JOHN O . WARD

Magic and Rhetoric From Antiquity to the Renaissance: Some Ruminations

I

he conjimction of magic and rhetoric, proposed in recent years for certain periods or social sitaations between Graeco-Roman and Renaissance times, promises inter­

esting insights into both authorized social and inteUectaal power structares during that epoch (the intellectaal, institational and procedural world of "Ucensed" school, studium, magister, summa, audoritas, facultas, disciplina) and unauthorized ones (the intellectaal world of the Uterate courtier or secular cleric, notary, practicing professional in the market-place). The interplay between these structares has not received the attention it deserves in our cultaral histories, and the very natare of unauthorized structares has to some extent been obscured by the lack of validation accorded them by the orthodox or dominant institations and structares 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 differ­ent individuals and groups. In the background of my enquiry is the cultaral 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 hu­manism of the Renaissance, or as the advent of a "modern," "ra-

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

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tional" cultaral mentality (c. 1050 A.D. onwards) supersedmg an archaic, superstitious, ritaal cultare (c. 500-1050 A.D.). It is not my project here to comment directly upon these dichotomous se­quences, but I hope that my enquiry wUl both complicate and enrich them.

A starting point is provided by Jacqueline De RomUIy's Magic and Rhetoric in Ancient Greece.^ De RomUly proposes a hnk between magic and rhetoric thus: apate or "Ulusion," is the aim of rhetoric; it is also the aim of magic. "Anything that is urational and deprives you of lucidity is witchcraft, "goetda."^ AU arts of Ulusion are "goe-tda," including rhetoric, Plato argues in the Republic.^

De RomUly also contrasts two conceptions of rhetoric. First, rhetoric as magic: logos or speech as a "great lord" (dunastes megas), as "divinely inspired enchantment" (entheos epoidos), as "magical power" (diinamis), as "sorcery" (godda), to use Gorgias' terminol­ogy. Second, rhetoric as techne: "rules, mode, way of gairung 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 reahty." The

'Cambridge, Mass., 1975. The original version of the present paper was deliv­ered as the Borchers Lecture in Communication Arts at the Third Biennial Meeting of the Intemational Society for the History of Rhetoric, Madison, Wisconsin, 1981.1 would like to thank Deirdre Stone, David McRuvie, Julian Holland, and Conal Con-dren for intelligent comment on various drafts. A random selection of reviews of De Romilly's book reveals httie to my purpose: Rev. des Et Grecques 91 (1978), p. 217; Rev. de Philol. 51(1977), p. 281; Class, foumal 74(1978-79), pp. 170-71; Revue Beige de Philol. 56(1978), pp. 442-43, where we are reminded that for Gorgias too, rhetoric was a techne; Richard Enos, Philos. and Rhd. 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 thought fur­ther about its themes, particularly in connection with literature that has appeared since 1981.

^Ibid., pp. 26-27, 30. ^Ibid., p. 31. "M. 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 Rermissance (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." There is much of value on the two concep­tions of rhetoric expressed here in Michael Leff, "The Frozen Image: Sulpicius Vic­tor and the Ancient Rhetorical Tradition." (Ph.D. diss.. University of California, 1972.) For Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, 2.4, "Poetry . . is nothing else but rhetori­cal composition set to music": A. Preminger, O. B. Hardison, K. Kerrane, eds.. Clas­sical 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 statas of one among many skills, the skUl of observ­ing and mastering the persuasive factors that any sitaation pre­sents, with no privileged statas m regard to factaal reahty. The link between the first of the above conceptions of rhetoric and magic does not, in Plato's eyes at least, preclude a hnk between magic and "reason." Paradoxically, perhaps, agaurst the "magic" of rhetorical Ulusion, Plato placed the Socratean "magic" of "reasoning and dis­cussion, when devoted to the search for truth." However, the ar­gument between Plato and Gorgias, continues De RomUly, was not so much a conflict between the magic of Socratean reasoning and the Gorgian attitade towards "the deceiving power of style . . . the choice and arrangement of arguments which could create at wUl any kind of emotion," as it was a conflict about the natare of techne, or "lucid knowledge." Thus, it centered on such issues as whether Gorgias' description of rhetoric as a techne was valid, or whether medicine was analogous to rhetoric. In his search for some certain­ties in the world of flux and perception, Plato almost succeeded in banishing the "arts of Ulusion" from the canon of legitimate arts.

Out of this quarrel between plausibUity and certainty emerged the notion of rhetoric as a legitimate techne, purged of its magical, iUusory associations.' This rhetoric emphasized "the reasoning on which the proof rests,"* as opposed to "irrational means" of gain­ing approval, which are "unscientific and [have] nothing to do with the real techne."'' With Aristotle, rhetoric acquired "the safe and unquestionable quality of theoretical knowledge;" it emerged as a legitimate techne paraUel to Plato's own art, dialectic,' "a fuU grown techne with respectable companions, including dialectic, ethics and politics."' 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 actually ascribed occultic superstition to Homer, Vergil, Ovid and linked it with humanism, poetry and ancient philosophy, B. Easlea, Witch Hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy (Harvester, 1980), pp. 4, 212.

^De Romilly, Magic and Rhetoric, p. 55, and earlier, p. 37. For useful back­ground, see Helen North, "Inutilis sibi, perniciosus patriae: a Platonic Argument Against Sophistic Rhetoric," Illinois Classical Studies 6 (1981), pp. 242-71.

'De Romilly, p. 60. 'Ibid., p. 59. »Ibid., pp. 60-61. 'Ibid., p. 65.

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"The magic of speech, the magic of style no longer had a place m the new rhetoric'"" of the fourth centary B.C. The theorists of that centary "had disregarded the urational impact of oratory, the poet­ical strangeness in style, and any rehance upon inspiration. They had made a choice."" "The defence of rhetoric as techne had meant a divorce from its seductive and attractive marvels.'"^

Two comments on De RomUIy'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 IjsseUng in his Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict.^^ It amounts to the acceptance, or non-acceptance of a different order of reahty for language and "things:" at one end of a sliding scale, to so speak, hes language as a medium of technical communication, with as few eddies and coruscations as possible emanating from its own substance and existence. At the 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 Ulustration, Richard Lanham's "serious" view of reality, involv­ing "ordinary" use of language, and a "rhetorical" view, involving literatare, poetry and rhetorical prose."

Second, De RomUIy's examination of Aristotle's "magic-less" rhetoric'^ makes clear that what is at stake is control of discomse within "rational bounds." This notion of control of discourse— rhetoric as techne (distinct from the older Gorgianic or pre-Gorgiaruc notion of rhetoric as magic)—wUl emerge in medieval cultare as a dominant element in the struggle between different groups for control of knowledge.

In her final chapter, De RomUly 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 weU."^* In the first and second centaries A.D., the

'"Ibid., pp. 65-66. "Ibid., p. 70. '^Ibid., p. 66. "The Hague, 1976. "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.

"De Romilly, pp. 70-75. "Ibid., pp. 69-70.

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period chosen by De RomiUy to stady the retarn of "magical rheto­ric," there is evident" a revival of magic . . . the magic of the magos and of the sacred healer, the Pythagorean magic. . . . Even among sophists and rhetoricians we find several people accused of practic­ing magic."" "The sophist Aristides was an adept in . . . sacred magic.'"* 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 subhme speech; the rhetors of the Asian influenced "second sophistic" went further in the dhection 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 irra­tional impact and power."" The "Asianism" of the second sophis­tic "reveals, in the full hght of history, an obstinate longing toward something that had been lost for several centaries under the weight of overinteUectaal methods," a longing which amounts to an as­pect of the "struggle between the spell of the irrational and the de­sire to master it by means of reason," a struggle which "could . . . be foUowed not only in Greek and Latin prose . . . but in aU Utera-ttues and at aU times." °

Ages, De RonuUy seems to imply, move between one tendency and the other,^^ but it is not untU her own day that she feels the exact reversal of Aristotle's "rationahsm" has come about, and a fuU retarn to Gorgianic or pre-Gorgianic "magic and . . . inspi­ration" 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 urational domination."^ Rather surprisingly, De RomiUy continues, rhetoric has come in for a revival ("a new rhetoric"^), though in a far

''Ibid., pp. 76, 81. "Ibid., p. 77. "Ibid., pp. 79, 84. ™Ibid., p. 85. "Cf. Ibid., p. 88, "The pendulum oscillates from one excess to the other." "^Jhid., pp. 86-87. ''Ibid., p. 87; cf. Ch. Perelman, The New Rhdoric and the Humanities (Reidel,

1979); R. BarUh, Poetica e Retorica (Milan, 1969-1984), pp. 5-38; W. B. Horner, ed., The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric (U. of Missouri Press, 1983); J. O. Ward, "Artificiosa Eloquentia in the Middle Ages." (Ph.D. Diss., Toronto, 1972), ch. I.

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broader sense than that in which Aristotie under s tood the art. In fact, "classical rhetoric is treated as obsolete . . . as obsolete as faith in the very transparence and objectivity of language."^*

Such a presentat ion of t rends in twent ie th centary modern ism and cultare generally is not wi thout a certain resonance. Not orUy is ours in some senses the age of "deconst ruct ion ," of a "Diony-sian" reversal of the nineteenth centary "AppoUonian" constmc-tion of positivist/empiricist, "rat ional" certainties in the arts and sciences, but it is an age in which some have detected an alarmmg rise in interest in the supernataral . The contemporary AustraUan poet A. D. Hope , for example, refers to

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

Another contemporary critic writes:

Contemporary man, tortured . . by self-consciousness, turns to new cults and therapies not to free himself from obsessions but to find meaning and purpose in Ufe, to find something to Uve for, precisely to embrace an obsession, if only the passion maitresse of therapy itself. . .

"De Romilly, p. 87. '^Quoted in David Tribe, The Rise of the Mediocracy (London, 1975), p. 53. See

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

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the hero of a recent novel renounces free choice and lives according to the dictation of dice. Whereas earlier ages sought to substitute reason for arbitrary dictation both from without and within, the twen­tieth century finds reason, in the debased contemporary form of ironic self-consciousness, a harsh master; it seeks to revive earlier forms of enslavement. The prison life of the past looks in our own Hme like liberation itself."

