Against Benedict XII," Studies in
Church History 10(1973), pp. 109-116; A. R. Myers, "The Captivity of a Royal Witch:
the Household Accounts of Queen Joan of Navarre 1419-21," Bull, of the John Rylards

Library 24(1940), pp. 263-84; F. D. Mathew, ed., "The Trial of Richard Wyche," En

glish Historical Review 5(1980), Montague Summers, trans., Malleus Maleficarum (Lon
don, 1928); my review of P. Partner, "The Murdered Magicians," Journal of Religious
13(above n. 29); Hilary Science, and Society, ed. P. Curry,
History Carey, Astrology,
and Brewer (1987), pp. 41ff, has charted the growing appeal of astrology to
Boydell,
later medieval English and French kings.

102Jean Favier, de Marigny, un conseiller de le Bel (Paris, 1963),

Enguerran Philippe
chap. 1, esp. p. 17.
103See Journal of Religious 13 (above n. 29), pp. 108-10.
History
Magic and Rhetoric 85

their powers irrespective of the truth.104 More specific is Claude

assertion that alchemy was the resort, not of the common
Gagnon's
man, but of usurers and other evil-doers . . . certain intel
"thieves,
lectuals of the avant-garde . . . fascinated
by the theoretical postu
lates or certain positive results conveyed by the alchemical prac
tice." "The alchemist was therefore kept within the interior of the
walls of the city but he received no fixed status. He was condemned
to float in the margin of the hierarchy of social classes as money
a
floated at the stock-exchange, considered by some as master, by
others as an artisan, by still others as a gangster; by others, finally, as
a of the classe silencieuse (b?rgern).105
good, devout bourgeois
The new race of dictaminal specialists occupy the same socio
logical position as our occult suppliers of non-established power.
The dictator es are an aspirant class, often of humble social origins.
Their milieu is the court and chancery; their aim is to promote their
science as the queen of sciences, as the guide to
"paradise and to
the very fount of human intelligence and knowledge."106 Like the
wielders of occult science, they promise a magic, the magic of
speech or document composed according to rules of the cursus and
capable of persuasion irrespective of the truth of the contents; they
offered the incantatory power of the word. Their science exploded
eventually into a variety of rhetorical manifestations of which the
most promising are represented by the career and writings of Dante
and his teacher Brunetto, who combine a mastery of rhetorical and
astrological lore.107

104Coopland (above n. 67), pp. 91, 97,109.

105
Allard (above n. 57), pp. 151-54; Mary Douglas, Cultural Bias (London, 1978),
pp. 48-49, notes that low grid societies (societies in flux) are prone to the invention
of a "new medium" to enable individuals to "get ahead." Such a medium could take
the form of revolutionary ideas, or humanism, or
Christianity, or artistic innova
tion, or rhetoric, or dictamen.
Specialists in the new medium are sometimes usefully
termed an "intelligentsia."
106H.Wieruszowski, Politics and Culture inMedieval Spain and Italy (Rome, 1971),
pp. 372-73.
107Wieruszowski, pp. 543, 540:
Brunetto Latini is called by commentators
within five years of Dante's death
"optimus astrologus, phisica et moralitate prae
clarus" and by Villani, "summo maestro in rettorica, tanto in bene sapere dire come
in bene dittare." Anderson (above n. 101), pp. 304-05: Dante his poetry
"writing
out of his own reverses, with the humanists, the condemna
mystical experience"
tion of poetry in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, that poetry deals with
asserting
"things that, because of their basic lack of truth, cannot be grasped reason
by
(whereas) theology pertains to those truths which are above reason." Anderson,
86 RHETORICA

Thelinking of alchemy and rhetoric in this fashion is no mere

product of the twentieth century imagination. According to Aelius
"six centuries after the Gorgias . . .Hermes
Aristides, [was] sent
Zeus to offer mankind . . . rhetoric:"108 This Hermes, dubbed
by
"thrice great" and equated with the Egyptian God Thoth by the Ro
man devotees of mysticism, alchemy, and neoplatonism, came
down to the twelfth century A.D. as the author of much occultic,
pseudo-alchemical, neoplatonic lore, and was regularly referred to
in that century as the teacher of Cicero in the art of rhetoric.109 The
very "Alanus" (of Lille?) to whom is commonly ascribed an impor
tant Ad Herennium commentary, written, according to conventional
wisdom, at the end of the twelfth century, wrote a much earlier
work, replete with occultic, alchemical code language, in which he
tells us that the sentence "God is an intelligible sphere of which the
center is everywhere, the circumference nowhere" is an enriching
treasure of Egyptian wisdom, "altiloqua philosophi tuba, que. . . .
altioris th?ologie ausa est secreta intonare;"110 the sentence is at
tributed to Cicero rhetor "for here is the great rhetor Tullius, who,
as he shone forth with the flower of human so he thun
eloquence,
dered forth with the loftier words of theology, saying ..." (and the
sentence follows). The sentence cannot, of course, be attributed to
Cicero?it is found in the Liber XXIV Philosophorum attributed in
some manuscripts to Hermes Trismegistus, is twelfth century and
associated with the Porretan (theological) school?but the ascrip
tion does indicate the close link between rhetoric and "alchemical"
lore that existed in the minds of many during the central Middle
Ages.
With the rich interweaving of rhetoric and magic that prevailed
during the Middle Ages thus established, I proceed now to illus
trate the theme of my paper from a more strictly diachronic view
point, a more to the
viewpoint appropriate, perhaps, suggestions
made by De Romilly in her last chapter.

pp. 114ff, and cf. chap. 1: "One of the most important characteristics shared by the

poets of the dolce stil nuovo is the attention they paid to their visions and dreams."
On links between love, magic, and poetry in the writings and imagination of Dante
and on the poet's "rhetorical realism," see Anderson, pp. 78, 50-51.
108De Romilly, pp. 79-80.
109See Yates (above n. 58), chap. I; Fowden (below n. 113); and for example, MS
Oxford, Corpus Christi College 250 f. 9ra line 41, and Ad Herennium, ed. min. Teub
ner 1964), p. 14 app. crit. to 1.15.
(Leipzig,
110H.Caplan (above n. 43), chap X; M. Th. D'Alverny, Alain de Lille, Textes In?d
its (Paris, 1965), pp. 163ff, 295ff.
Magic and Rhetoric 87

The Diachronie View

At first glance, it seems obvious that between late antiquity

and the Renaissance high points in the history of rhetoric are also
in devotion to the occult. Late antiquity is a clear case
high points
in point. Augustine's own interest in demonology has attracted
much comment;111 Seznec in his Survival of the Pagan Gods remarks
on the growing belief in astrology in the period.112 The largest pro
as amulets or to con
portion of Christian literary papyri to be used
tain other evidence of magical use comes from the period; Brown's
article has already been mentioned, and much more could be cited,
had we time, to illustrate the truism that late antiquity was pro
gressively devoted to the occult.113 This is the period in which the
Ad Herennium comes to light,114 in which most of the "minor Latin
rhetoricians," as C. Halm, who edited their work, calls them,115
wrote their treatises. Of the twenty-four treatises Halm published,
ten were dedicated wholely to matters of style or the colores?a spe

111
See, for example E. Langton, Satan, a Portrait (London, 1945), p. 61 quoted
Partner (above n. 71), pp. 125-26 and 256, and Partner pp. 128, 257.
112Seznec (above n. 100), p. 41. See also R. MacMullen, "Social History in As

trology," Ancient Society 2 (1971), p. 112 on the fortunes that legal advocates and rhet
ors could acquire in the fourth century. There are remarks on the con
interesting
junction of rhetoric, dreams, and changes in attitudes towards the supernatural in
P. Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1978), especially, pp. 64ff.
113
Papyri: cf. lecture by Edwin ludge (1981 Australian and New Zealand Asso
ciation for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference, Macquarie University,
"The Magical Use of Scripture in the Papyri." Professor
NSW), ludge, who directs
the Macquarie University Corpus Papyrorum Christianorum project, cites two collec
tions of this source material: J.Van Haelst, Catalogue des papyrus litt?raires juifs et chr?
tiens (1976), and K. Preisendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae (Leipzig/Berlin, 1928-31), 2
vols. On the unstable ridden nature of the period, see H. Chadwick, Pris
"angst"
cillian of Avila: the Occult and the Charismatic in the Early Church (Oxford, 1976); E. R.
Dodds, Pagan and Christian in a Age of Anxiety (Cambridge, 1965), esp. chap. 2, and
the Response, ed. R. S. Smith and J. Lounibos, Press of America, 1984).
(University
Of much relevance is G. Fowden's recent The Egyptian Hermes: aHistorical Approach to
the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge, 1986). The period the characteristic Victor
displays
Turner refers to as "liminality"?passage from one structure (Roman) to another
(ecclesiastical). V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago,
1969), chaps. 3 and 4; and cf. the critique by C. Bynum in Anthropology and the Study

of Religion, ed. R. Nooke and R Reynolds (Chicago, 1984), pp. 105-25. Perhaps the ar

chetypical liminal figure is the "holy man." See Peter Brown, "The Rise and Function
of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," Journal of Roman Studies 61(1971), pp. 80-101.
114Cicero, Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi, ed. and trans. H. Caplan (Loeb
Classical Library, Cambridge Mass., 1964), pp. xxxiv-xxxv.
115C Halm, Rhetores Latini Minores (Leipzig, 1863).
88 RHETORICA

ciality of Gorgias. In this period De inventione commentation be

gins, and the rhetoric of the Greek second sophistic movement
dominates; it is the period in which the prestige of a rhetorical edu
cation is at its height, with a influence on poetry
corresponding
and prose. Appropriately, as a recent investigation has suggested,
later Latin writers became more visual, audial, rhetorical (or the
atrical): "The reason why the art of memory could have made the
literate society of late antiquity more pictorial or theatrical than
that of the republic is not so much that, in the republic, rhetorical
training had not been established at Rome for so long, but because,
by late antiquity, the demands upon the memory were much greater
and the fields in which it could be utilized were more numer
ous."116 Other developments commented upon in this context stim
ulated the late antique emphasis on rhetoric as techn?, and on liter
acy as "control;" "by imprisoning sound, writing itself fosters a
sense of order and control over the environment;"117 it generated
controversies (heresies) over the written word, belief in the (writ
ten) finality of dogma, and stimulated the articulation of rhetoric/
techn?, as a resource for control and triumph in polemic and court
controversy.118
to Newbold, was a
The consequence, according specific reac
tion to information overload, a reaction that greatly enriched meta
phoric resources of language and confirmed the rhetorical/visual
emphasis in late antique culture. Newbold writes:

