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Magia-Retrca Ward
Magia-Retrca Ward
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John O. Ward
? The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Rhetorica, Volume VI,
Number 1 (Winter 1988)
57
58 RHETORICA
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
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
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
II
"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
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
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
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
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
Ill
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
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,
(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
(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
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
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
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
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
79A.Momigliano, ed., The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth
(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
^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
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
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.
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
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
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
fishing_119
119R.R Newbold, "Centre Periphery and Eye in the Late Roman Empire," Flo
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
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
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
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
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
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:
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. . . .
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
IV Conclusion
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
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
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
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