The theme of the present paper is not the validity or social sig-ruficance of these statements, nor even the accuracy of De RomiUy's presentation of the natare of Gorgianic and Aristoteleian rhetoric. Rather it is the significance for medieval and Renaissance cultaral history in the West, of her assertion first that a chronological os-cUlation between a tendency to view rhetoric as magic and a ten­dency to view it as techne is demonstrable in history from the time of Gorgias to that of Victorinus, and, second, that an oscillation to­wards rhetoric as magic is accompanied by a broader cultaral inter­est in the "irrational." I wish to ask specificaUy whether such os-ciUations can be detected in medieval and Renaissance cultares, 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 cultaral change in these periods. I thus hope to comment usefuUy on a threefold convergence of topics that enjoy some currency: the natare of the twelfth centary and Italian "Renaissances,"^^ the natare of rhetoric,^ and the historical dimen­sion of an interest in magic and witchcraft.^' The links among aU three need underlining and comment beyond what is so far to be found in the hteratare.

"Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Dimin­ishing Expectations (New York, 1979), pp. 178, 258; M. Eliade, Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions. Essays in Comparative Religions (Chicago, 1976), pp. 58ff dis­cusses the occult explosion of the 1960s and 1970s, and pp. 52, 63-64 sees revolt against "the establishment" expressed through it.

"The bibliography here is enormous, but note Warren Treadgold, ed.. Renais­sances Before the Renaissance (Stanford, 1984).

"See note 23 above, and James J. Murphy, La Retorica nel Medioevo, trans. V. Licitra (Liguori, 1983).

"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 ar­ticle, the following should be noted as seriously affecting comprehension: after "against" in second last line of text, p. 107, add "heretics (especially Cathars), or the pattern of accusation against."

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II

Our first step is to examine De Romilly's assertions a little more closely and criticaUy. Aristofle's "clearance," his reduction of rheto­ric to techne, is in a sense an over-intellectaalized approach to the subject, appropriate to the institationalized environment of an "academy," with its concern for "truth" and "certainty," its insula­tion from the conditional world of the market-place, its lack of in­terest in the "subjective," the "emotional," the "irrational," in "magic."^ How is it, then, that "even among sophists and rheto­ricians [under the Roman Empire] we find several people accused of practising magic?"'' No answer is given by De RomiUy other than to point to the Asian origin of the second sophistic'^ and to suggest the causal primacy of "a revival of the irrational in Iffe and thought" which in some unannounced way precedes and predeter­mines the osciUation of the pendulum in the specified direction.'^ One of the initial difficulties, therefore, of De RomiUy's thesis is simply that it is cast in terms of an entire cultare, with no indica­tion of any mechanism that might explain changes of attitade or mentality one way or the other.

We are therefore left in search of factors which may account for the oscUlatory peaks of rationalism and irrationalism indicated by De RomUly in her survey. Some initial groundwork here may be established by a consideration of what, in the medieval and Re­naissance context, may be meant by rhetoric as magic and rhetoric as techne.

In some respects the distinction is that between "theory" and "practice," the ars considered "intrinsically," as a body of precep­tive lore, and "extrinsically," as a certain set of discursive prac­tices.^ Thus, we might define rhetoric/tec^ine 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.

"De Romilly, p. 76. '^Ibid., p. 82. "Ibid., p. 88. ^Victorinus, Commentary on Cicero's De inventione in Rhetores Latini Minores,

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 (Cf 74, above note 1, p. 170).

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inventione, the rules of didamen, the ars podriae, 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 detect­able in the art and practice of rhetoric, a concern with the acqui­sition of a rhetorical capacity (i.e., the rules) must surely pre­cede any demonstration of this capacity in practice.'^ This will be even more certainly the case in a cultare where literate dis­course takes place in an artificially promoted and crUtaraUy anach­ronistic language such as Latin in medieval and Renaissance cul­ture, 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 skiU existed in the same anachronistic language.^ In fact, we may be tempted to associ­ate rhetoric/magic specffically with oral performance or primitive ciUtares, and rhetoric/fechne with standards of verbal performance as set by writing and hteracy. Plato, in his Ion, specifically associ­ates rhetoric/magic with the poetic utterances of rhapsodists "in a state of inspiration . . . possessed by a spirit not their own""' and the UrU< with priirutive societies is suggested by some recent an­thropological research.^ The concept of the poet as a divinely in­spired prophet-seer is not absent in medieval and Renaissance ciUtare: John of Salisbury asserts in a well-known passage that "po­etry is the cradle of philosophy" and much of the inspiration be­hind the Latin cosmological poetry of the twelfth centary derives from the beUef that poetry by its aUusive metaphoric, Ulusionistic natare can approximate better to truths that cannot be framed

^See, 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.

*Cf. the discussion in E. Breisach, ed.. Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiog­raphy (Kalamazoo, 1985), p. 133.

"Plato, 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 RomUly, pp. 4-13.

'"I refer here to the unpublished research of Raechelle Rubinstein on Balinese poets such as Ida Pedanda Made Sidemen (d. 10/9/1984).

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

Thus, a workable line of approach for medieval and Renais­sance cultares may well entaU an association between rhetoric/ techne 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, disci­plines, implies restriction of persuasive rhetorical capacities to ap­proved channels; emotional "power" implies both the disruption of rational preceptive systems that derives from the incantatory, metaphoric, poetic mode,*' and the challenge to authorized classes and disciplines that derives from traffic with occult systems, in par­ticular those areas of occult systems regularly proscribed by au­thorized groups and persons within the period. There is here both a difference of "interpretive strategies"'' 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-universitas/universitas-studium system of benefices and more depen­dent upon misceUaneous court patronage; a measure of free float­ing between these two cultaral environments is not impossible for individuals, but texts will be characterized by one rather than an­other. A close link between the fortanes of rhetoric and magic can be expected precisely because rhetoric as a form of "control" devel­ops 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

' 'John of Salisbury, Mdalogikon 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," Modem Philology 43(1945-46), pp. 217-34, reprinted in Critics and Criticism Ancient and Modern, ed., R. S. Crane (Chicago, 1952), pp. 297ff. For the humanist emphasis upon poetry and metaphor as "truth," see E. Grassi, Heidigger and the Question of Rermissance Humanism (Binghamton, 1983), espe­cially pp. 29, 57, 71, 76.

*"'It is here that the gap between poetry and oratory (rhetoric/tec/ine) becomes most apparent, because so much poetry is notoriously unclear." M. Murrin, The Vdl of Allegory (Chicago/London, 1969), p. 8. On metaphor as par excellence the distur­bance of the established "prosaic" relationships between outer sign and mearung, see Renate Lachmann in P. Steiner et al., eds'.. The Structure of the Literary Process (Amsterdam, Philadelphia, 1982). Vergil's epic "polyvalency" was an important leg­acy to the medieval and Renaissance practitioners of allegorical, poetic, rhetoric/ magic: Murrin, The Allegorical Epic (Chicago/ London, 1980), pp. 19ff.

^'See B. Stock in New Literary History 16(1984-5), pp. 27-28.

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on sorcery, demonology, and witchcraft derive from the threat such views of the power of the sorcerer imply for the clerical estab­lishment's control of the supernataral. An interest in what is de­scribed in authorized discourse as the irrational wUl characteriye those seeking to nullify the power of the "free" rhetor and sor­cerer, just as it wiU characterize the rhetor and the sorcerer them­selves, and where the power struggle between these groups is most intense, there wUl our conjunction be most obvious. An inter­est in rhetoric as magic stimulates an interest in rhetoric as techne, in rhetoric as mode of control, and the interaction serves to focus attention on the irrational on the part of both practitioners and controUers. The location of the free rhetor and the sorcerer in the same sociological context (courts, dependency, the margins of es­tablishment society) and an inevitable focus upon rhetoric as the major resource of polemical vocabulary complete the convergence.

A further point must precede a fuUer exposition of these themes. If we 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 im­plicit cogitations or sense impressions in the mind, then a text (whether speech, poem, letter, history, summa, or other) wUl lie somewhere between the two. It represents for us, today, the only access we have to the order of thurgs in past times. It represented for contemporaries in those past times an ordered manifestation, a weUing-up, "realization," fixing, a transmission of some aspects of the order of things, a conjurmg up for the specific purpose of trans­mitting, 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 U may unpede transmission, arrest the would-be decoder, waylay him/her in the opacity of its own textare. 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, defini­tions of terms, ui regard to the interpretation of the order of t h i n g s -accepted by writer and putative audience. Such a sitaation wUl exist where writer and audience are hnked by institational valida­tion; that is, they cuculate within an environment where an estab­lished institation, discipline, or system of thought, has sorted out and instUled in advance some agreed rules of communication. On the other hand, where the cohesion of group and shared classifi-

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cations, rules, or procedures"' is weak, the text becomes a tour-de-force guaranteed only by the charisma of its author or the par­ticular attractiveness of its presentation, or the mystic promise of "occult" knowledge for which, again, the writer is the chief guar­antor. However viewed in detaU, the "opaque" text represents an intensified act of imposition of self upon the disorder of event and reality; it is a personal, unifying, creating act. The important aspect of magic and the occult for this paper is that it represents a particu­larly forceful imposition of self; it offers the possibihty of a mastery over natare and the future as a result of individual or personal knowledge and skiUs acquired and guaranteed by the writer. This is a possibihty denied to the Christian priest who is more of a help­less executor through established ritaals, or an observer of the wUl of God. Mastery of rhetoric offers simUar possibiUties to those offered by magic and the occult. The point is underlined when we remember the touchiness of medieval Christianity towards the sec­ular arts of language and science: too great a rehance on the "self-service" aspects of the secular arts threatened the acquisition of sal­vation and grace which were at the disposal of God alone, working through his clerical hierarchy on earth. Dante's VirgU and Beatrice represented a compromise here, as did the Liberal Arts portal of Chartres Cathedral and St. Augustine's simUe of plundering the Egyptians.*' 1 would suggest, therefore, that the ultimate signifi-

"Readers may recall here the notions of "grid and group" in the writings of Mary Douglas; see D. Oldroyd in History of Science 24 (1968), pp. 145-71, and Eco's notions of "overcoding" and "undercoding"—above note 14.