The and survival of books in Greece and Rome continu

production
ously added to the burden of cultural history that required exact mem
orization. and visual mnemonic devices were aids in the
Epitomes
effort to keep the hallowed cultural heritage in focus, but by late antiq
uity one strategy was simply to give up trying to do this and to seek to
communicate concerns the medium of com
present by unambiguous,
pleted artifacts instead of impressionistic, incomplete processes, to
stress "what" rather than "how." But another was to reject
strategy
the tunnel-vision and the environmental that such a
impoverishment
to information overload can induce, and to mobilize all the
response
modalities, to seek a more holistic of and
body's sensory way seeing,
to call on peripheral and subliminal resources, on the realms of allu
sion, and on symbolic pars pro toto thinking whereby a process or a

116
R. Newbold, "Perception and Sensory Awareness Latin Writers in
Among
Late Antiquity," Classica etMediaevalia 33(1981-82), p. 182.
117Ibid., p. 185.
118Cf. Ibid., p. 184 and Ward (above n. 78).
Magic and Rhetoric 89

of ideas or an can be evoked a

complex activity by single component.
For example, a net can stand for all that is associated with fishes and

fishing_119

This emphasis upon the m?tonymie and metaphorical (rhetoric/

magic) in late antiquity has been noticed by others. Pennacini, for
example, points out, "che negli anni tra la fine del 1 sec. e l'inizio
del 2. emergesse con crescente vigore la tendenza dell'ornatus po
?tico ad invadere la prosa. . . ."120 There seems in to
much, fact,

support De Romilly's reading of trends in later Roman imperial

antiquity.
Ifwe were to submit to the influence of writers like Agobard of
Lyons and the continual stream of royal, episcopal, penitential and
canonical proscriptions of belief in pagan magic and "irrational"
sorcery,121 the period between late antiquity and the twelfth cen
could be seen as a peculiarly "rational" turn of the tide against
tury
the apparent welling up of occultism in later antiquity. Such a view
would, however, be something of a misreading. The period in
question is one characterized by orthodox "control," which takes
two forms. One is the already mentioned, and shrill, proscription
of branded heterodoxy and magic, and the other is the imposition
on society of a sanctioned form of the irrational: belief in saints'
powers, relic cults, miracles and the efficacy of the liturgy and
church ritual. Behind and beneath this facade of control, there
lurks a growing belief in the threat of the supernatural, the power
of Satan, the powerlessness of the official ecclesiastical hierarchy
(through pomp, mundanity, secularity, venality and corruption),
and the need for recourse to other wellsprings of insulation and
security.122
The same period is one of experimentation and renovation, as

119R.R Newbold, "Centre Periphery and Eye in the Late Roman Empire," Flo

rilegium 3(1981), p. 94.

120
A. Pennacini, La Funzione dell arca?smo e del neologismo neue teorie della prosa da
a Frontone (Torino, 1974), p. 99.
Corni?cio
121
P. Quennell, ed., Diversions in History (London, 1954), pp. 41-51; Lea (above
n. 96), pp. 414-16, and Russell (above n. 46), pp. 82-83; H. Gamer and J. T. McNeill,
ed. and trans., Medieval Handbooks of Penance (New York, 1938, 1979). See also my
articles at n. 78 above and "Women, Witchcraft and Social Patterning in the Later
Roman Law Codes," Prudentia 13(1981), pp. 99-118.
122See Peters (above n. 69), Stock (above n. 73), esp. p. 110, as
heresy "magical
ritual," and Kors-Peters, (above n. 71), to which add R. I. Moore, ed., The Birth of
Popular Heresy (London, 1975), his The Origins of European Dissent, (Oxford, 1985),
and his articles in recent numbers of Studies in Church History (e.g., 23[1986]).
 90 RHETORICA

far as attention to technical rhetoric is concerned, displaying consid

erable interest in the colores and euphuistic prose. Four of Halm's
treatises derive from the period 600-800 A.D.,123 and one must
note minor rhetorical moments such as the Hisperica famina (Brit
ain/Ireland, 5th-6th century A.D.),124 Aldhelm (Britain, second
half of the 7th century),125 Rather of Verona (Italy, 10th century),126
Adalbero of Laon,127 and Gerbert of Rheims (c. 1000 A.D.).128 It is
customary, however, to view the study of rhetoric between late an
and the twelfth century as in something of a recess. Atten
tiquity
tion to the larger manuals of classical rhetorical theory, such as the
Ad Herennium and De inventione, replacing use of the minor Latin
rhetoricians, begins in the ninth century, and reaches visible fruit
ion in the eleventh.129 Gerbert of Rheims and his contemporaries
displayed unusual interest in teaching and using the divisions of
rhetoric as set forth in treatises like the Ad Herennium. Predictably,
an interest in rhetoric is often linked with a concern for magic, at
least in the eyes of observers. Gerbert, whose interest in rhetoric
was pronounced, earned the reputation of a necromancer, perhaps
because of his devotion to science and numerology, and Isidore,
noted for a standard textbook description of rhetoric that saw
much use, also provided a standard discussion of magic and the
occult arts.130
It is, however, in the twelfth century that we detect not only a
significant upswing of interest in technical rhetoric, but also a
marked oscillation of the cultural pendulum towards a preoccu
pation with the "irrational" and rhetoric as magic. It is relevant to
recall again De Romilly's description of the modern revival of Gor
the "new rhetoric:" "Writing has become a sacred and
gianism,
operation; words themselves seem to haunt the writer,
mysterious

123Nos. 15, 16, 20 and 24 in Halm's enumeration.

124
W. R Bolton, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 597-1066 (Princeton Univer

1967), I pp. 46-48. the Irish term for the Hisperica Famina is
sity Press, Curiously,
"retoric." L. Beiler, Ireland, Harbinger of theMiddle Ages (London, 1963), p. 13.
125Bolton, pp. 68ff.
126
Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity
E. Auerbach, and in the
Middle Ages, trans. R. Mannheim (New York, 1965), pp. 133ff, especially pp. 139-40.
127See Duby (above n. 35).
128
See Murphy (above n. 35).
129With the De inventione commentary in MS Oxford Laud Lat. 49. See R. W.
Hunt et al., The Survival of Ancient Literature (Oxford: Exhibition Cat., 1975), pp. 57
58 (#108).
130 n. 74).
Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, p. 665. (Above
Magic and Rhetoric 91

like magic formulas coming from nowhere;" the critic "refuses to

read a text as a logical sequence offering one single meaning; he
looks for a plurality of meanings, for connotations and symbols.
Classical rhetoric is treated as obsolete."131 One is immediately re
minded here of the second half of the twelfth century, at the end of
which the boom interest in classical rhetorical manuals was to ebb
in northern France,132 and during which the verbal and oral magic
of the chanson de geste was joined by the multiple level, hexagonal,
symbol strewn courtly Romance, with its foundation in the magic of
the Arthurian literature.133 This was also the heyday of the Latin
cosmological poets (Bernard Silvester, Alan of Lille),134 who brought
their search for meaning in the universe to rest on a laden, coded
text which they called the integumentum,135 the "covering," beyond
or beneath which they would not proceed. In other words, Iwould
interpret the later twelfth century as a time in which rhetoric as
magic began, in France at least, to dominate rhetoric as techn?.
Such an interest in rhetorical practice was nevertheless un
fuelled an expansion of the traditional rhetorical cur
doubtedly by
riculum in the period. Already settling down to the large scale ex
position of the full panorama of the art of rhetoric as set out in the
comprehensive classical treatise, the Rhetorica Ad Herennium (rather
than the incomplete De inventione), the rhetorical curiculum was at
the same time diversifying into the techniques appropriate to the
reproduction of the poetic magic of late antique elegiac and hex
ametric Latin verse through the artes poetriae.136

131De. Romilly, pp. 86-87.

132See J. J.Murphy, ed., Medieval Eloquence, p. 54.
roman medieval,"
133Pierre Gall?is, "L'hexagone logique et la Cahiers de Civiliza
tion M?di?vale 18(1975), pp. 1-14,133-48. See laeger (above n. 85), pp. 236ff. Further
to our theme is the evidence for a "resurfacing" of gnosticism in the twelfth century
A.D. elicited by some from The Song of Roland, cf. H. and R. Kahane, Romance Philol
ogy 12(1959), pp. 216-31.
134
W. Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton Univer

sity Press, 1972); Cf. above n. 110.

135Jeauneau as cited Wetherbee p. 38 n. 68. See also n. 141 below. Rhetoric/

magic, allegory and the occult are part and parcel of the same project: Murrin Veil

(above n. 40), pp. 18-53. That late classical and the Renaissance were focal
antiquity
periods for this project (Murrin, pp. 52-53) is most pertinent to the theme of the

present study.
136
See above n. 28, J. J. Rhetoric in theMiddle Ages (University of Cali
Murphy,
fornia Press, 1974), pp. 135ff; J. J. Murphy, ed., Medieval Eloquence, pp. 45ff, and
fascicules on "Rhetoric" in the series Typologie des Sources du Moyen
forthcoming Age
Occidental by D. Kelly, M. Camargo, M. Briscoe, J. O. Ward.
 92 RHETORICA

It is no accident, perhaps, that the same period saw a height

ened interest in the practice of the occult, a crescendo of protests at
manichaean and cathar occultism and proto?"sabbat" orgiastic
rites, the beginnings of the Inquisition, the beginnings of the intel
lectualization of witchcraft.137 William of Newburgh and his con
temporaries record the earliest of our vampire stories, and the in
flux of Arabic texts excited a boom in alchemical and astrological
interest.138 Critics have noted how alchemy and dream psychology
underscore the Romances of Chr?tien de Troyes.139 "Alchemical"
undertones can also be detected in the twelfth century Goliardic
poem the Metamorphosis of Golias,140 the theme of which is the unity
of knowledge, the union of wisdom and eloquence, the marriage of
and Philology. Mercury is represented as
Mercury eloquence. Mer
cury is the Greek Hermes, the messenger of the Gods, who carried
the divine word from the gods to men; Hermes is the Egyptian
Thoth, the "inventor of language and of writing and all branches of
learning that depended upon writing?medicine, magic, astron
omy and astrology." Thoth created the world with his voice and
could pronounce magical formulas with the tonalities that gave
power. It was Thoth (Hermes), we recall, who taught?according
to common twelfth century opinion?the art of rhetoric to Cicero
himself, and Cicero's emphasis in the preface to his De inventione

