Early Medieval stylistic rhetoric

Abstract

According to the well-known expert on medieval rhetoric, James J. Murphy, the three typical medieval forms of rhetoric are the art of letter writing, the art of preaching and the art of poetry (Murphy, 1971, p. xv). In this paper we are concerned only with the second of these arts, namely, the rhetoric of preaching. Though the perceptive treatises on the rhetoric of preaching, the so-called artes praedicandi, did not originate before the thirteenth century, pulpit rhetoric was very much alive in the earlier part of the Middle Ages and fine examples of this kind of eloquence can be quoted.