*' Viator 3(1972), pp. 243-44; Augustine, De dodrina Christiana 11.40.60, trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. (New York, 1958), pp. 75-76. In the late antique "secret dis­course on the mountain of Hermes Trismegistus to his son Tat," F. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964), pp. 28f, it is stated that "truth" can­not be perceived by the senses: it can only be known by the effects of its power and energy, for example, by a "conjoining" of knower and known, sign and signified. By contrast the scholastic, unrhetorical, "reasoned" or "rational" interpretive strat­egy works by disjoining, by positing an external reality that can be 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 community. Memory represents a powerful aid to the conjoining of knower and known, which may explain its signifi­cance for the rhetorical/occult project (see below note 188). Note H. Caplan, 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

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

Conversely, for those located closer to the center of shared clas­sification systems, text or discourse assigns, aUocates, divides and classifies, parcels up, "controls." Rhetoric/ techne provides limited access for approved purposes to the arsenal of language persuasive tricks and constructs, assists the devising and circulation of a view of magic as heresy and of witchcraft as the work of the devU (a pro­claimed loser to God)*^ and insulates by safe classification, assign­ment, and condemnation.

To summarize the proposal of my paper, therefore, I aim to pur­sue in brief, suggestive outline, the notions 6f rhetoric as techne, as control, and of rhetoric as magic, as surrender, and to explore the Unks between both and a broad interest in what is termed "the irra­tional," from late antiquity to the Renaissance. I do so not to sug­gest so much the oscillation between one age and another that I take to be De RomUIy's leading idea, as to suggest the somewhat more sinister struggle between groups, between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, between authorized (vahdated, legitimated) discourse, and unauthorized (or self-authorized) discourse, between insiders and outsiders, wirmers 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 de­tected for control of discourse, a struggle which gave unauthorized

"See Norbert Ellas' emphasis upon "self-detachment" and "self-conscious­ness," 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 in­teresting remarks on witchcraft as a "primitive vocabulary of individualism," rheto­ric as analogous to magic, and the verbal element in both in K. Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York, 1950), pp. 40ff.

*^See Peter Brown, "Sorcery, Demons, and the Rise of Christianity: From Late Antiquity Into the Middle Ages," in his Religion and Society in the Age of St. 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 R H E T O R I C A

discourse temporarUy greater profile in the corpus of literary traces surviving from the periods in question.

Ill

1 proceed now to iUustrate my theme in two ways. In the first way I look at my theme synchronically, with an emphasis upon the ways in which rhetoric/ techne functions to control, upon analogies with the exercise of control in the areas of magic and other "irra­tional" 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 rhetoric/magic and magic/ the urational/the occuU develops. In the second way I retarn to a more expUcitly chronological or diachronic perspective, to Ulus-trate my first way, and to summarize what is left of De RomiUj^s approach as it may be seen to apply to the medieval and Renaissance periods.

The Synchronic View

At the outset, it wUl 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,"" 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 dodrina Chris­tiana. There Augustine addresses himself not to rhetoric in its less harmful guise of techne (an art for summing up possible persuasive elements in a sitaation) but in its alluring and pleasurable guise of ornamented and artistic discourse. Augustine recommends careful neglect of verba cultiora,"' advocates a "more modest eloquence,'"^ and equates eloquentia and suavitas with dementia;'^'' gravitas and

*See J. B. Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle 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.

"Augustine, De dodrina christiarm, ed. J. Martin, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 32 (1962), p. 132 line 2 of IV. 10.24.

"Ibid., p. 138 line 28 of IV. 14.31. "Ibid., p. 137 line 16 of IV 14.30.

Magic and Rhetoric 71

pidas 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 sen­tence structare with classical word order and variation in clause length, not a matter of complex colores like homoeoptoton, parono­masia, exdamatio, continuatio, gradatio, conversio, complexio, tradudio, contentio, corredio, etc., but rather a matter of simple, forceful com­binations of devices like repditio (used frequently, with simple words lUce ecce, in, per, an, qui) and isocola involving very short phrases.'^ Augustine's sermo humilis has thus excluded many of the resources of rhetorical discourse, and the metaphor of the woman using cosmetics as an insult to God is employed to suggest the dis­placement of styUstic grandeur in favor of clear statement of ap­proved content.'^

Rhetoric thus, hke use of the occult, represented a threat to a clerical monopoly of minds and knowledge. This latter aspect emerges clearly in the attitade of twelfth centary inteUectaals to sciences such as astrology. Magic commonly embraced astrology in the medieval perspective," 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 magi­cal.^ John of Salisbury, ^ whose commitment to the primacy of elo­quence Uned him up against the more scholasticaUy minded of his contemporaries,'* objected to astrology not on the grounds that much of it was invahd, 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 then "source in

=°Ibid., pp. 138 and 148. "'See Martin (above n. 47), p. 149, lines 125ff. "Martin, pp. 155-56. "L. Thomdike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1929), II

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

tury, when John Ashenden wished to stress the "respectable" side of astrology (as distinct from magic, necromancy, geomancy, etc.), he urged the shunning of ver­bosity (Thomdike, n. 53 above). 111, p. 334.

^ Policraticus 11.19. See Carey (below n. 187), pp. 118ff. *Cf. John of Salisbury, Mdalogikon I.l, 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 R H E T O R I C A

natare and then development in experience and reason."^' The only genuine oneiromancers were those vouchsafed this power by God. What John was protecting here is the approved source of oc­cult knowledge (the Bible), the class dedicated to its cultivation (the clergy), and the systems of knowledge elaborated to explain it (the exegetical and Uberal arts). Thus, an addiction to the occult could be proscribed as an attempt to manipulate or anticipate nataral means by use of ritaals and devotion to lore proscribed by the ec­clesiastical/monarchic power structare of late antique and medi­eval Europe.

John's concerns in this regard are evident enough in his thir­teenth centary scholastic successors. These too express a basic an­tipathy to the idea that rhetoric, lUce sorcery, can or should, have any autonomous persuasive effects on our minds independent of the "things" to which words refer, and which can be controlled by scientia vera. It was no anomaly for them that magic could be de­fined in terms of its rhetorical featares, in terms of the pecuhar, u-rational, rhetorical power that words, symbols, and ritaals have m summoning supernataral powers or producing supernataraUy mo­tivated developments. Bert Hansen'" notes as one of the distinctive featares 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 cucumstance set scholastics like Thomas Aquinas and WiUiam of Auvergne a problem, as indeed it did Mar­tin Luther. Thomas believed that "words, in so far as they signify something, have no power except as derived from some inteUect." WUUam of Auvergne, a thirteenth centary Paris theologian, argued "that U spoken words possessed [magic power] they must derive it either from the material of which they are composed, ah, or from

"John of Salisbury, Policraticus, trans. J. B. Pike, Frivolities of Courtiers and Footprints of Philosophers (Minneapohs, 1938; repr. 1972), p . 86. On oneiromancy and its place, see Guy H. AUard et al., ed.. Aspects de la Margirmlite au Moyen Age (Mon­treal, 1975), pp. 126-27.

^Bert Hansen, "Science and Magic" in Science in the Middle Ages, ed. David C. Lindberg (University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 484, 487-88. See also R. S. Kins­man, ed.. The Darker Vision of the Rermissance: Beyorui the Fields of Reason (University of California Press, 1974), pp. 102-03. De Romilly points out that once an author be­came fascinated by the irrational power of speech, it was hard to draw lines dividing 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 incanta­tions, hymns, and rites for occultic doctrines (the Cabala, Neoplatonism, Hermeti-cism, etc.).

Magic and Rhetoric 73

their form, sound, or from what they signify."'' 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 ahen to the northeTi scholastics, with their emphasis upon dialectic and the duality of reahty 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 then rhetorical effect on an audience (WUUam). So too, in the same period, the Aristotelian scholastic mentality—ac­cording to many—and the Catholic Church itself, denied to the sorcerer any independent power, ascribing all effects of sorcery to the devU (rather than to the art or the practitioner).""

The scholastic attitade towards "word power" and sorcery is understandable for the very reason that "word power" is so impor­tant a part of magic. There is, after aU, no extra-verbal guarantee of the efficacy of the magician's powers beyond the degree of hyp­nosis—of self or other, or both—induced by the formulas, in­cantations and ritaals. Even in man's relationship with God, rhe­torical invocation plays a major part. Anselm of Canterbury's novel eleventh centary prayers are highly rhetorical," and WUUam of Auvergne himself wrote a special treatise on the rhetorical art of prayer, caUed the Rhetorica divina. This work opens: "In sacred or sacred-related practices, the digrUty and superior exceUence of speech is clear to aU who are able and wUling 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."" WUliam goes on to stress the need for con-turual prayer and dips into the rules of classical rhetorical theory to provide a systematic guide to prayer. WUUam's interest in the rhe­torical aspects of invocation is matched by his interest in the irra­tional and the occult: Lynn Thorndike in his History of Magic and

' 'Thomdike (above n. 53), II p. 352. "J. B. Russell (above n. 46), pp. 142-147;Ch. Hopkins, The Share of Thomas Aqui-

rms in the Growth of the Witchcraft Delusion (Philadelphia, 1940); Kieckhefer and Brown (above n. 45).

"R. W. Southern, St. Anselm and His Biographer (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 41ff. " I translate from the opening 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 'epoide' is ritual, in that it expresses the words of magic power with which, for instance, a prayer is fortified."

74 R H E T O R I C A

Experimental Science allocates him thirty-three pages," a not incon­siderable allocation—more, for example, than Frederick IPs cour­tier Michael Scot, famed for his knowledge of magic and the occult, receives.

In the late Middle Ages the same sitaation prevaUs. The strong­est castigators of the occult are the later medieval northern univer­sity 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 man­ageable 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 plu­ralism of society and the threat to the social and intellectaal mo­nopoly of the clergy that this presented. Where this pluraUsm was more deeply rooted, in later medieval and early Renaissance Italy, for example, there rhetoric as magic and an interest in aU aspects of sorcery and magic surface strongly.