137
Asset out by Wakefield-Evans, Kieckhefer, Peters, and Russell; N. Cohn,

Europe's Inner Demons (Paladin, 1976); W. L. Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisi
tion in Southern France 1100-1250 (London, 1974), and others.
138Cf. above n. 69, Seznec (above n. 100), p. 52; Allard (above n. 57), p. 150;
Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, pp. 667ff. R Sherwood Taylor, The Alchemists,
Founders ofModern Chemistry (Heinemann, 1951), p. 100, says, "Alchemy like a
swept
fever over thirteenth as a consequence of the translation of key
century Europe"
Arab texts. of the thirteenth
Taylor's portrait century alchemists, pp. lOlff, contains
much of interest for our theme. The alchemist is a cleric, a monk, a canon. Such
classes had time, literacy, and resources. One could add also, a market for their
skills and products. It is no accident that the names of Arnald de Villanova and
Raimon Lull were affixed to the most influential alchemical of the early
writings
fourteenth century (Taylor, pp. 109-10).
139Iean Gyory, "Le cosmos, un Annales Universitatis Scientiarum Buda
songe,"
pestensis, sectio philologica 4(1963), pp. 87-110.
140Printed in Studi Medievali vol. 3 (1962), pp.764-772. I hope to prepare a

study of the alchemical elements in this poem. For the links between the nature of
alchemical change and the functioning of imagination in late medieval courtly verse,
see D.
Kelly, Medieval Imagination, Rhetoric, and the Poetry of Courtly Love (Madison,
1978), pp. 27 and 233.
Magic and Rhetoric 93

on the role of eloquence/ rhetoric in creating (and then corrupting)

civilization, forms the basic underpinning of courtier-humanist in
sight in the twelfth century.141
The Metamorphosis Goliae advances an equation between love
and rhetoric that was to have a great future in the equation clerical
curialitas and courtly love; both love and rhetoric are close to Pallas
(wisdom), in differing tensions; Abelard epitomizes service to both.
The theme is the centrality of language (eloquence); the writer was
a member of our literate service class already mentioned, and the
poem is shot through with "alchemical," numerological and musi
cal allusions. No less central a figure than Bernard Silvester, al
ready mentioned as one of the cosmological poets, displays a simi
lar fascination with metaphoric/ poetic language and the occult. His
Mathematicus reveals a considerable interest in rhetoric and astrol
ogy, while his Experimentarius is concerned with geomancy.
Whether this latter treatise is the work edited in 1959 by Mirella
Savorelli, or "a similar work of which only the prologue has sur
vived,"142 is not particularly pertinent here. The whole introduc
tion of Hermetic and astrological lore, whether Arabic or Latin,
into European culture during the period of the "twelfth century
Renaissance" is a subject of great interest, but at present without
sure guides. From such texts as the Experimentarius, the Metamor

141
Kinsman (above n. 58), p. 99; W. Shumaker, The Occult Sciences In the Renais
sance: A in Intellectual Patterns (University of California Press, 1972), p. 208; and
Study
Easlea (above n. 4), p. 97: "Cabalist magic derives from the belief that God created
the cosmos by the spoken word and that the word therefore is powerful and crea
tive." The "ritual terminology" of the Metamorphosis Goliae is taken from the later

antique neoplatonists, whom such "fictions" betrayed "into a revival of magic," ac

cording to Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Penguin Books, 1967),
pp. 4-5. These "fictions" were to surface in the "rhetorical" Renaissance of
again
the humanists. On the (Ciceronian) rhetorical myth of civilization in
Castiglione
(without the realization that Cicero is behind it), see laeger (n. 85 above), pp. 9-10,
who is speaking, in fact, of twelfth century The proemium to the De
developments.
inventione is extensively in numerous twelfth is found
glossed century manuscripts,
in a wide variety of writings of the time and, continued to dominate about
thought
civilization well into the sixteenth a in the 1987
century: majolicaware plate, #100
British Museum exhibition
arranged by Timothy Wilson, 1549 'Mazo' (=May), Ven
ice (from Urbino) representing the allegory of civilization, portrays the power of

eloquence and carries extracts from the De inventione on its reverse side. See be
low n. 154.
142Ch. Burnet in Archives d'histoire doctrinale et litt?raire du Moyen Age 44(1977
78), pp. 79, 98. On the Experimentarius, see Dronke (below n. 145), pp. 139ff.
 94 RHETORICA

phosis Goliae, the Tabula Smaragdina, the Sermo ad sphaeram of Alan

(of Lille?), it is possible to infer that this occult lore created a tre
mendous stir among the magistri of northern France and elsewhere
during the twelfth century.
Bernard Silvester, in the preface to his (?) Experimentarius de
scribes the utility of the work in these terms: "It is possible to avert
divine vengeance by forestalling future impending dangers, seen in
the stars, by urgent prayer and the giving of alms?in the fashion
of the people of Nineveh and on the example of King Hezekiah.
Albumasar, that most excellent philosopher and skilled astrono
mer, tells us that since reason rules the heavens, chastisement and
the application of punishment can be avoided when the creator,
who regulates all things, is pacified. For the stars are his function
aries (officiates). Whatever dangers, therefore, that we can know
about in advance from dreams, visions, prophecies or the [stellar]
constellations, can be mitigated by the humility of penance and by
satisfaction through penance, and can thus be changed to the con
trary. For all divine threats are recognized to be conditional. Darts
which can be foreseen hurt less, or very little."143
A resurgence of interest in dream theory during the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries has been noted, in part stimulated by the
advent of new works of Aristotelian science and Greek medicine,144
and an important elegiac poem fairly securely attributed to Ber
nard Silvester, the already mentioned Mathematicus, enables us to
glimpse with uncanny clarity the dimensions of intelligent interest
in the "irrational" and the power of language during the twelfth
century. An excursus is necessary to demonstrate how deeply en
tangled these two threads have in fact become.
In the Mathematicus, Patricida is the son of a Roman miles at the
time of the Punic wars between Rome and Carthage.145 Patricida's
birth was foretold astrologically. Itwas also foretold that he would

143Ibid., p. 123. See II Kings 19.15ff, and lonah 3.5

1441refer here to Dr. Alison Peden's paper "Macrobius and Medieval Dream
Literature," which I had the opportunity of reading in typescript the au
through
thor's kindness. See now Medium Aevum 54 pt. 1. (1985), pp. 59-73.
145Cf. the reference to Hannibal in lines 153,157 of the edition of B. Haureau, Le
Mathematicus de Bernard Silvestris et la passio Sanctae Agnetis de Pierre (Paris, 1895).
Riga
Ms. Deirdre Stone is preparing a translation, and study of this poem
commentary,
and its context. I owe much to her valuable and research. For an extended
insights
discussion of the poem and its source see Peter Dronke, Fabula: Into the
Explorations
Uses Of Myth inMedieval Platonism (Leiden, 1974), pp. 126ff, esp. p. 129.
Magic and Rhetoric 95

slay his father, and the father, when told, urges his wife to kill the
child. She refuses to do this, as it turns out, and sends him away to
be nursed instead. The child grows up, like Tristan, ac
secretly
complished in all the arts, and becomes king of Rome. Bernardus
specifically links the boy's training in astrology and rhetoric, the
latter equated with the colores and the ability to speak succintly
and clearly.146 Savage conflict is thus engendered in the mind of
the mother:

anxia distrahitur mis?rrima voto

dubioque
fluctu?t et bellum mater et uxor agunt

Bernard stresses the inexorability of fate:

sed tristis Lachesis, sed inexorabile fatum

The mother/wife becomes a foil for a poetic exercise on the evils of

the female sex147 and the focus for some images of marital fidelity
and bliss.148 The tirade against women becomes part of a suasoria on
whether the wife's wrongful decision to spare the boy (the triumph
of nature over marital fidelity) should be imputed to a natural fault
(naturae vitio) or to the characteristics of an individual (genuinis mo
ribus).U9 The husband's reply praises the wife's fine natural in
stincts and sense of right and duty, and he accepts his lot, noting
that he will, though dead, live on in the fame of his son.
Bernard develops the suasoria to gloss the theme of human
happiness, perfection, and fate; however happy and in control the
perfect man may be, he cannot escape fate. The decree that he will
kill his father is perhaps, allegorically, death itself, which cuts short
all human ambition and brings to nought all human perfection. It
is, however, human instinct to evade such harsh facts. The strict
relationship between Patricida's name, and what he must do, can
be replaced by a rhetorical, "irrational," metaphoric, displaced
one. Words do not necessarily denote actions in a precise sense.
Patricida will kill himself, thus rendering it impossible that he kill
his father, except in the displaced sense that a father whose son
kills himself for such a reason (or for any reason) is no longer, in

146Ed. Haur?au, lines 125-30.

147Ibid., lines 321ff.
148Ibid., lines 309-10, 318-19, 355ff.
149Ibid., lines 346-47.
96 RHETORICA

the strict sense, a father.150 The social constraints that interfere with
such an attempt to confront inexorable fate are, however, consider
able, as the final scenario of the book demonstrates.
In this final scenario, Patricida faces two opposing forces: the
force of the astrological prediction regarding his killing of his fa
ther, and the conventional eloquence of the Roman senate, which
does not want to grant their king (Patricida) freedom to commit
suicide in order to evade the astrological prediction. The Romans,
having granted Patricida anything he wished for, when it is re
vealed what he in this instance desires, try to evade the conse
quences of their former agreement and to "probare arte" that what
they had agreed to, they had not. Patricida immediately points out
that argumentosa calliditas does not behoove the senate, and then, in
a kind of dramatic present tense reportage in the first person of the
debate he witnesses, makes clear that rhetoric and sophistry un
derlie the Romans' arguments against him: "Enthymema sonat, so
nat hinc inductio."151 "A Varus" (that is, a senator) "sends words to
and fro in wandering digressions, trying to conclude some great
matter in a way best known to himself, and logic binds me slowly
with reason, but there is no tongue so replete with shrewd sophis
tries that the senators can remove me from my purpose." Another
senator, a (veritable) Pollio, then

speaks out gilding the surface of his speech and mobilizing the re
sources of an artful breast. He persuades,
he adorns, he leads the suit,
he makes the very figure of an orator; he changes his modes (of speech)
in accordance with the art, he changes his tack artfully, (but) it is not
the charm of or of voice which can
presentation grace pervert my
vows and hinder me from Camillus was as rustic in his
dying. speech
as he was in his clothing, he was prized by his betters for his rusticity.
The stern Catos were not amused by painted trifles. Speech was plain
for them and without vestment. Greece showed the blandished mode
to rustic Latium, the Greece was the teacher of the
complex speech,
grand style. O tragic day when simple and rude truth grew filthy, and
an ocean had ren
painted sounds proved more pleasing! Would that
dered Athens inaccessible. Rome would not have grown with the glit
ter of its eloquence. . . .

Patricida continues and stresses how the Romans opposed him

with "legum decreta" and "litera:" they hide behind decrees and

150Ibid., see lines 637-38.

151 see Cicero,
Ibid., line 813; on these major tools of rhetoric De inventione 1.31.51
et seqq; 1.34.57 et seqq; and Halm (above n. 115) index s.v. "enthymema" (p. 639).
Magic and Rhetoric 97

literal interpretations of the law. He will invoke the authority of the

dead Justinian, the greatest arbiter in the whole world, no trivial
auctor, one who does not utter poor words. The sentence ascribed
to Justinian, "dux populi, victor munus quod quaeris, habeto" is as
dubious as the time sequence, which requires Justinian to be a
dead authority for the "king" Patricida. Has Bernard forgotten that
Justinian lived after the Roman Republic and the period of the
kings? Is he shifting to the time position of his own day (for which
Justinian was a "dead" authority), or do we have here a subversion
of "the focussed, concentrated, 'hard-eyed', analytic mode, more
concerned with detail, fine print, hierarchical organisation and
pre-existing schemata" in favour of "the relaxed, diffused, un
focussed, 'soft-eyed' mode, more concerned with synthesis and the
overall picture,"152 part, perhaps, of "a wholesale shift in cultural
emphasis from logic, language and literature to intuition, space and
visual art, from left to right hemispheric (brain) cognitive modes,"
from hypotaxis to parataxis? Newbold has in fact so explained what
he sees to be the emerging characteristics of late Roman culture:
knowledge "overload," and "an efflorescence of bureaucratic lan
guage," accompanied by attempts at hierarchical control of flam
boyance and emotional impulse through progressive articulation of
ceremonial, liturgy, procession, assembly in favor of authority and
rank and the state, produced a reaction in favor of the sensory, the
poetic, pictorial, metaphoric, mythic, ecphrastic: "In literature or
visual art, the reaction to control, to restraint and to hierarchical,
linear, three dimensional, explicit compositional form may mani
fest in emotionality and expressiveness of subject matter, juxtapo
sition, two-dimensionality and looseness of structure."153
Newbold's description of what he sees as "a major cultural
shift" in late antiquity?a shift, it should be noted, in the same di
rection as is required by the De Romilly "thesis" with which this
paper began?does conjure up similarities with the twelfth cen
tury, but Patricida's predicament is no simple exposition of them.
He is caught, in fact, between the determinism of the occult and
fate, and the determinism of law, logic, technical rhetoric, and
power structures. By killing himself, he evades both; by following
his will (and thereby extinguishing his will), he evades both deter
minisms: "Liber et explicitus ad mea vota meus" says the last line

152
R. R Newbold, "Nonverbal Communication and Parataxis in Late Antiq
uity," L'Antiquit? Classique 55(1986), p. 237, 238, 239, 240-43.
153Ibid., p. 239.
 98 RHETORICA

of the poem: "Free and uninvolved to follow my desire, my own

man, (I resign the crown)." The individual has chosen an individ
ual path; simplicity of sermo is equated with freedom (liber), lack of
entanglement (explicitus), autonomy to do one's will (meus), uncon
strained by astrology or rhetoric.154 The denunciation of rhetoric is
quite explicit, and the astrological context is elaborately contrived.
The point, I think, is a protest at the power of technical rhetoric
and astrology to obscure purpose and social truth, to create ties of
dependence; technical rhetoric has teamed up with astrology to
thwart human free will and excellence. In this sense the poem is
a denunciation of rhetoric as techn?, as nefarious ally of law and
technical astrology, negating the fullest development of human
excellence.
An earlier commentator on the poem stresses that, in the
pseudo-Quintilian declamation that lies behind Bernard's text, the
situation in which Patricida finds himself is insoluble. The youth is
trapped in the contradictions of humanity. Like a God yet prey to
fate and death, unable to chart a free and uninvolved path: "The
point of the dilemma is in its insolubility."155 The very last line of
the declamation indicates the very real possibility that in killing
himself, the hero may also kill his father (of grief): "Metuo, ne pat
rem, dum morior, occidam."156 in all
Curiously, nearly manuscripts
of the Mathematicus,157 the last line of the poem expresses triumph,
the triumph of the individual over the restrictions of law, society,
and rhetoric depicted as the slave discipline of statecraft. Bernard
does not say (in most versions of the poem) that Patricida was suc
cessful in his intention to evade the astrological prediction; he seems

154I.P. Migne, Patrolog?a Latina 171.1380D; ed. Haur?au, p. 37,1.854; Wetherbee

(above n. 134), pp. 153-58. For an extraordinarily similar concern with a
possible
clash between "the humanistic vision of man utilizing nature and forging his own
civilization (of which) the cement (is) speech (and) the celestial determinism of . . .
in the Renaissance, see Trinkaus (n. 65 above, pp. 460 and pp. 466-67).
astrology"
The opposition here expressed between, on the one hand, free will, a culture based
on rhetorical practice, human self-fulfillment, and on the other, astrological deter
minism, underlines the coincidence between the rhetorical humanism of twelfth
and fifteenth centuries. Pontano (1429-1503) was a courtier, and poet. Cf.
astrologer
above n. 141.
155Wetherbee (above n. 134), p. 157.
156
G. Lehnert, Quintiliani quae feruntur Declamationes XIX Maiores (Leipzig,
Teubner, 1905), p. 88.
MS (cf. ed. Haur?au, p. 8); Dronke n. 134ff.
157Except the Berlin (above 145), p.
Magic and Rhetoric 99

more in the decision

interested to adopt a course of action that is
very likely approved by no one other than Patricida, least of all by
the Roman senators who undoubtedly discount (as rulers should)
the disruptive effects of astrological prognostication, and recall
Patricida to the civic obligations he was ready enough to assume
when things were different.
Foremost tensions and anxieties of social life were explored in
poetry with increasing vigor during the twelfth century, not be
cause poetry provided answers or solutions, but because it ex
with, focussed on insolubilia and thereby aimed at a
posed, played
sort of attempted "control," by way of rhetoric/magic, the incan
descent inspired elegiac;158 no different, perhaps, was
Virgilian
Dante's terza rima, with its Vergilian inspiration, and its "great mat
ter." Thus, Bernard's poetic integumentum, in this case, plays with
the equivalent of Gorgias' conclusion that "all is tragic."159 One as
excellent in human skills and power as Patricida has two choices:
death, the negation of everything, or slavery?enslavement, that
is, to the impossibility of certain knowledge and autonomy, to
technical rhetoric and astrology.
Ultimately, then, the poem testifies to contemporary interest in

158Ms. Deirdre Stone has made important discoveries illustrating the close
nexus between the Aeneid and the Mathematicus. Cf. above n. 145. Ancient declama
venture in the twelfth and perhaps
tory themes inspired much poetic century
the familiar debate?poem genre. Conflicts between or
helped spawn step-children
between family and feudal loyalty underlie many chansons de geste. For the Romance,
see: R. W. Hanning, The Individual in Twelfth Century Romance (New Haven, 1977),
and his
article, "The Social Significance of Twelfth Century Chivalric Romance,"
Medievalia et Human?stica ns. 3(1972), pp. 3-29; E. Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Ox
ford, 1971); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (New York, 1957), chap. 6; Penny Gold, The

1985); S. Knight, "Proesce and Cortoisie: in

Lady and the Virgin (Chicago, Ideology
Chr?tien de Troyes Le Chevalier au Lion," Studium 1982). On the Stoic
14(Sydney,
view of death as an apotheosis of the great man of perfect virtue, see M. Colish, The
Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages 1(1985), pp. 30-31; for Seneca's
of suicide as an action to preserve ibid., pp. 49-50. For the
justification liberty,
in the twelfth see Phil Barker, "The Politicis of Primo
Oedipal complex century,
Sex, Consciousness, and Social Organization in North Western Europe
geniture:
(900-1250 A.D.)" in E. Leach et al., eds., Feudalism; Comparative Studies (Sydney,
1985), and Dronke (above n. 145), p. 130. For other relevant perspectives, W. Von
den Stienen, "Les sujets d'inspiration chez les po?tes latins du XIIe si?cle," Cahiers
de Civilization M?di?vale 9(1966), pp. 378-79. The major poems of Alan of Lille are
relevant illustrations here, but too complex for adequate annotation in the space
available.
159Untersteiner (above n. 4), pp. 118-24,140-63.
 100 RHETORICA

astrology, the occult, predestination, divination, and the host of

human problems they impinge upon, not least the relationship be
tween fathers and sons. The close link between the insolubilia that
arise from any attempt to consider the relationship between the in
dividual and destiny, and poetry as the appropriate mode for ex
ploring such insolubilia suggests the primacy of rhetoric as magic,
elevated above the controlling, normalizing, "linearizing," "hypo
tactic" forces harnessed in technical rhetoric, by a fascination with
the irrational element in life, with the impinging supernatural. Ber
nardus of course, was not alone in his double interest in rhetoric,
poetry and the occult. Marbod of Rennes (c. 1100 A.D.) for ex
who wrote a short commentary on the fourth book of the
ample,
Ad Herennium (the colores), not only was described by contempo
raries as king of orators, but also excelled as a poet and wrote a
standard treatise on the occult powers of gems.160
This final item, the occult power of gems, suggests a classic il
lustration of the conjunction between rhetoric and magic in the
middle twelfth century: the case of Abbot Suger of St Denis, "the
Father of Gothic." Suger believed, following the neoplatonic trea
tises of Pseudo-Denis the Areopagite, that through contemplation
of beautiful material objects, especially gems, man was able to
make the spiritual or anagogical ascent to contemplation of celes
tial hierarchies, the invisible sphere of spiritual understanding.
This is the conceptual framework behind Suger's construction and
ornamentation of the abbey church of St. Denis in the 1130s and
1140s. A belief in the spiritual or magical properties of gems is the
most staple and uncontested aspect of medieval occultism. Recent
work, however, suggests that Suger's highly rhetorical Vita Ludo
vici Sexti was itself written as an aid to the ascent to a
anagogical
knowledge of things spiritual; the Latin text, complete with its rhe
torical structure of triad and reciprocity, is used, in this interpreta
as
tion, like much monastic historiography, liturgical lectio or read
ing and provides specific access to the occult, the spiritual, the
"hidden," like gems or rituals and ceremonies. Certain
magical

160Thorndike n. 53) I (1923),

(above chap, xxxiv, pp. 775ff. See also his "de fato
et genesi," ed. W. Bulst, Marbodi . . . Liber Decem
Capitulorum (Heidelberg, 1947),
pp. 22-26. Hildegard of Bingen is another highly literate twelfth century writer
with a in the magical of words,
deep belief efficacy incantations, rites, ceremonies,
stones, gems, animals, and plants. Her condemnation of astrology and divination
would appear to be closely related to such beliefs. See Ch. Singer, From Magic to
Science (New York, 1958), chap. 6; Thorndike, II chap. 40.
Magic and Rhetoric 101

other features of Suger's situation fit our picture. He was of humble

birth and a courtier to Louis VI and VII. He was a literate member of
the clergy. He fits our pattern of the practitioner of magic and rheto
ric, a supplier of skills to ruler and crown?administrative, ideologi
cal, rhetorical, historical, liturgical and architectural skills.161
There seems a close link, then, between various forms of rheto
rical interest and awareness in the twelfth century and the rising
tide of the irrational. The latter phenomenon however does not
emerge with equal clarity in the writings of scholars who lately
have devoted themselves to an understanding of the principal in
gredients in the "cultural shift" accomplished during the "Twelfth
Century Renaissance."162 Some emphases discerned accord well
enough with the lines I have been tracing in this paper; for ex
ample, the emphasis upon interiority, self-doubt, self-centered
ness, alienation noticed by Southern, Hanning, Vinaver, Morris,
and others in what they take to be the new world of the "Ro
mance," during the second half of the twelfth century. Other
threads noticed, however, work against my idea of a destabilizing
of the universe, of the mental world in which the thinking, literate
individual found him/herself in the period: "Twelfth century Eu
rope merits attention as a society that became critical of its
magical
beliefs and developed scientific conceptions," writes Radding;163