There are three further compelling reasons for the strong asso­ciation between the medieval clerical castes and magic and rheto­ric, between rhetoric as control (with cross reference to discourses seeking to control magic and the "irrational") and rhetoric as magic/disruption. In the first place, both rhetoric and magic flour­ished among the learned class of this period, because both were bookish sciences, replete with elaborate systems, tables, concor­dances, and lore.''^ There is, in fact, a desperate, umbUical relation­ship between practitioners of magic and practitioners of eloquence in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

In the second place, we need to note the metaphorical consis­tency between the methods of rhetoric and those of the occult arts. Astrology, alchemy, and divination reUed greatly upon analogies, correspondences, correlations, and "sympathies" between adja­cent parts. For example, Venus influences the working of copper since both the goddess and the mineral ore derived originally from Cyprus.^ The whole art of divination was a matter of recognizing

"Thomdike (above n. 53), pp. 338-71. '•'Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 8 (Cambridge, 1936), p. 676. '"Lindberg (above n. 58), p. 493 on "analogies" in astrology; Ch. Trinkaus, "The

Astrological Cosmos and Rhetorical Culture of Giovanru Gioviano Pontano," Re­naissance 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 SaUsbury,^ 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). Rheto­ric and poetry get much of their effect from metaphor and me­tonymy, 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 centary France, uruversity 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 nataral science.'^ It is perhaps not purely coincidental that the friars of the mendicant orders, so closely associated with the medieval ars predi­candi and its rhetorical techniques of amplificatio, should have been "the chief producers . . . codifiers and purveyors of alchemy to the Latm West."^

My third reason for associating the clerical caste, rhetoric as control (and control of magic and the "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 centaries was considered a pecuUarly volatUe threat to the intellectaal donunance of the clergy. *' We have here almost a matter of professional jealousy within a class. The most Uterate sec­tions 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 Uterary form with

^Policraticus II, 15-16, trans.. Pike, pp. 75ff. "G. W. Coopland, Nicole Oresme and the Astrologers: A Study of His 'Livre De Di-

virmcions' (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 87. Bonaventure considered that "maledicta curiosita," characterizes "rhetoricians, philosophers, mathematicians, astrologers, alchemists, grammarians, and canon lawyers." "Curiosity" is appropriate in fields where reality is unknown, or the outcome of inquiry uncertain (information from Professor E. Peters after the delivery of his paper to the 1981 meeting of the Medieval Academy of America: "Curiositas: the Medieval Shape of an Idea").

"E. H. Duncan, "The Literature of Alchemy and Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Tale: Framework, Theme and Characters," Speculum 43(1968), p. 635. In general, see B. Vickers, ed.. Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1984), p. 9.

"E. Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), ch. 2.

76 R H E T O R I C A

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 threatenmg phenomena of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. Anselm of Besate is a good ex­ample of his class: dictator in the chancery of the German ruler Henry III in the eleventh centary.™ Historians—most of them trained in rhetoric—also faU within this class: Guibert of Nogent, WUliam of Malmesbury, Ralph of Coggeshall, WiUiam of New-burgh are among our most important sources for the occult in the twelfth centary. Literate courtier-admirustrators like Walter Map and Gervase of Tilbury simUarly stand out." These members of the clerical-administrator class used aU the resources of language to buUd up a pictare 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 by natare, and hence open only to the literate in Latin, but our first pictare of the occult in the eleventh and twelfth centaries is to a large extent an elaborate rhetorical fiction.

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 centaries were themselves clerics. The first major outbreak of "Manicheanism" in the medie­val West occurred among the canons of the Church of the Holy Cross at Orleans in 1022 A.D.'^ An earlier recorded heresy, c. 970 A.D., at Ravenna, involved a certain VUgard, a devoted classical scholar in hteratare who began to put himself and his knowledge

'"Ibid., and cf. H. E. J. Cowdrey in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 23(1972), pp. 115ff.

" On both classes of writers, see the sources marshalled in W. 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 History 1110-1700 (University of Pennsylvarua 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 Mon­mouth on Merlin and divination, but reveals in ch. 5 that William had a sizeable interest in the supernatural. For William of Malmesbury, dreams play an important part in his history. See, for example, pp. 102-03, 157, 344 in the translation by J. 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 ^7

above that of the local clergy and to usurp their role. The monastic chronicler who teUs us of the episode, Ralph Glaber, says VUgard was visited by demons in the likeness of the poets Vergil, Horace and Juvenal—a very neat equation between magic and rhetoric!" In this connection, we need to note that many of the most learned scholars of the Middle Ages acquued a reputation for sorcery: Dun-stan, Gerbert of Rheuns, Thierry of Chartres, Abelard, and Dante,'" to name but a few. Most episodes of heresy that we know of stress the above-average abihty of the heretics to communicate, to "ap­pear learned," to engage in learned disputes, to know the pro­cesses and faUings of the clerical profession.'"' Tanchelm, an early twelfth centtuy priest or morrk in the Low Countries, "preached in hidden places and in bedrooms, upon rooftops and delivered his sermons in the open fields"—people hung on his words.'^ If we run through the outbreaks of heresy described in the classic source­book for the period, Wakefield and Evans' Heresies of the High Middle Ages, oui pictare is strengthened: the Trier heretics of the first quarter of the twelfth centary were priests; Arnold of Brescia was a Paris educated abbot, clerics formed the entourage of a num­ber of heretics, one heretic pretends to be a deacon, another was called a bishop, and yet another was an ex-monk.'^ Although many heretics were not and did not pretend to be clergy, or Uterate, the phenomenon of the heresiarch was sufficiently close to their own

"Ibid., p . 73. For recent interpretation of both episodes, see B. Stock, The Im­plications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the 11th and 12th Centuries (Princeton, 1983), 93ff.

''Cambridge Medieval History VIII p. 667; Thomdike (n. 53 above) I p. 773, II pp. 119-20; William of Malesbury, Gesta Regum 11.10 (trans. Giles—above n. 71— 175ff), ed. Shibbs (Rolls series, London, 1887) I pp. 193ff and cf. p. Ixvi; 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 Society and Alchemy from 1200-1500," foumal of Medieval Studies 6(1980), p. 107.

"Wakefield-Evans, pp. 72, 83ff, 87, 96, 98-99. "Ibid., p. 98. "Ibid., pp. 105, 146ff, 112, 114, 128, 125. We might cite, by way of illustration,

William of Newburgh's description of Eon de I'Etoile: "eratque per diabolicas praes-tigias tam potens ad capiendas simplicium animas ut, tanquam ex muscis ara-nearum opere irretitis, seductam sibi multitudinem aggregaret ludificatione daemonum ita dementatus . . . vir pestifer . . . idiota . . . spiritu plenus diabolico, praestigiali astutia tam multos seduxerat . . . fretus sequentium numero," C. John­son, ed.. Selections From the Historia Rerum Anglicarum of William of Newburgh (Lon­don, SPCK, 1920), pp. 16-19; for English translations, Wakefield-Evans, 143ff.

78 R H E T O R I C A

stereotype to alarm members of the clergy and to attract accusa­tions of magic and occult practices. The great moot ground be­tween cleric and heresiarch was the right and ability to preach, and access to learned descriptions of ancient heresies, such as gnosti­cism 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 posi­tion in society, the fascination of one for the other is understand­able, 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 laUy 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 anthropologists associate with the production of witchcraft accusations. Peter Brown in a re­cent influential article, entifled "Sorcery, Demons and the Rise of Christianity: From Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages"™ has pro­posed 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 pe­riod 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 ori­gin, and the senatores, the ancient, established, part pagan class of traditional wealth and education. In consequence of the competi­tion for power caused by the rapid rise of the new bureaucracy of the military emperors, both palatini and senatores fear magical at­tacks on their power and resources; both have recourse to accusa­tions of involuntary (internal) magic and (external) controlled magic involving spells, curses, charms, formulas, potions, and invoca­tions. Brown, using the writings of the sociologist Mary Douglas, locates the actual practitioner of sorcery in "interstitial" areas of

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

Magic and Rhetoric 79

the social structure—weak areas in between power systems (for ex­ample, the wife in a tribal society that emphasizes the power claims 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 "in­formal" power on the part of the senators. The palatini use the sor­cery accusation against the senators as their way of demanding a check against the informal power and the wealth seen to accrue from the rhetorical skUls and social connections of the senators. The great Antioch orator of the day, Libanius, actually links his rhetorical abUities to the presence or absence of sorcery nullifying them." Sorcery is thus a kind of anti-rhetoric. In fact, both sorcery and rhetoric are funds of "informal" power which become volatUe when "formal" power structures become fluid. This fluidity lasted beyond the fourth centary A.D. into the early Middle Ages; it is no accident, for example, that the same class of senators (in their later guise as bishops) became an influential mediator class in early Ger­manic society, when formal power structares were completely in flux. Their power in Merovingian society was founded upon ex­actly the same informal base that drew accusations of sorcery upon the senators in the later Roman Empire. Thus, expectedly, the epis­copal class from time to time drew upon itself accusations of sor­cery from the palatini of the early Middle Ages.^

Brown's scenario provides a precise sociological locus for the occurrence of the link between magic and rhetoric proposed by De RomUly for late antiquity. It is extremely significant that, according to Peters,*' simUar chcumstances recur in the twelfth centary. The court environment of the twelfth centary A.D. represented a re­tarn of the type of envuonment that characterized sensitive areas

"A. Momigliano, ed.. The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century (Oxford, 1963), p. 116.

""Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks (giving book and chapter common to all editions and translations—then page number in the translation by L. Thorpe, Penguin books, 1974); I.5(p. 71), 1.25 (p. 84), IV16 (p. 212), IV28(p. 223), IV40 (p. 235), V.5-6 (pp. 409-12), VII.44(pp. 426-27), lX.6(pp. 483-87), lX.10(pp. 491-94), lX.36-38(pp. 523-26). The case of the Prefect Mummolus (VI.35, p. 365), though not involving a bishop, should not be ignored in the present context: Mum­molus "often received from (Parisian housewives who) confessed that they were witches . . . unguents and potions which were supposed to bring him into the good favour of the King and Queen . .

"'cf. n. 69 above.