1611owe this interpretation of Suger's Vita to a fascinating talk by Gabrielle

and Historiography," (paper delivered at the Abbot
Spiegel, "Suger Suger and St.
Denis, international symposium, N.Y., April 12,1981). On Suger's humble birth, see
E.
Panofsky, ed. and trans., Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St. Denis and its Art
Treasures (Princeton, 1948, 1979), p. 33.
162Ch. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century Mass., 1927);
(Cambridge,
R. W. Southern, The Making of theMiddle Ages (London, 1953), chap. 5; M. Stevens,
"The Performing Self in Twelfth Century Culture," Viator 9(1978), esp pp. 207ff; C.
Morris, The Discovery of the Individual 1050-1200 (London, SPCK, 1972); M. Becker,
"Individualism In the Early Italian Renaissance: Burden and Blessing," Studies in the
Renaissance 19(1972), pp. 237-97; Peter Brown, and the Supernatural: a Me
"Society
dieval Change," Daedalus 104(1975), pp. 133-51; A. Murray, Reason and Society in the
Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978);Ch. Radding, A WorldMade byMen: Cognition and Society
400-1200 (University of N. Carolina Press, 1985); Heather "lohn Wyclif's De
Phillips,
Eucharistia in its Medieval Setting" (Ph.D. diss., Toronto, 1980); G. R. Evans (above
n. 56); B. Stock (above n. 73); T. Stiefel, The Intellectual Revolution in Twelfth
Century
Europe (Croom Helm, 1985).
163Radding in American Historical Review 84(1979), p. 968; see too his World Made
by Men (above n. 162), pp. 74, 145, 153ff, 219ff, 246ff, 255ff. The crucial aspect of the
"disorder (that) sparked the development of advanced was not,
reasoning" (p. 155)
it may be added, or would have
general, political (as Radding it), but part of the
social experience of particular groups and individuals within the new litterati.
 102 RHETORICA

the "deanimisation and demagification of the universe begins in

the twelfth century," says Richard Dales;164 Tina Stiefel claims that
an intellectual revolution occurred in the twelfth century: a com
plete scientific methodology was developed that anticipated in goal
and nature modern scientific methodology: "it began to appear
that the whole universe was intelligible and accessible to human
reason: nature is now perceived as an orderly system, not a myste
rious, necessarily obscure phenomenon;" the "increasingly wide
rejection of rationalist and scientific thinking, in favor of magical
and occult thinking" that characterized Europe between the fourth
century B.C. and the eleventh century A.D. was now reversed.165
Other writers have stressed a movement away, in the twelfth cen
tury, from archaic, ritual-based "Old Testament" culture in the ear
lier Middle Ages, towards one based on rational literacy, scholastic
a
reason, clarity, hierarchy, linearity and calculating mentality.166
How do we reconcile the "rise of rationalism" with the de
stabilizing of cosmology that accompanies a rising fascination with
the occult and the supernatural? Do we have to do with two com
the one a
peting mental universes, world of cosmology, poetry, al
alchemy, and the supernatural, the other a world of
legory, magic,
literate, bureaucratic, scholastic "reason?" Is this what Brian Stock
meant recently by his "logical" and his "rhetorical" interpretative
strategies?167 The answer to this question cannot delay us here, ex
cept to note that two (or more) mental universes in the twelfth cen
tury, competing or discrete, should not surprise us; after all, there
were as many generative sociological environments to produce
them: the universities, the courts, the monasteries, the world of
the traditional semi-literate miles, the world of the "rustic" drawn
from non-literate environments into the disturbed literate world of

164
Dale, "A Twelfth Century of the Natural Order," Viator 9 (1978),
Concept
p. 179.
165Stiefel, (above n. 162), pp. 2-3, 8, 35, 98. W. Eamon, "Technology
as
Magic
in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance," Janus 70(1983), p. 183, agrees.
166Morris, Phillips, Murray (above n. 162); L. K. Little, Religious Poverty and the
inMedieval Europe (London, 1978); lanet Nelson,
Profit Economy "Society, Theodicy
and the Origins of Heresy: Towards a Reassessment of the Medieval Evidence,"
Studies in Church History 9 (1972), pp. 65-77; R. W. Southern in Perspectives on the

European Past: Conversations With Historians, ed. H. F. Cantor (New York, 1971),
pp. 190ff.
}67New Literary History 16 (1984-85), pp. 27-28, and cf. comments of G. Evans,
p. 117.
Magic and Rhetoric 103

court service,168 the world of the "villain" upstart civis or burgher,

the world of the new heretical confraternities, or "textual commu
nities," the very competing textual communities169 themselves?
that based on Aristotle's Organon, that based on the De inventione,
on the Timaeus, on the Bible, on Martianus Capella's De nuptiis, and
other texts.
What is abundantly clear is that a magical view of the universe
did not die out with the twelfth century, or even the fourteenth.
Although at all periods there have been intellectuals who voiced
skepticism in regard to aspects of superstitious magic (Agobard
of Lyons, John of Salisbury, Nicole Oresme, to name three from
three different periods), certain intellectuals have periodically been
drawn to a magical view of the universe, and it is with those in
tellectuals, and their less intellectual partners or compeers, with
whom the present paper is concerned. The wider question of the
extent to which intellectual postures reflect or shape movements of
general cultural mentality, from magical to scientific, touch to sight,
modular to representational170 must for the moment be put aside.
The pattern revealed by the period from the end of the twelfth
century to the advent of the (Italian) Renaissance is complicated as
far as the threads I have been trying to tease out are concerned. On
the one hand, as already noted, in Europe north of the Alps, from
the late twelfth century on, a dimunition of interest in rhetoric/
techn? and rhetoric/magic can be detected.171 The latter is relegated
to incipient vernacular efforts?Latin cosmological poetry dies
out172?and a recent article E. H. Duncan indicates the interest
by
ing possibility that Chaucer was a master alchemist himself (and
had a court background).173 In a sense, however, these circum

168Cf. above n. 82.

n. 73); N. The Pursuit
169Stock (above Cohn, of the Millenium (Paladin, 1970),
chap. 3.
170See the interesting trilogy of articles in Viator 6 (1975), pp. 309-90.
171
Murphy, Medieval Eloquence, p. 54.
172Wetherbee (above n. 134), pp. 255-56.
173
Above n. 68 and note Robert M. Sch?ler, "The Renaissance Chaucer as Al
chemist," Viator
15 (1984), p. 305ff. For the Roman de la Rose and see
alchemy, Ogrinc
. . . rethorica . . .
(above n. 74), p. 108. Note also the curious conjunction of "oratio
encantativas . . . divinativas . . . ..." in Las
nigromantia I. Anglade, ed., Leys
d!Amors I (Toulouse, 1919), pp. 73-74. Note that both Giordano Bruno and Tommaso

Campanella, his younger contemporary, were Hermeticists and

slightly poets
(Yates, n. 43 above), p. 393. See Dennis Costa, "Poetry and Gnosticism: the Po?tica
of Tommaso Campanella," Viator 15 (1984), 405ff.
104 RHETORICA

stances represent not so much a declining interest in rhetoric as

techn? as a routinizing of that interest: rhetoric/ techn? subsides into
the fourth book of Boethius' De differentiis topicis; even Aristotle's
Rhetoric, when it came in for study, was dealt with rather under the
headings of ethics and politics than of Ciceronian rhetoric. This re
turn of a monolithic institutional/intellectual environment and a
consequent streamlining of rhetoric as techn? is, in fact, accompa
nied by a growing concern to control the irrational in other areas.
It is the conclusion of all students that the later Middle Ages wit
nessed a growing concern with demonology, diabolism, the learned
arts of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft, especially in France and the
Rhineland, at all levels, folk, learned, court, and church. The very
attention that writers like Nicholas Oresme, Pierre d'Ailly, Henry
of Langenstein, Nicolas de Sauer, Jean de Francfort, Henri de
Gorkum, Deitrich de M?nster and other members of the ruling
theological caste devote to the condemnation of the occult suggests
the same conclusion.174 "The ferment of diabolism," writes Seznec,
has regained all its old virulence and the "astrolatry" expressly rec
ommended Picatrix takes us back to the time of Apuleius, to the
by
days of incantation and sacrifice offered to the astral divinities."
Picatrix was a magical and astrological manual composed in Arabic
in the tenth or twelfth century from oriental and Hellenistic ele
ments. It was translated into Spanish at the court of Alfonso el
Sabio (thirteenth century), but there are no Latin manuscripts ex
tant before the fifteenth century, when it became popular in that
too.175
guise
Bernard in the volume on marginality mentioned ear
Chaput
lier,176 locates the impetus for the fascination with madness in the
trials and woes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries?war,
plague, cold winters, drought, famine, and amortality rate so high
that in some years, the grave-diggers could not cope. But the link

174See Coopland (n. 67 above); N. H. Steneck, Science and Creation in theMiddle

Ages, Henry of Langenstein (d 1397) On Genesis (Notre Dame, 1976); R. N. Swanson,

Universities, Academics and the Great Schism (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 20-21; R Bonney,
"Autour de lean Gerson: de th?ologiens sur les et la sor
opinions superstitions
cellerie au d?but du XVe si?cle," Le Moyen Age 77(1971), pp. 85-98. Thorndike and
others have stressed that magic was not marginal to intellectual life in the Middle
and Renaissance This does not, however, deny the obvious evi
Ages generally.
dence for a rise and fall of interest in the subject.
175Seznec (above n. 100), pp. 53-56; Thorndike II (above n. 53), p. 813.
176Allard (above n. 57), p. 43.
Magic and Rhetoric 105

between a fascination with the occult and the notion of rhetoric as

magic is apparent even in the pre-humanist "boom" days before
the onset of the Black Death and economic recession. Paget Toyn
bee, for example, in her Dante Alighieri, cites a document in which
Dante is mentioned as a person on hand who could, by image
magic and incantations, procure the death of anyone.177 In the Con
vivio, according to Jean Seznec, "Dante outlines a system
complete
of knowledge, corresponding point for point with the astrological
system."178 In this system Dante associates the planet Venus with
rhetoric.179 Although Dante himself seems to have been responsible
for this association, he derives the allocation of rhetoric to the third
from an earlier rhetor, Buoncompagno, who ar
planetary ring
in a series of concentric planetary rings thus:
ranged knowledge
trivium, quadrivium, medicine, law, theology, then the subtiles (or in
other readings futiles) spheres of geomancy, necromancy, pyro
mancy, spatomancy, alchemy. Dante's equation of rhetoric and
Venus breaches the usual equation of rhetoric and Mercury,180 and
opens up a whole new view of the irrational power of rhetoric,
foreshadowed by the role of Mercury, Venus, love, and rhetoric
in the Metamorphosis Goliae, and, in other ways, in the poetry of
the troubadours. In the Commedia (Paradiso) Venus returns to her
primary association love,181 and spell-casting,
with witchcraft, al
chemy, fortune-telling, and magicians like Michael Scott are con
demned.182 Pico della Mir?ndola provides another example of such

177Paget Toynbee, Dante Alighieri: His Life and Works, ed. C. S. Singleton (N.Y.,
1965), p. 101.
178Seznec (above n. 100), p. 49, and G. Holmes, Dante (Oxford, 1980), pp. 37-39.
179Convivio II xiv, p. 85 of // Convito, The Banquet of Dante Alighieri, trans. E. R

Sayer (London, 1887).