80 R H E T O R I C A

within the fourth centary Roman Emphe. The court had become the new center of power; the formal position of the older aristoc­racy was under threat from upstarts who commanded hterate and occult resources useful to rulers seeking to estabhsh and retain large bureaucratic power systems.*^ Competition for favor in the new envuonment of the court*' encouraged classical conditions for the flourishing of witchcraft accusations—a descent from what Mary Douglas describes as the high classification social profile to the "smaU group" social environment, in which "we have social units whose external boundaries are clearly marked, whose inter­nal relations are confused and which persist on a smaU scale." In these uruts, "we should look for the active witchcraft type of cos­mology . . . here . . . the body politic tends to have a clear external boundary and a confused internal state in which envy and favour­itism flourish and continually confound the proper expectations of members." "In a community in which overt conflict cannot be contained, witchcraft fears are used to justffy expulsion and fis-

"cf. C. Erickson, The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception (New York, 1976), p. 119: "Eager to find loyal servants not driven by personal or 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 chanceUor and then archbishop in the court of Henry II: earlier in the century Roger of Salisbury rose from humbler ori­gins to prominence at the court of Henry I. Perhaps the most spectacular rise from obscurity to power came in the France of Louis VI, where the Garlande family threatened to take over every major post at the Capetian court. . . " I t is thus no 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 mobility through clerical education. See my comments in L. O. FrappeU, ed.. Prin­cipalities, Powers, and Estates (Adelaide, 1979), p . 67. Also F. L. Cheyette, "The In­vention of the State" in B. Lackner and K. Philip, eds.. Essays on Medieval Civilization (Univ. of Texas Press, 1978). For a contemporary reference to "Christiani" educating their sons "propter lucrum," see A. Landgraf, ed., Commentarius Cantabrigiensis in epistolas Pauli e schola Petri Abaelardi (Notre Dame, 1939), p. 434.

"'Erickson writes again most pertinently (p. 129): "Courtiers of aU 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 colleagues at the English court with their "disturbed ambition," their competi­tive natures, and their perpetual jealousy. "Their minds squeezed in torment," he 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 attention paid to their rivals, they must nonetheless keep the semblance of gaiety (hilaritas); their good cheer and kind words were not to be trusted. 'Fear the sud­den laughter of the applauders,' Arnulf advised Becket, 'and the sweet songs of adulation.'"

Magic and Rhetoric 81

sion. These are communities m which authority has very weak re­sources."** Such a court envuonment divorces words from reaUty (flattery) and encourages resort to the occult and rhetoric as the two major reservohs of "informal" power. Both practitioners of the occult and rhetors (didatores) come from the same social group, the margmal, disestabUshed, unestablished or partially established elements operating withm the gravitational field of the power cen­ters of the day (the courts). Both constantly fluctaate between posi­tions of close intimacy with those centers and banishment to the perimeters, continuaUy drawing the fire of the landed aristocracy, continually leveUing the bitterest accusations at each other." It is this fluid, mobUe, literate class in the twelfth centary, with its com­mand 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: onehomancy, astrology, alchemy, notarial, dictaminal and administrative skills.

The Count of Flanders, as we learn from the notary Galbert of Bmges' account of his murder in 1127, lost his Ufe because he culti­vated low-born litterati such as the notary Fromold. In the atmo­sphere of favouritism and competition for adnurustrative positions that surrounded the Flemish court at this period, sorcery and speU-casting are found. Spells are even cast upon God to ensure suc­cess.** Ranulf Flambard, the lettered chaplain and right hand man of WUUam Rufus in England, the son of an obscure priest, was—

"^Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols (Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 87-88, 138, 139-40.

"^From such groups derive, as could be anticipated, new 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 analogous to 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 didamen: "Militia Curialis: die Kritik am geistlichen Hofdienst bei Peter von Blois und in der lateinischen Literatur des 9-12 J/h," Miscellanea Mediaevalia ed., A. Zimmerman Bd. 12/1 Soziale Ordnungen im Selbstverstandnis des Mittelalters (Berlin/N.Y. pp. 227-57.). Also C. S. Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideas (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 54ff, 176ff. Too close an equation between the twelfth century and late antiquity may mislead, as I have indicated in my review of 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 refer­ence to Mary Douglas' later writings.

"'Cf. J. B. Ross, trans.. The Murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, by Galbert of Bruges (New York, 1960), index s .w. "Fromold" and "Sorcery."

82 R H E T O R I C A

according to R. W. Southern*'—"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 skUled pleader or placita-tor, or king's advocate in local court cases involving royal affahs. 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.)** The contemporary Count of Soissons, ac­cording to Guibert of Nogent, sought his innermost advisers from heretics guUty of occult practices.*' Stephen, minister of Anjou for Henry II, consulted a diviner to protect himself from possible in­quiry into his administrative irregularities following Richard I's re­lease from captivity.'" WiUiam of Newburgh, who teUs the story, assumes that divination was a service easily avaUable for a fee and that demons were quite wUling to cooperate with diviners. Thomas Becket consulted an aruspex and a chhomancer." 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. WUUam Rufus remarked that monks "dream for money."'^ WUUam of Tu-dela, a Spanish courtier, chapel clerk and magister, learned in ad­vance through geomancy, according to the Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise,''^ 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 individu­als. Michael Scot, quoted repeatedly in a fifteenth centary medieval commentary on the Ad Herennium,'^* was a courtier for Frederick II

"'R. W. Southern, "Ranulf Flambard," Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford, 1970), ch. 10.

""Ordericus VitaUs, Ecclesiastical History 10.18, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall (Ox­ford, 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. "Thomdike (above n. 53), p. 167. "See 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 fu sage," p. 139 lines 4800ff "Li mastre Amagin. . Li capellan de gramancie." On Rufus: William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, trans. J. A. Giles and ed. Stubbs (Lon­don, 1847), IV.l, p. 345, (1889), II, p. 378.

"E. Martin-Chabot, ed., (Paris, 1960), I pp. 3-4. *'MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Canon. Misc. 7 (S. C. 19483), s.xv. fols. Ir et

seqq. Dictaminal, rhetorical and occultic works are frequently found together in later medieval manuscripts.

Magic and Rhetoric 83

and an expert in astrology and alchemy." Arnold of VUlanova was a lay alchemist, astrologer, oneiromancer, legist, preacher, physi­cian, specialist in incantations, Ugatares and other magic devices and served popes and monarchs in the time of Boniface VIII.'"' Cecco d'Ascoli was an accomplished astrologer, poet and scholar in the Uberal arts, who became official astrologer to Charles of Cal­abria and was burnt at the stake by the Inquisition in Florence in 1327." 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.'* Raymond Lull represents the courtier-rhetor-occultist par excellence. A famiUar, at various times in his life, of the courts of Aragon, France, Cyprus, Rome and elsewhere. Lull developed a language/ logic designed to establish in written form a 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 pictare of a courtier-rhetor-occultist, of one who—at least later in his life— sought to manipulate rulers and their courts in a direction favor­able to his impassioned projects, rather than to take service in such courts." We are told that the service of such figures was a common featare of monarchies in the thuteenth and fourteenth centaries.™

*L. Thomdike, Michad Scot (Edinburgh, 1965), chaps. 10, 11, 12. *H. C. Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (London, 1888) III, 52ff;

Thomdike II, ch. 68. "Lea (n. 96 above), 441ff; Cambridge Medieval History, Vlll, p. 677. Dante corre­

sponded with him (see below). Thomdike II ch. 71. See J. N. Stephens, "Heresy in Medieval and Renaissance Florence," Past and Present 54(1972), p. 33.

'"Lea, p. 440; Cambridge Medieval History VII p. 674; Thomdike II, ch. 70. "See J. 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 Rdhorica Nova will be found in MS Paris BN lat. 6443c fols. 95'"-109".

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

84 R H E T O R I C A

The often discussed spate of sorcery accusations associated with the papal and the French royal courts in the fourteenth cen­tary involves many such figures. Accusations of sorcery or divina­tion were aimed at rulers (kings, queens, popes), and there were aUegations concerning the practice of occult arts by members of the clergy (cardinals, bishops, papal clerks, priests, abbots, Domini­cans and Franciscans), court favorites (Piers Gaveston, favorite of Edward II), royal counseUors, advocates, chamberlains, treasurers, courtiers, and episcopal servants."" Among the least clerical would have been a figure like Enguerrand de Marigny, chamberlain to PhUip IV, whose wife and sister were accused of employing sor­cery. Enguerrand derived from a middling famUy many members of which were in the clerical profession. Although neither an intel­lectaal nor a jurist, he had a basic instruction in hteracy, left letters in French, was of "cultivated and intelhgent" spirit and was de­scribed by contemporaries as "a beautiful and subtle speaker."'"^ Certainly, as has recently been proposed,"" the court of PhiUip would have had great use for the service of such coiutiers skiUed in verbal and written eloquence, particularly if—as many of them must have done—they professed a command of sorcery, witch­craft, and ritaal magic. The affair of the Templars, for example, would not have been possible without courtiers possessing such a complex of skUls. Writing, perhaps with a later court in view, Nicholas Oresme describes astrologers, alchemists, and oneiroman­cers as rhetorical con-men out to persuade princes and patrons of

sources other than Oresme's Divinacion and supposes that Oresme's intimacy with Charles and his own critical view of astrology indicate that in reality Charles did not place faith in astrological predication.

""W. R. Jones, "Political Uses of Sorcery in Medieval Europe," The Historian 34(1972), pp. 670-87. W. Anderson, Dante the Maker (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," En­glish Historical Review 5(1980), Montague Summers, trans.. Malleus Maleficarum (Lon­don, 1928); my review of P. Partner, "The Murdered Magicians," fourrml of Religious History 13(above n. 29); Hilary Carey, Astrology, Science, and Society, ed. P. Curry, Boydell, and Brewer (1987), pp. 41ff, has charted the growing appeeJ of astrology to later medieval English and French kings.

""Jean Favier, Enguerran de Marigny, un conseiller de Philippe le Bel (Paris, 1963), chap. 1, esp. p. 17.

'"See fourrml of Religious History 13 (above n. 29), pp. 108-10.