180H.Wieruszowski (above n. 106), ch. 7 pt. II, pp. 530ff. Dante's assignment,
though astrological in pattern, departs from the usual identification. For example,
Marsilio Ficino, in his De vita coelitus comparanda (1489, Shumaker?above n. 141?
ch. Ill pt. iii) assigns Mercury to "wit," "industry," "inventiveness," i.e., the special
qualities of man versus beast, including speech, and Venus to "warmth and soft
ness," i.e., a "companiable capacity."
181
Paradiso canto VIII, etc.
an
182Inferno 29,11, 20; Inf. 20.118: Guido Bonatti, astrologer (liber astronomicus),
Professor at Bologna: G. Scartazzini, La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri
Bologna
(1889), I pp. 341-2. In the Paradiso (IV 37-42), Dante takes refuge in a "scholastic"
view of language?as a mediator of a reality beyond words. See
straight-forward
Anderson (above n. 101), pp. 376-77. Compare Petrarch's condemnation of Al
(above n. 74), p. 109.
chemy: Ogrinc
106 RHETORICA

a change of position. His Disputationes adversus astrologiam divi

natricem (1495) has been described as a "volte-face" of his earlier
views.183 In a sense, however, condemnation does not imply any
dimunition of interest in the phenomenon condemned, although it
may indicate that the writer in question at the time of the "volte
face" was enjoying a more stable socio-vocational context.
Humanism itself seems to have been part and parcel of a rising
tide of interest in the irrational. Peter Burke and J. K. Hyde184 asso
ciate this with the development of a deeper interest in antiquity; a
similar renewed interest in antiquity seems to be noticeable in the
field of music, and Peters has commented on the role of classical

antiquity in the growing witchcraft preoccupations of the eleventh

and twelfth centuries A.D.185 There seems, however, in the Renais
sance, to be something more fundamental at stake than an interest
in antiquity: "At precisely the time when human ideals and values
were replacing traditional medieval beliefs, the city [Florence] was
its heretics and sorcerers. . . . The advent of humanism
burning
coincided with a revival or sorcery persecution," writes Brucker, of
the period 1375 to 1430.186 "The first effect of humanism was to en
courage astrology" writes Seznec.187 "Of the great humanists, only

183Shumaker (above n. 141), ch. I pt. ii. Yates (above n. 43), however, sees it as,
but a defence of magia naturalis. Lefevre was another believer in
lacques d'Etaples
magic who later recanted.
184
Peter
Burke, "Witchcraft and Magic In Renaissance Italy: Gianfrancesco Pico
and His ed. S. Anglo,
Strix," The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft
(London, 1977), pp. 32-52; J.K. Hyde, Padua In the Age of Dante (Manchester, 1966),
pp. 304-05. Dante's interest in Ovid and antiquity, to Anderson (above
according
n. 101), pp. 418-19, gave him insight into antiquity's "irrational side, its dependence
on and witchcraft." His own practice as a caused him to sail
prophecy prophet/poet
close to the Inquisition and this may he so condemned
explain why vehemently
contemporary wizards and necromancers in the Divine Comedy.
185
Above n. 69.
186
G. Brucker, "Sorcery in the Early Renaissance," Studies in the Renaissance

10(1963), pp. 7-24, p. 8.

187Seznec (above n. 100), p. 57 and Trinkaus (above n. 65), though it should be
noted that the humanists tried (p. 60) to free human will from stellar determinism.

Comedy, Purg. XVI 106-08; D. later min,

Cf. Dante, Divine Savonarola and Florence:
in the Renaissance 1970), pp. 88ff deal with the cre
Prophecy and Patriotism (Princeton,
scendo of interest in astrological in fourteenth and fifteenth century Italy.
prophecy
E. Garin, Lo Zodiaco delta vita: la pol?mica sull' astrologia del trecento al Cinquecento (Bari,

1982). H. Carey, and Divination in Later Medieval England," (Ph.D.

"Astrology
diss. Oxford, 1984), esp. pp. 15-16, 126, 157, 314, dealing with the rapid growth of
of geomancy in
interest in the subject outside Italy. On the considerable popularity
Magic and Rhetoric 107

Erasmus held reservations about magic and failed to share the

world view of his contemporaries . . . [an] . . . irrational
magical
world view that threatened the very foundations of Christianity"
in the person of a figure like Giordano Bruno, burnt at Rome in
1600 A.D.188 The year 1520 marks a peak of witch-hunting in Italy;
Yates speaks of a "rise in the status of the magician in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries."189 A long list of eminent humanists, en
couraged by a faith in the intellectual powers of man, showed in
terest in the potential that magic and astrology had for unlocking
secrets as yet hidden from man concerning the nature of things.
Amongst these we mention Petrarch, Marsilio Ficino, Giro
might
lamo Cardano, Giovanni Pico della Mir?ndola, Giordano Bruno,
Pomponazzi, Cornelius Agrippa, Giovanni Pontano. Pomponius
Laetus copied a Geomancy in his own hand; Coluccio Salutati wrote
a in his De fato, fortuna et casu which
polemic against Ceceo d'Ascoli
commented on Dante's theory of determinism and astrology. "It
seems that the cognitive validity and authority of occultism grew
stronger in the Renaissance thanks to the attention which Marsilio
Ficino and Pico della Mir?ndola gave to astrology, Cabala, the Her
m?tica, magic and other species of occultism." "The occultist tradi
tion lost this "cognitive authority between the last quarter of the
fifteenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth." "The dan
gerous impetus that astrology had gained in the thirteenth century

later medieval and French courts, see Th?r?se Charmasson, Recherches sur
English
une technique divinatoire: la g?omancie dans l'occident m?di?val (Paris, Geneva, 1980). Pa
tricia Eberle pointed out (at the 22nd International Congress of Medieval Studies,
Kalamazoo, 1987, session 61) that Richard II of England was the first English ruler to
be an autocrat in principle, and the first to commission a geomancy. See my discus
sion above at n. 42 and n. 43.
188Iohn Burke, "Hermetism as a Renaissance World View" in Kinsman (above
n. 58), pp. Ill and 115. Giordano Bruno "was involved in the humanist
deeply
movement and the revival of classical learning," D. W.Singer, Giordano Bruno: His

1950), p. 55. He wrote on artificial memory (an essential

Life and Thought (London,
aspect of the rhetorical curriculum and a key access to power), logical topics, the
Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, Llullian mnemonics, and a funeral oration, to select from
those of his writings that concern rhetoric (Singer, pp. 208-211). Despite his castiga
tion of extremes of occultism, Jean Bodin's occultic views were saturated with Her
metic Neoplatonism, the Cabala, cosmic allegory and a belief inmagic, witchcraft and
natural divination that were characteristic of his age, Jean Bodin: Colloquium of the Seven
About Secrets of the Sublime, trans. M. L. D. Kuntz (Princeton, 1975), pp. xxxivff. Cf.
above n. 43 and n. 44.
189Burke (above n. 184), p. 33.
 108 RHETORICA

was accentuated in the fifteenth and sixteenth. Here, again, the Re

naissance was to prove a continuation of the Middle Ages." "Thus,
at the very moment when great thinkers are striving to throw off
as such, they tremble be
the humiliating yoke of the cosmic bodies
fore the mysterious divinities which inhabit them."190 According to
Foucault, "from the fifteenth century on, the face of madness has
haunted the imagination of western man,"191 an intensification, as
itwere, of the theme of death which "up to the second half of the
fifteenth century or even a little beyond . . .
reigns alone."
Accompanying this link between humanism and the irrational,
we must note the striking revival, in the humanistic and magic
strewn Italy of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, of interest in
rhetoric/ techn?. This is the period and place from which most of the
commentaries on the glossed and unglossed texts of the Ad Heren
nium and De inventione derive. As in later antiquity, where a rising
interest in rhetoric/ techn? was
accompanied by a growing sensi
tivity towards rhetoric/magic, the humanist period in Italy is char
acterized by an intense interest in poetry, rhythmic prose, and
practical verbal and oral manifestations of eloquence. From the
time of Dante onwards, for example, Grassi notes "the primacy of
directive, revelatory, metaphorical language over argumentative,
deductive, rational speech."192 Landino in the fifteenth century as
serted the "primacy of poetry over the 'liberal arts'" and tells us
that poets "are moved by a divine madness"193?in this harking
back to antique views, expressed most clearly in Plato's dialogue
Ion where Socrates maintains that poets "are possessed by a spirit
not their own when they compose, like Bacchantes possessed by
the God, or the Corybantes who lose all control of reason in their
enthusiasm for the sacred dance, in a state of divine insanity."194
Grassi stresses the notion of language as "rhetorical, imagistic, and

190See: Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, p. 679 (Laetus); D. Thompson and A. F.

Nagel, eds., The Three Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments of Dante, Petrarca and
Boccaccio (New York, 1972, Coluccio); Brian Copenhaver, Symphorien Champierand the
in Renaissance France (The Hague,
Reception of the Occultist Tradition 1978), pp. 34-35;
Seznec (above n. 100), pp. 57, 61.
191
Foucault, p. 15. The first western hospital to house the mad is mentioned in
the statutes of the Order of the Holy at founded 1178-79
Spirit Montpellier, (p. 44).
192 a New
E. Grassi, "Can Rhetoric Provide Basis for Philosophizing? The Hu
manist Tradition," Philosophy and Rhetoric 11(1978), p. 14.
193Ibid., p. 81.
194 n. 37).
A. D. Lindsay (above
Magic and Rhetoric 109

metaphorical" among the humanists.195 The humanist movement

marked a revival of the Greek sophistic notion of rhetoric as magic.