Magic and Rhetoric 85

their powers irrespective of the truth.™ More specffic is Claude Gagnon's assertion that alchemy was the resort, not of the common man, but of "thieves, usurers and other evU-doers . . . certain intel-lectaals of the avant-garde . . . fascinated by the theoretical posta­lates or certain positive results conveyed by the alchemical prac­tice." "The alchemist was therefore kept within the interior of the waUs of the city but he received no fixed statas. He was condeirmed to float in the margin of the hierarchy of social classes as money floated at the stock-exchange, considered by some as a master, by others as an artisan, by stUl others as a gangster; by others, finaUy, as a good, devout bourgeois of the classe silencieuse (burgens).^°^

The new race of dictaminal speciahsts occupy the same socio­logical position as our occult suppliers of non-estabUshed power. The didatores are an aspirant class, often of humble social origins. Then mUieu is the court and chancery; their aim is to promote then science as the queen of sciences, as the guide to "paradise and to the very fount of human intelUgence and knowledge.""* 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. Then science exploded eventaaUy 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."^

""Coopland (above n. 67), pp. 91, 97, 109. '"'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 innova­tion, or rhetoric, or didamen. Specialists in the new medium are sometimes usefully termed an "intelligentsia."

""H. Wieruszowski, Politics and Culture in Medieval Spain and Italy (Rome, 1971), pp. 372-73.

'"Wieruszowski, 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 VUlani, "summo maestro in rettorica, tanto in bene sapere dire come in bene dittare." Anderson (above n. 101), pp. 304-05: Dante "writing his poetry out of his own mystical experience" reverses, with the humanists, the condemna­tion of poetry in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, asserting that poetry deals with "things that, because of their basic lack of truth, cannot be grasped by reason (whereas) theology pertains to those truths which are above reason." Anderson,

8^ R H E T O R I C A

The linking of alchemy and rhetoric in this fashion is no mere product of the twentieth centary imagination. According to Aelius Aristides, "six centuries after the Gorgias . . . Hermes [was] sent by Zeus to offer mankind . . . rhetoric:""'* This Hermes, dubbed "thrice great" and equated with the Egyptian God Thoth by the Ro­man devotees of mysticism, alchemy, and neoplatonism, came down to the twelfth centary 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."'' The very "Alanus" (of LiUe?) to whom is commonly ascribed an impor­tant Ad Herennium commentary, written, according to conventional wisdom, at the end of the twelfth centary, wrote a much earlier work, replete wUh 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, "altUoqua phUosophi taba, que. . . . altioris theologie ansa est secreta intonare;""" the sentence is at­tributed to Cicero rhetor "for here is the great rhetor TuUius, who, as he shone forth with the flower of human eloquence, so he thun­dered 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 Trismegistas, is twelfth centary and associated with the Porretan (theological) school—but the ascrip­tion does indicate the close hnk 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 prevaUed during the Middle Ages thus established, I proceed now to Ulus-trate the theme of my paper from a more strictly diachronic view­point, a viewpoint more appropriate, perhaps, to the 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 stU 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.

'°»De RomUly, pp. 79-80. '"See Yates (above n. 58), chap. 1; Fowden (below n. 113); and for example, MS

Oxford, Corpus Christi College 250 f. 9ra line 41, and Ad Herennium, ed. min. Teub-ner (Leipzig, 1964), p. 14 app. crit. to 1.15.

"»H. Caplan (above n. 43), chap X; M. Th. D'Alverny, Alain de Lille, Textes Ined-its (Paris, 1965), pp. 163ff, 295ff.

Magic and Rhetoric 87

The Diachronic View

At first glance, it seems obvious that between late antiquity and the Renaissance high points in the history of rhetoric are also high points in devotion to the occult. Late antiquity is a clear case m point. Augustine's own interest in demonology has attracted much comment;'" Seznec in his Survival of the Pagan Gods remarks on the growing beUef in astrology in the period."^ The largest pro­portion of Christian literary papyri to be used as amulets or to con­tain 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 Ulustrate the truism that late antiquity was pro­gressively devoted to the occult.'" This is the period in which the Ad Herennium comes to light,"" in which most of the "minor Latin rhetoricians," as C. Halm, who edited their work, calls them,"' wrote their treatises. Of the twenty-four treatises Halm pubhshed, ten were dedicated wholely to matters of style or the colores—a spe-

'"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.

'"Seznec (above n. 100), p. 41. See also R. MacMullen, "Social History in As­trology," Ancient Society 2 (1971), p. 112 on the fortunes that legal advocates and rhet­ors could acquire in the fourth century. There are interesting remarks on the con­junction of rhetoric, dreams, and changes in attitudes towards the supernatural in P. Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1978), especially, pp. 64ff.

'"Papyri: cf. lecture by Edwin Judge (1981 Australian and New Zealand Asso­ciation for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference, Macquarie University, NSW), "The Magical Use of Scripture in the Papyri." Professor Judge, who directs the Macquarie University Corpus Papyrorum Christianorum project, cites two collec­tions of this source material: J. Van Haelst, Catalogue des papyrus Utteraires juifs d Chre­tiens (1976), and K. Preisendanz, Papyri Graecae Magicae (Leipzig/Berlin, 1928-31), 2 vols. On the unstable "angst" ridden nature of the period, see H. Chadwick, Pris-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, (University Press of America, 1984). Of much relevance is G. Fowden's recent The Egyptian Hermes: a Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Cambridge, 1986). The period displays the characteristic Victor Turner refers to as "liminality"—passage from one structure (Roman) to another (ecclesiastical). V. Turner, Ttie 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 F. Reynolds (Chicago, 1984), pp. 105-25. Perhaps the ar­chetypical liminal figure is the "holy man." See Peter Brown, "The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity," fourrml of Roman Studies 61(1971), pp. 80-101.

"''Cicero, Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi, ed. and trans. H. Caplan (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge Mass., 1964), pp. xxxiv-xxxv.

"=C. Halm, Rhetores Latini Minores (Leipzig, 1863).

88 R H E T O R I C A

ciahty of Gorgias. In this period De inventione commentation be­gins, and the rhetoric of the Greek second sophistic movement dominates; it is the period in which the prestige of a rhetorical edu­cation is at its height, with a corresponduig mfluence on poetry and prose. Appropriately, as a recent investigation has suggested, later Latm writers became more visual, audial, rhetorical (or the­atrical): "The reason why the art of memory could have made the Uterate society of late antiquity more pictorial or theatrical than that of the repubUc is not so much that, in the repubhc, rhetorical trauiing had not been estabhshed 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 numer­ous.'""* Other developments commented upon in this context stim­ulated the late antique emphasis on rhetoric as techne, and on liter­acy as "control;" "by imprisoning sound, writing itself fosters a sense of order and control over the envuonment;""^ it generated controversies (heresies) over the written word, behef in the (writ­ten) finality of dogma, and stimulated the articulation of rhetoric/ techne, as a resource for control and triumph in polemic and court controversy."*

The consequence, according to Newbold, was a specffic reac­tion to information overload, a reaction that greatly eruiched meta­phoric resources of language and confirmed the rhetorical/visual emphasis in late antique cultare. Newbold writes:

The production and survival of books in Greece and Rome continu­ously added to the burden of cultural history that required exact mem­orization. Epitomes and visual mnemonic devices were aids in the effort to keep the haUowed ciUtural heritage in focus, but by late antiq­uity one strategy was simply to give up trying to do this and to seek to communicate present concerns by the medium of unambiguous, com­pleted artifacts instead of impressionistic, incomplete processes, to stress "what" rather than "how." But another strategy was to reject the tunnel-vision and the environmental impoverishment that such a response to information overload can induce, and to mobUize aU the body's sensory modalities, to seek a more hoUstic way of seeing, and to call on peripheral and subUminal resources, on the realms of aUu-sion, and on symboUc pars pro toto thinking whereby a process or a

'"•R. Newbold, "Perception and Sensory Awareness Among Latin Writers in Late Antiquity," Classica et Mediaevalia 33(1981-82), p. 182.

'"Ibid., p. 185. "»Cf. Ibid., p. 184 and Ward (above n. 78).

Magic and Rhetoric 89

complex of ideas or an activity can be evoked by a single component. For example, a net can stand for aU that is associated with fishes and fishing. . . .'"

This emphasis upon the metonymie and metaphorical (rhetoric/ magic) ur late antiquity has been noticed by others. Pennacini, for example, points out, "che negh anru tra la fine del 1 sec. e I'inizio del 2. emergesse con crescente vigore la tendenza deU'omafus po-etico ad invadere la prosa. . . ."'^° There seems much, in fact, to support De RomUIy's reading of trends in later Roman imperial antiquity.

If we were to submit to the influence of writers like Agobard of Lyons and the continual stream of royal, episcopal, penitential and canorucal proscriptions of behef in pagan magic and "irrational" sorcery,'^^ the period between late antiquity and the twelfth cen­tary could be seen as a pecuharly "rational" tam of the tide against 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 shriU, 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, reUc cults, miracles and the efficacy of the litargy and church ritaal. Behind and beneath this facade of control, there lurks a growing belief in the threat of the supernataral, the power of Satan, the powerlessness of the official ecclesiastical hierarchy (through pomp, mundaruty, secularity, venality and corruption), and the need for recourse to other weUsprings of insulation and security.'^

The same period is one of experimentation and renovation, as

'"R. F. Newbold, "Centre Periphery and Eye in the Late Roman Empire," Flo-rilegium 3(1981), p. 94.

""A. Pennacini, La Funzione dell arcaismo e del neologismo nelle teorie della prosa da Comificio a Frontone (Torino, 1974), p. 99.

"'P. Quennell, ed., Diversions in History (London, 1954), pp. 41-51; Lea (above n. 96), pp. 414-16, and RusseU (above n. 46), pp. 82-83; H. Gamer and J. T. McNeill, ed. and trans.. Medieval Handbooks of Permnce (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.

""See Peters (above n. 69), Stock (above n. 73), esp. p. 110, heresy as "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 R H E T O R I C A

far as attention to technical rhetoric is concerned, displaying consid­erable interest in the colores and euphuistic prose. Four of Halm's treatises derive from the period 600-800 A.D.,'^ and one must note minor rhetorical moments such as the Hisperica famina (Brit­ain/Ireland, 5th-6th centary A.D.),"^' Aldhelm (Britain, second half of the 7th centary),'^ Rather of Verona (Italy, 10th centary),'^" Adalbero of Laon,'^' and Gerbert of Rheims (c. 1000 A.D.).'^ It is customary, however, to view the stady of rhetoric between late an­tiquity and the twelfth centary as in something of a recess. Atten­tion 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 centary, and reaches visible fruit­ion in the eleventh.'^' 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.™

It is, however, in the twelfth centary that we detect not oiUy a signfficant upswing of interest in technical rhetoric, but also a marked oscUlation of the cultaral pendulum towards a preoccu­pation with the "irrational" and rhetoric as magic. It is relevant to recall again De RomUIy's description of the modern revival of Gor-gianism, the "new rhetoric:" "Writing has become a sacred and mysterious operation; words themselves seem to haunt the writer.

"^Nos. 15, 16, 20 and 24 in Halm's enumeration. "*W. F. Bolton, A History of Anglo-Latin Literature 597-1066 (Princeton Univer­

sity Press, 1967), I pp. 46-48. Curiously, the Irish term for the Hisperica Famina is "retoric." L. Beiler, Ireland, Harbinger of the Middle Ages (London, 1963), p. 13.

"5 Bolton, pp. 68ff. "*£. Auerbach, Literary Language and its Pnblic in Late Latin Antiquity and in the

Middle Ages, trans. R. Mannheim (New York, 1965), pp. 133ff, especially pp. 139-40. "'See Duby (above n. 35). ""See Murphy (above n. 35). "'With 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).

™Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, p. 665. (Above n. 74).

Magic and Rhetoric 91

Uke magic formulas coming from nowhere;" the critic "refuses to read a text as a logical sequence offering one single meaning; he looks for a pluraUty of mearungs, for connotations and symbols. Classical rhetoric is treated as obsolete.'"" One is immediately re­minded here of the second half of the twelfth centary, at the end of which the boom interest in classical rhetorical manuals was to ebb in northern France,"^ 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 literatare."' This was also the heyday of the Latin cosmological poets (Bernard SUvester, Alan of LUle),"^ who brought their search for meaning in the universe to rest on a laden, coded text which they caUed the integumentum,^^^ the "covering," beyond or beneath which they would not proceed. In other words, I would interpret the later twelfth centary as a time in which rhetoric as magic began, in France at least, to dominate rhetoric as techne.

Such an interest in rhetorical practice was nevertheless un­doubtedly fuelled by an expansion of the traditional rhetorical cur-rictUum in the period. Aheady settUng down to the large scale ex­position 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 podriae.^^

'^'De. Ronully, pp. 86-87. "'See J. J. Murphy, ed.. Medieval Eloquence, p. 54. "*Pierre Gallais, "L'hexagone logique et la roman medieval," Cahiers de Civiliza­

tion Medievale 18(1975), pp. 1-14, 133-48. See Jaeger (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, ci. H. and R. Kahane, Romance Philol­ogy 12(1959), pp. 216-31.

'^W. Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century (Princeton Univer­sity Press, 1972); Cf. above n. 110.

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

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

92 R H E T O R I C A

It is no accident, perhaps, that the same period saw a height­ened 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 begmnings of the intel-lectaalization of witchcraft.'" WiUiam of Newburgh and his con­temporaries record the earUest of our vampire stories, and the in­flux of Arabic texts excited a boom in alchemical and astrological interest."* Critics have noted how alchemy and dream psychology underscore the Romances of Chretien de Troyes."' "Alchemical" undertones can also be detected in the twelfth centary Gohardic poem the Metamorphosis of Golias,^'^ the theme of which is the uruty of knowledge, the union of wisdom and eloquence, the marriage of Mercury and PhUology. Mercury is represented as eloquence. Mer­cury 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 aU branches of learning that depended upon writing—medicine, magic, astron­omy and astrology." Thoth created the world with his voice and could pronounce magical formulas with the tonahties that gave power. It was Thoth (Hermes), we recall, who taught—according to common twelfth centary opinion—the art of rhetoric to Cicero himself, and Cicero's emphasis in the preface to his De inventione

"'As set out by Wakefield-Evans, Kieckhefer, Peters, and Russell; N. Cohn, Europe's Inner Demons (Paladin, 1976); W. L. Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisi­tion in Southern France 1100-1250 (London, 1974), and others.

""Cf. above n. 69, Seznec (above n. 100), p. 52; Allard (above n. 57), p. 150; Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, pp. 667ff. F. Sherwood Taylor, The Alchemists, Founders of Modern Chemistry (Heinemann, 1951), p. 100, says, "Alchemy swept like a fever over thirteenth century Europe" as a consequence of the translation of key Arab texts. Taylor's portrait of the thirteenth 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 Amald de Villanova and Raimon Lull were affixed to the most influential alchemical writings of the early fourteenth century (Taylor, pp. 109-10).

"'Jean Gyory, "Le cosmos, un songe," Anrmles Universitatis Scientiarum Buda-pestensis, sedio philologica 4(1963), pp. 87-110.

'"Printed in Studi Medievali vol. 3 (1962), pp. 764-772. I hope to prepare a study of the alchemical elements in this poem. For the lirJ^s 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) civUization, forms the basic underpinning of courtier-humanist in­sight in the twelfth centruy.""

The Metamorphosis Goliae advances an equation between love and rhetoric that was to have a great futare 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 Uterate service class already mentioned, and the poem is shot through with "alchenucal," numerological and musi­cal aUusions. No less central a figure than Bernard Silvester, al­ready mentioned as one of the cosmological poets, displays a simi­lar fascination with metaphoric/poetic language and the occult. His Mathematicus reveals a considerable interest in rhetoric and astrol­ogy, whUe his Experimentarius is concemed with geomancy.

Whether this latter treatise is the work edited in 1959 by Mirella SavorelU, or "a simUar work of which only the prologue has sur­vived,""^ is not particularly pertinent here. The whole introduc­tion of Hermetic and astrological lore, whether Arabic or Latin, into European cultare during the period of the "twelfth centary Renaissance" is a subject of great interest, but at present without sure guides. From such texts as the Experimentarius, the Metamor-

'•"Kinsman (above n. 58), p. 99; W. Shumaker, The Occult Sciences In the Rermis­sance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (University of California Press, 1972), p. 208; and 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 crea­tive." The "ritual terminology of the Metamorphosis Goliae is taken from the later antique neoplatonists, whom such "fictions" betrayed "into a revival of magic," ac­cording to Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 4 -5 . These "fictions" were to surface again in the "rhetorical" Renaissance of the humarusts. On the (Ciceronian) rhetorical myth of civilization in CastigUone (without the realization that Cicero is behind it), see Jaeger (n. 85 above), pp. 9-10, who is speaking, in fact, of twelfth century developments. The proemium to the De inventione is extensively glossed in numerous twelfth century manuscripts, is found in a wide variety of writings of the time and, continued to dominate thought about civilization well into the sixteenth century: a majolicaware plate, #100 in the 1987 British Museum exhibition arranged by Timothy Wilson, 1549 'Mazo' (=May), Ven­ice (from Urbino) representing the allegory of civilization, portrays the power of eloquence and carries extracts from the De inventione on its reverse side. See be­low n. 154.

'"Ch. Burnet in Archives d'histoire dodrirmle d litteraire du Moyen Age 44(1977-78), pp. 79, 98. On the Experimentarius, see Dronke (below n. 145), pp. 139ff.

94 R H E T O R I C A

phosis Goliae, the Tabula Smaragdina, the Sermo ad sphaeram of Alan (of LiUe?), it is possible to infer that this occult lore created a tre­mendous stir among the magistri of northern France and elsewhere during the twelfth centary.

Bernard Silvester, in the preface to his (?) Experimentarius de­scribes the utUity of the work in these terms: "It is possible to avert divine vengeance by forestaUtng futare 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 phUosopher and skiUed astrono­mer, 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 function­aries (officiates). Whatever dangers, therefore, that we can know about in advance from dreams, visions, prophecies or the [steUar] consteUations, can be mitigated by the humihty of penance and by satisfaction through penance, and can thus be changed to the con­trary. For aU divine threats are recognized to be conditional. Darts which can be foreseen hurt less, or very Uttle.""'

A resurgence of interest in dream theory during the twelfth and thirteenth centaries has been noted, in part stimulated by the advent of new works of Aristotelian science and Greek medicine,™ and an important elegiac poem fauly securely attributed to Ber­nard SUvester, the already mentioned Mathematicus, enables us to glimpse with uncanny clarity the dimensions of intelhgent interest in the "irrational" and the power of language during the twelfth centary. An excursus is necessary to demonstrate how deeply en­tangled 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."' Patricida's birth was foretold astrologically. It was also foretold that he would

'"Ibid., p. 123. See 11 Kings 19.15ff, and Jonah 3.5 '"1 refer here to Dr. Alison Peden's paper "Macrobius and Medieval Dream

Literature," which 1 had the opportunity of reading in typescript through the au­thor's kindness. See now Medium Aevum 54 pt. 1. (1985), pp. 59-73.

"'Cf. the reference to Hannibal in lines 153,157 of the edition of B. Haureau, Le Mathematicus de Bernard Silvestris et la passio Sandae Agnetis de Pierre Riga (Paris, 1895). Ms. Deirdre Stone is preparing a translation, commentary, and study of this poem and its context. I owe much to her valuable insights and research. For an extended discussion of the poem and its source see Peter Dronke, Fabula: Explorations Into the Uses Of Myth in Medieval Platonism (Leiden, 1974), pp. 126ff, esp. p . 129.

Magic and Rhetoric 95

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

arvxia distrahitur dubioque miserrima voto fluctuat et beUum mater et uxor agunt

Bernard stresses the inexorabUity of fate:

sed tristis Lachesis, sed inexorabUe fatum

The mother/wffe becomes a foU for a poetic exercise on the evils of the female sex'^' and the focus for some images of marital fidelity and bliss.'^ The tirade against women becomes part of a suasoria on whether the wife's wrongful decision to spare the boy (the triumph of natare over marital fidehty) should be imputed to a nataral fault (naturae vitio) or to the characteristics of an individual (genuinis mo-nbws)."" The husband's reply praises the wife's fine nataral in­stincts and sense of right and duty, and he accepts his lot, noting that he wUl, 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 wUl kUl his father is perhaps, aUegorically, death itself, which cuts short aU human ambition and brings to nought aU 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, "urational," metaphoric, displaced one. Words do not necessarily denote actions in a precise sense. Patricida wUl kUl himself, thus rendering it impossible that he kUl his father, except m the displaced sense that a father whose son kUls himself for such a reason (or for any reason) is no longer, in

""Ed. Haureau, lines 125-30. "'Ibid., lines 321ff. •"ftid., lines 309-10, 318-19, 355ff. '«Ibid., lines 346-47.