Nancy Struever writes that "the concern with figure and sound [on
the part of the humanists] is conducive to the inclusion of irrational
as well as rational aspects of thought-as-experience."196 Richard
Lanham says: "You cannot read Renaissance literature for long
without a delight in words, an infatuation
noticing everywhere
with rhetoric, a stylistic explosion."197 This efflorescence is accom
panied by a heightened interest in musical chromaticism, that is, in
a for the direct emotion of textual homophony versus
preference
the diffused experience of polyphony, in an attempt to capture the
"powerful pyschological and sometimes even miraculous effects
on listeners that Greek music was supposed to have been capable
of producing."198
Here, then, in the later Middle Ages we find all the phenomena
in which we are interested competing, exactly as in the eleventh
century, in disorder: the of a rationalism aimed in part
growth
against occultism, the growth of interest in the "irrational" and oc
cultism, an upsurge of interest in both rhetoric/ techn? and rheto
These conjunctions demand an explanation that moves
ric/magic.
beyond the somewhat simplistic chronological sequence of ratio
nalism plus rhetoric/ techn? followed by an oscillation of the pen

195Grassi, p. 84.
196Struever (above n. 4), p. 67, and see also
p. 81.
197Lanham (above n. 14), p. 33. The association between "Renaissance," "Hu
manism" and "rhetoric"
grows stronger with each decade: H. H. Gray, "Renais
sance Humanism: the Pursuit of Eloquence" in Renaissance Essays from the Journal of
the History of Ideas, ed. P. O. Kristeller and P. P. Wiener (N.Y., 1968), pp. 199-216;
W. J. Bouwsma, in Later Renaissance Culture," Viator
"Changing Assumptions
7(1976), pp. 421-40; "The Renaissance and the Drama of Western Ameri
History,"
can Historical Review84 (1979), pp. 1-15; The Culture of Renaissance Humanism (Ameri
can Historical Association 1973); "The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism
pamphlet,
and Augustinianism in Renaissance Itinerarium Italicum, ed. H. A. Ober
Thought,"
man and T. A. Brady 1975), pp. 3-60, and the Forma
(Leiden, esp. p. 3; "Anxiety
tion of Early Modern After the Reformation:
Culture," Essays in Honor off. H. Hexter,
ed. B. C. Malament of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), pp. 215ff (especially
(University
234, "fluidity" in the Renaissance with rhetoric being the sci
replacing "certainty,"
ence of and fluidity "valued in the Renaissance for its plasticity, its ability
probability
to flow into and through every area of experience.") Cf. also Maurice Finocchiaro's
exhaustive emphasis upon the rhetorical aspects of Galileo's work: Galileo and the Art

ofReasoning:RhetoricalFoundationsOf Logic and ScientificMethod (Reidel, 1980).

198See the interesting (17) by H. M. Brown in E. Cochrane, The Late Ital
chapter
ian Renaissance 1525-1630 (Macmillan, 1970), and Brian Vickers in Rhetorica 2(1) 1984.
 110 RHETORICA

dulum towards rhetoric/magic and irrationalism suggested by our

initial reading of De Romilly's book. In outlining such an explana
tion I bring this paper to a close.

IV Conclusion

What I propose instead of the simplistic chronological pattern

just mentioned, is, in fact, a chronological pattern tempered with
some attention to the sociology of writing. Put simply, we must
distinguish between simple, archaic, primarily rural, and oral so
cieties in which the literate, intellectual class is a small beleaguered
minority, and complicated, pluralist societies in which literacy is
in which different (literate) worlds can co
relatively widespread,
exist, in which there is an observable power struggle for control of
and scientia that results in some and
literacy, word power, groups
individuals emerging victorious, while others become marginal
ized. In simple societies, a simple chronological pattern of chang
ing interests on the part of the small literate elite may well emerge
as that elite encounters different influences and embraces them
In our second type of society, competing cultural
homogeneously.
universes will coexist and conflict one with another. The high points
in the period we have just surveyed, the fourth, twelfth, and fif
teenth centuries (to use crude and rather too narrowly stated con
ventional chronological delineations) are significant points of diver
sification and conflict between cultural universes and the groups
that sustain them, not simple swings of De Romilly's pendulum. In
later antiquity the advent of Christianity, of the military Emperors
and their new social class of palatini, of increasingly significant
eastern influences, and the rich maturity of Graeco-Latin culture
across the whole canvas of sophisticated urban imperial territory,
created new dimensions of cultural conflict?between palatini and
senatores, between Christians and pagans and gnostics and here
tics, between new social groups and old ones, for example?that
resulted in radical cultural and mental shifts, the ramifications and
dimensions of which have been charted with great insight by R. F.
Newbold.199 In the period of the Twelfth Century Renaissance' Eu
rope lurched decisively and irrevocably into an age of archival gov

199Cf. above n. 116, n. 119, and n. 152.

Magic and Rhetoric 111

ernment and relatively widespread, dominant literacy in which,

after a struggle, a powerful, diversified, and numerous literate elite
that was to shape for all subsequent time the cultural
emerged
mentality of the European world. In the period of the "Italian Re
naissance," a precocious shift of literacy took place further from
the monopolist studiuml universitasl ecclesia power centers of an ear
lier age, into the market place, the commune, the court, with the
consequence that, as in the twelfth century, new recruits to literacy
were sucked into the new literate vortices from the rural world.
These changes and shifts accentuated the conflict of cultural uni
verses and sensitized the interconnections among them with con
sequences of direct relevance to our theme.
To explain adequately the links between the phenomena en
countered so far in this paper, we need to develop the sociological
patterns hinted at earlier in our discussion. For example, the tide of
"irrationalism" in the later Middle Ages, most evident in the growth
of the witchcraft phenomenon, is nowadays reckoned to be the
in of a intellectual class in a
product, large part, particular particu
lar social context, rather than of society as a whole; it is, in other
words, difficult to tell just how far common beliefs in society at
large paralleled the manias of intellectuals.200 Peaking of interest in
the irrational, as we have seen, derives as much from socio-political
a very for
changes of particular type, associated example with the
rise of courts and bureaucratic monarchies, as it does from the
changing cultural values of a society in general. Social changes
affecting the position of a particular class also account for peaking
of interest in rhetoric as magic. The rise of courts and bureaucratic
monarchies in the 12th century, together with the tentacular elabo
ration of ecclesiastical and papal governments created a critical cli

200For an attempt (that has been criticized) see Kieckhefer (above n. 45). P. Rich?,
"La Magie de l'Acad?mie des Inscriptions
Carolingienne," Comptes Rendus et Belles
lettres, (Paris, 1973), pp. 127ff comments on the increase in magical beliefs in all
classes during the Carolingian period. Does this phenomenon, however, represent
a mania of the intellectuals (who are at the same time fascinated the power of
by
classical rhetorical and poetic or their reaction to a
writing) developing passion
among the lower orders? Does their own heightened
it represent awareness of the
occult brought about by the extension of Carolingian conquests into deeply pagan
areas? The emphasis of the present paper is necessarily upon the intellectual class
rather than the folk mentality of the time, and De Romilly's remarks this
require
qualification. For the general prevalence of occultic beliefs among the masses cf.
Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, pp. 664-66. See also above n. 29.
112 RHETORICA

mate of competition among, and a demand for, literate intellectuals

and administrators, many of whom were drawn from nonliterate
and marginal social groups and trained in cathedral schools (with
their broader intellectual goals and standards) rather than in spe
cialized institutions of administrative and dictatorial skills. The re
sult was a class of "alienated" intellectuals, producing novel, non
established literary forms?Goliardic verse, cosmological poetry,
Romance, history, belleslettres, letters, and farragines like John of
Salisbury's Policraticus or Walter Map's De nugis curialium or Ger
vase of Tilbury's Otia imperialia. Another peak of interest in rhetoric
as magic was occasioned by the precocious growth of communal
chanceries in Italy after the collapse of the Hohenstaufen regime,
an
leading up to Dante's day. Becker in interesting article entitled
"Dante and His Literary Contemporaries as Political Men" has de
scribed the literary activities of Dante, Dino Compagni, and others
as a combination of eloquence and politics.201 A third
unique peak
ing of interest in rhetoric as magic is associated with the later Ital
ian humanists. Lauro Martines characterizes this class as sprung
"from families of a middling sort, often professional, rather than
from well-established class families; . . . dozens . . .were
upper
'outsiders' in the sense that they won patronage or major public
. . .
positions in cities to which they were not native they were av
ambitious, mobile, and combative . . .
idly socially proud, touchy
. . . itwas the skill that
they clung to the ideal of eloquence because
. . . took them in the world . . . from social positions.
up middling
Sooner, therefore, and more faithfully than men to the manner
born, the men, men on the make?were able
professionals?new
to articulate the values of the elites which they had entered or to
which or in whose service their pens were arrayed
they aspired,
. . .but fundamental social trends?such as the century's deepen

ing stress on birth, class and privilege?also had the effect on

them, as parvenus, of intensifying their touchiness, snobbery and
esteem for the intellectual virtues."202 Some members of the dicta
tor/humanist class were sprung from relatively aristocratic origins:
Dante derived from a 12th century Ghibelline noble family, and in
his Commedia a conservative and aristocratic stand
adopts socially

201 see Mor

Speculum 41(1966), pp. 665-80, esp. p. 679. For the twelfth century,
ris (above n. 162) chapter 6 and Frappell (n. 82 above), chap. 7.
202L.Martines, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (N. Y., 1979),
p. 206.
Magic and Rhetoric 113

was sprung from an

point; Brunetto Latini imperial knight/notary,
and Martines has noted others.203 Nevertheless the precocious in
terest that intellectuals in the three periods just mentioned show in
rhetoric as magic derives from their own class experience, not from
the general features of the social mentality of their day.
The particular example of Florence is instructive. Between 1343
and 1393, Becker speaks of "an enlargement of communal bureau
cracy" in Florence. There was a five-fold increase in the "number
of officials hired by the Florentine a vast expansion in
treasury,"
the vicariate and the captaincy "throughout the burgeoning Flor
entine Empire," "a movement towards the bureaucratization of the
the rise of a "new officialdom."204 Such a must
polis," development
have accentuated the primacy of literacy and put a new premium
on the skills a class of persons many of whom must
possessed by
have come from less literate backgrounds and felt the sharp edge of
their new social situation. At the same time, Brucker stresses a new
emphasis upon rhetorical skills in the pratiche of the period 1382
1434. An essential aspect of this new rhetorical awareness was a
concentration upon history as a crucial element in political persua
sion.205 This rhetorical and historical awareness blossomed into
the sustained classicizing rhetoric that Hans Baron has associated
specifically with the wars against Giangaleazzo Visconti.206 Such a
close association is, of course, unnecessary. The characteristic fea
ture of the Florentine 1382-1434 is a recurrence of the conflict
polity
between "formal" and "informal" power, between the processes of
the government and the constitution on the one hand, and the influ

^Wieruszowski (above n. 106), p. 520; Dante, Paradiso cantos xv-xvii; some

members of Dante's poetic circle in Florence to important families or
"belonged
were men of law" (Anderson, above n. 101, p. 82). Guido Cavalcanti was a member
of one of Florence's wealthiest families. See also Martines, The Social World of the
Florentine Humanists 1390-1460 (London, 1963), p. 14. For Giovanni Villani, see F.
Antal, Florentine Painting and its Social Background (London, 1948), pp. 47ff. Agrippa
van Nettesheim (1487-1535) was also of noble birth and a member of court circles
(Easlea, above n. 4). By contrast, Paracelsus was a "social outcast" (Ibid. p. 100).
204N. Rubinstein, ed., Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Renaissance Flor
ence (Evanston, 1968), pp. 117-119. D. Herlihy, "The Tuscan Town in the Quattro
cento: A Demographic Profile," Medievalia et Human?stica ns. 1(1970), pp. 99-104
notes the peculiarly immigrant origins of notaries and intellectuals.
205
G. Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1977),
pp. 290ff and 284-302 generally.
^Ibid., pp. 293-94, and cf. R. G. Witt, "Florentine Politics and the Ruling
Class 1382-1402," Journal ofMedieval and Renaissance Studies 6(1976), pp. 243-67.
114 RHETORICA

ence of the elite of entrenched wealthy, well-connected families, on

the other. We have noted that in late antiquity such a situation
caused?according to Peter Brown?a rise in witchcraft accusa
tions, and in twelfth and thirteenth century Europe?according to
Edward Peters?a conjunction of interest in rhetoric and magic.
So, in late fourteenth and early fifteenth century Florence, those
groups and individuals whose power and status was neither as as
sured nor as predictable as they would have liked, a
display height
ened awareness of the power of rhetoric and rhetorical genres (for
example, history) in face-to-face persuasive situations. That this
development should have a rising incidence of sor
accompanied
cery accusations207 is no
surprise.
The social and cultural experience of the class of new intellec
tuals just mentioned must be linked to a far broader perspective for
later medieval and early Renaissance society. Norbert Elias has
suggested that the development of a courtly society and culture in
this period is but one symptom of a broad change affecting upper
literate elements in society. He calls this change a process of "dis
tancing," a product of the increasingly and competitively interde
pendent upper class world in and around the courts of the day and
the necessary behavioral and linguistic codes used to mark rank
and distance between individuals. Part of a process of increasing
consciousness of a difference between self and nature, self and ob
this and "detachment" represents a key feature
ject, "distancing"
of later medieval elite urban society, a society progressively domi
nated by the phenomenon of the centralized court.208 Reflection
and calculation, argues Elias, replace spontaneity in social rela
tions. Like Burckhardt, Elias starts from transformations wrought
by the centralized state and its court; the state came to be viewed as
"a work of art," to use Burckhardt's phrase.209
Part and parcel of "this shift towards an increased conscious

207Cf. n. 186 above.

208
See John Larner, "Europe of the Courts," Journal ofModern History 55 (1983),

pp. 669-681; N. Elias, The Court trans. E. Jephcott (N.Y., 1983), pp. 242-43.
Society,
On the relevance of Elias' work see n. 85), pp. 5-16. I have also had
Jaeger (above
the benefit of an unpublished paper on the subject by my colleague M. W. Jackson,
entitled, "The Power of Civilization."
209Elias, p. 243. J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans.
S. G. C. Middlemore (Mentor, 1960),pt. I. Jaeger (above n. 85), p. 258: "circum
stances in court society action to etiquette, a and
subject prescribe stylized speech
. . . conduct becomes so highly structured that life approaches art: the cour
posture
tier is himself a work of art. ..."
Magic and Rhetoric 115

ness of the autonomy of what is experienced in relation to the per

son who towards a greater autonomy of 'objects' in
experiences,
the experience of 'subjects', [which] is closely related to the thick
ening armour that is being interposed between affective impulses
and the objects at which they are directed, in the form of ingrained
self-control," of "this new level of ability to attain greater certainty
about events," is the paradoxical circumstance that "quite specific
new sources of uncertainty are opened at the same time. . . .The
steady increase in certain knowledge is accompanied in countless
variations by manifestations of this specific uncertainty. While in
some areas, that of 'Nature,' the concepts and modes
particularly
of thought used by people match the observable facts better than
ever before, while in this sense the image that people form of natu
ral phenomena becomes more adequate and reliable, at the same
time people cannot convince themselves that everything they think
about this 'reality' is not mere ideas, products of the human mind,
in short illusions. This uncertainty, the doubt concerning the rela
tion of reality and illusion, pervades the whole period."210
This new sense of uncertainty?Bouwsma has called it "anxi
a premium upon rhetoric as the preserver and codi
ety"211?places
fier of "social distance," the determiner of image and mask, the
ideology and discourse of communication and social interreaction,
the science of self-control and hence, social mastery. Thus the
flood of courtesy books, the treatises on conversation, wit, man
ners, and the proliferation of dictaminal texts in the period.212 This
new sense of uncertainty also throws into high relief the occult as a
potentially powerful and interestingly novel source of security and
"control" over the uncertainties and insecurities unleashed by the
competitive world of the court retainer and dependent, who can no
longer be "protected" by the insulating ritual of church or ancestral
neighborhood. The "reality" of the occult is, in fact, permitted by
the growing sense of the "unreality"?that is, vulnerability to ma
nipulation?of the observed world, and by the disappearance (for
the groups affected) of the participatory, spontaneous culture of the
archaic world.213 Bouwsma has recently referred to this complex of
cultural attitudes as an in western culture, be
oscillatory phase

210Elias, p. 252.
211
Above n. 197.
212Mark D. Johnston in Rhetorica 4(1) (1968), pp. 21ff, and Jaeger (n. 85 above),
pp. 13-16 and 211ff; Kinsman (above n. 58), ch. III.
213See Heather Phillips, in n. 162 above.
 116 RHETORICA

tween "Renaissance humanism" and "intellectual scholasticism."214

To this insight we need simply to add that individuals, like social
groups, are pushed periodically into the "relativist mode" by the
processes of marginalization, alienation, and environmental shift
associated with the dynamics of expanding literacy and cultural di
versification that characterize certain periods. Elias' term "courtiza
tion" indicates the role played by courts in these processes. Where
relatively large numbers of persons from backgrounds in which lit
eracy may not have been characteristic are affected by such dynam
ics, we have what can be recognized as a "Renaissance," to use a
term appropriate to an older generation of primarily philological
historians of culture.215 Set within these "Renaissances" are ag
of phenomena that may be associated with our theme.
gregations
Thus, for example, at the heart of the "twelfth century Renais
sance," in the Romances of Chr?tien de Troyes, the role of reflec
tion, calculation and the trivium, especially syntactic or hypothetic
rhetoric, as described by Vinaver, Hunt and others,216 reminds us
of the close link between courts and rhetoric as magic. Rhetoric
emerges as a crucial form of to an age in
distancing appropriate
which the transforming processes I have been referring to were
more than usually evident.
My conclusions, then, briefly, stated, are these. The chronologi
cal sequence of oscillations of the pendulum between rhetoric/
techn? and rhetoric/ magic that De Romilly presents for antiquity,
and, perhaps, implicitly for subsequent cultural periods, does not
work for the Middle Ages and Renaissance. For these periods we
are more impressed by the simultaneous peaking on the one hand,
of interest in rhetoric/ techn? and an urge to "control" and, on the
other, and an urge to the clear focus of
rhetoric/magic disrupt
rational, systematic "control" (as inappropriate to the margins
of the court, or the market-place). This second impulse seeks to
replace institutionally sanctioned forms of discourse with the
blurred, impressionistic, imagistic absence of focus inherent in po
etry, practical rhetoric and prestidigitation, divination, and oc

214
Above n. 197.
215Elias (above n. 208), pp. 167-68, 186-87, 216-17, 219, 222-29, 244, 248, 255,
257. There is much of value also in his The Civilizing Process: State Formation and Civi
lization, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford, 1982).
216
Above n. 158, and T. Hunt, "Tradition and Originality in the Prologues of
Chrestien de Troyes," Forum for Modern Language Studies 8 (1972): pp. 320-344.
Magic and Rhetoric 117

cultism. These a broad chronological imperative, as

peakings obey
the medieval cultural world makes the transition from a small
scale, primarily oral, "archaic" culture, to the beginnings of a court
and literacy dominated, pluralist set of proto-modern cultural uni
verses, but within the broad picture of intensification from the
eleventh century onwards are set minor chronological oscillations
or "Renaissances" which have more to do with particular social re
sponses to relatively sudden spurts of the impulse towards archival
and literate modes of domination within a rapidly diversifying and
maturing cultural pattern than with general features of an age as a
whole. The dynamism or mechanics of these "spurts" seems to
have been oscillatory; patterns of intense activity and competition
seem to have been succeeded by more focussed, routinized, mono
lithic patterns though the geography and timing of the oscillations
is hard to work out. The dislocation, diversification, competition,
and transformation associated with cultural changes that took
in the eleventh and twelfth centuries seems to have been suc
place
ceeded, in some areas at least, by a measure of stabilization or rou
tinization, in which the institutions and techniques of inquiry and
problem resolution that emerged triumphant from the earlier pe
riod enjoyed some dominance, and cultural patterns took on a
somewhat more homogeneous hue. Such stability as this process
may have achieved underwent further dislocation towards the end
of the thirteenth century when, at least in parts of France and
northern Italy, a strongly control-oriented clerical establishment
met head-on the pluralist, competitive, hotbed of lay literacy and
emerging socio-intellectual structures associated with decentraliza
tion of the imperial bureaucracy in Italy, the emergence of commu
nal chanceries and governments, and the octopus-like efficiency of
the new courts (royal, princely, condottiere) which struggled to
wrest control of social resources from church and bourgeoisie
alike. Whether they surfaced as the irrationalism of the French and
papal courts under Philip IV and John XXII,217 the rhetorical
"magic" of Dante and the other poets of the dolce stil nuovo or of
Jean de Meun, the rhetoric of the new dictaminal and preaching
trades, the apocalyptic literacy of the spiritual Franciscans, or the

dogged notarial literacy of Jacques Fournier's chancery,218 the prod

217See my review article in Journal of Religious History 13 (1984), pp. 92-113.

218Iean Duvernoy, Le Registre d'Inquisition de Jacques Fournier, ?v?que de Pamiers

(1318-1325), (Toulouse, 1965), 3 vols.
118 RHETORICA

ucts of this ferment accentuated the conjunction of the phenomena

that have intrigued us throughout this paper.
What began, then, as a rumination upon a half enunciated
"thesis" (De Romilly's) of interest to historians of rhetoric, and,
of the irrational, has taken the form of amini-cultural his
perhaps,
tory of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. I hope to have demon
strated some of the functional interdependencies between forms of
rhetorical practice and theory and attitudes towards, or practices
of, magic and the occult. If, at the same time, I have tempted some
to rethink the holist cultural history of medieval and early modern
"Renaissances" in terms of a response to and demand for growing
literacy on the part of certain social classes and groups, I trust the
reader will pardon the apparent initial incongruity of a paper that
proposed to talk of two topics not normally associated with one an
other: rhetoric and magic.