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the strict sense, a father."" The social constraints that interfere with such an attempt to confront inexorable fate are, however, consider­able, 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 kUhng of his fa­ther, 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 re­vealed what he in this instance desires, try to evade the conse­quences 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 un­derlie the Romans' arguments against him: "Enthymema sonat, so-nat bine inductio.""' "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 sophis­tries that the senators can remove me from my purpose." Another senator, a (veritable) PoUio, then

speaks out gUding the surface of his speech and mobilizing the re­sources 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 presentation or grace of voice which can pervert my vows and hinder me from dying. Camillus was as rustic in his 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 complex speech, Greece was the teacher of the grand style. O tragic day when simple and rude truth grew filthy, and painted sounds proved more pleasing! Would that an ocean had ren­dered Athens inaccessible. Rome would not have grown with the gUt-ter of its eloquence. . .

Patricida continues and stresses how the Romans opposed him with "legum decreta" and "Utera:" they hide behind decrees and

""Ibid., see lines 637-38. '"Ibid., line 813; on these major tools of rhetoric see Cicero, 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 wUl 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 Justiruan, "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 Justiruan was a "dead" authority), or do we have here a subversion of "the focussed, concentrated, 'hard-eyed', analytic mode, more concemed with detaU, 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 overaU pictare,""^ part, perhaps, of "a wholesale shift in cultaral emphasis from logic, language and literatare to intaition, 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 cultare: knowledge "overload," and "an efflorescence of bureaucratic lan­guage," accompanied by attempts at hierarchical control of flam­boyance and emotional impulse through progressive articulation of ceremonial, litargy, 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 literatare or visual art, the reaction to control, to restraint and to hierarchical, Unear, three dimensional, explicit compositional form may mani­fest in emotionality and expressiveness of subject matter, juxtapo­sition, two-dimensionaUty and looseness of structare.'""

Newbold's description of what he sees as "a major cultaral shift" ui late antiquity—a shift, it should be noted, in the same di­rection as is required by the De RomUly "thesis" with which this paper began—does conjure up simUarities with the tweffth cen­tary, 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 determirusm of law, logic, technical rhetoric, and power structares. By kUhng himself, he evades both; by following his wUl (and thereby extinguishing his wUl), he evades both deter­minisms: "Liber et expUcitas ad mea vota mens" says the last Une

"'R. F. Newbold, "Nonverbal Communication and Parataxis in Late Antiq­uity," L'Antiquite Classique 55(1986), p. 237, 238, 239, 240-43.

•^'Ibid., p. 239.

98 R H E T O R I C A

of the poem: "Free and uninvolved to follow my desire, my own man, (I resign the crown)." The individual has chosen an individ­ual path; simplicity of sermo is equated with freedom (liber), lack of entanglement (explicitus), autonomy to do one's will (meus), uncon­strained by astrology or rhetoric."" The denunciation of rhetoric is quite exphcit, 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 wUl and excellence. In this sense the poem is a denunciation of rhetoric as techne, as nefarious aUy of law and technical astrology, negating the fuUest development of human excellence.

An earlier commentator on the poem stresses that, in the pseudo-QuintUian declamation that lies behind Bernard's text, the sitaation 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 dUemma is in its insolubUity.""' The very last line of the declamation indicates the very real possibihty that in kiUing himself, the hero may also kUl his father (of grief): "Metao, ne pat-rem, dum morior, occidam."'" Curiously, in nearly all manuscripts of the Mathematicus,^^' the last Une of the poem expresses triumph, the triumph of the individual over the restrictions of law, society, and rhetoric depicted as the slave disciphne of statecraft. Bernard does not say (in most versions of the poem) that Patricida was SMC-cessful in his intention to evade the astrological prediction; he seems

"*J. P Migne, Patrologia Latina 171.1380D; ed. Haureau, 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 detemunism of . . . astrology" in the Renaissance, see Trinkaus (n. 65 above, pp. 460 and pp. 466-67). The opposition here expressed between, on the one hand, free wUl, a culture based on rhetorical practice, human self-fulfillment, and on the other, astrological deter­minism, underlines the coincidence between the rhetorical humanism of twelfth and fifteenth centuries. Pontano (1429-1503) was a courtier, astrologer and poet. Cf. above n. 141.

"'Wetherbee (above n. 134), p. 157. '"G. Lehnert, Quintiliani quae feruntur Declamationes XIX Maiores (Leipzig,

Teubner, 1905), p. 88. "'Except the Beriin MS (cf. ed. Haureau, p . 8); Dronke (above n. 145), p . 134ff.

Magic and Rhetoric 99

more mterested in the decision to adopt a course of action that is very Ukely approved by no one other than Patricida, least of aU by the Roman senators who undoubtedly discount (as rulers should) the disruptive effects of astrological prognostication, and recaU Patricida to the civic obhgations he was ready enough to assume when things were different.

Foremost tensions and anxieties of social Iffe were explored in poetry with mcreasing vigor during the twelfth centary, not be­cause poetry provided answers or solutions, but because it ex­posed, played with, focussed on insolubilia and thereby aimed at a sort of attempted "control," by way of rhetoric/magic, the incan­descent VirgUian insphed elegiac;"* no different, perhaps, was Dante's terza rima, with its VergUian inspuation, and its "great mat­ter." Thus, Bernard's poetic integumentum, in this case, plays with the equivalent of Gorgias' conclusion that "aU is tragic.""' One as excellent in human skiUs and power as Patricida has two choices: death, the negation of everything, or slavery—enslavement, that is, to the impossibUity of certain knowledge and autonomy, to techrucal rhetoric and astrology.

Ultimately, then, the poem testifies to contemporary interest in

"°Ms. Deirdre Stone has made important discoveries illustrating the close nexus between the Aeneid and the Matherrmticus. Cf. above n. 145. Ancient declama­tory themes inspired much poetic venture in the twelfth century and perhaps helped spawn the familiar debate—poem genre. Conflicts between step-children or between family and feudal loyalty underlie many chansons de geste. For the Romance, see: R. W. Hanning, The Iruiividual in Twelfth Century Romance (New Haven, 1977), and his article, "The Social Significance of Twelfth Century Chivalric Romance," Medievalia et Hurrmnistica ns. 3(1972), pp. 3-29; E. Vinaver, The Rise of Romance (Ox­ford, 1971); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (New York, 1957), chap. 6; Penny Gold, The Lady and the Virgin (Chicago, 1985); S. Knight, "Proesce and Cortoisie: Ideology in Chretien de Troyes Le Chevalier au Lion," Studium 14(Sydney, 1982). On the Stoic 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 justification of suicide as an action to preserve liberty, ibid., pp. 49-50. For the Oedipal complex in the twelfth century, see Phil Barker, "The Politicis of Primo­geniture: Sex, Consciousness, and Social Organization in North Western Europe (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 poetes latins du XII' siecle," Cahiers de Civilization Medievale 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.

'='Untersteiner (above n. 4), pp, 118-24, 140-63.

100 R H E T O R I C A

astrology, the occult, predestination, divination, and the host of human problems they impinge upon, not least the relationship be­tween fathers and sons. The close link between the insolubilia that arise from any attempt to consider the relationship between the in­dividual and destiny, and poetry as the appropriate mode for ex­ploring such insolubilia suggests the primacy of rhetoric as magic, elevated above the controlling, normalizing, "Unearizing," "hypo-tactic" forces harnessed in technical rhetoric, by a fascmation with the irrational element in life, with the impinging supernataral. Ber­nardus of course, was not alone in his double interest hi rhetoric, poetry and the occult. Marbod of Rennes (c. 1100 A.D.) for ex­ample, who wrote a short commentary on the fourth book of the Ad Herennium (the colores), not only was described by contempo­raries as king of orators, but also excelled as a poet and wrote a standard treatise on the occult powers of gems.'""

This final item, the occult power of gems, suggests a classic U-lustration of the conjunction between rhetoric and magic in the middle twelfth centary: the case of Abbot Suger of St Denis, "the Father of Gothic." Suger believed, following the neoplatonic trea­tises of Pseudo-Denis the Areopagite, that through contemplation of beautiful material objects, especially gems, man was able to make the spiritaal or anagogical ascent to contemplation of celes­tial hierarchies, the invisible sphere of spiritaal understanding. This is the conceptaal framework behind Suger's construction and ornamentation of the abbey church of St. Denis in the 1130s and 1140s. A belief in the spiritaal 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 anagogical ascent to a knowledge of things spiritaal; the Latin text, complete with its rhe­torical structare of triad and reciprocity, is used, in this interpreta­tion, Uke much monastic historiography, as litargical lectio or read­ing and provides specffic access to the occult, the spiritaal, the "hidden," Uke gems or magical ritaals and ceremonies. Certain

""Thomdike (above n. 53) I (1923), chap, xxxiv, pp. 775ff. See also his "de fato et genesi," ed. W. Bulst, Marbodi . Liber Decern Capitulorum (Heidelberg, 1947), pp. 22-26. Hildegard of Bingen is another highly literate twelfth century writer with a deep belief in the magical efficacy of words, 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; Thomdike, II chap. 40.

Magic and Rhetoric 101

other featares of Suger's sitaation fit our pictare. 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 rheto­ric, a suppher of skUls to ruler and crown—administrative, ideologi­cal, rhetorical, historical, litargical and architectaral skiUs.'^'

There seems a close link, then, between various forms of rheto­rical interest and awareness in the twelfth centary 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 in­gredients in the "cultaral shfft" accomphshed during the "Twelfth Centary Renaissance.'"" Some emphases discerned accord weU enough with the lines I have been tracing in this paper; for ex­ample, the emphasis upon inferiority, self-doubt, self-centered-ness, ahenation noticed by Southern, Hanning, Vinaver, Morris, and others in what they take to be the new world of the "Ro­mance," during the second half of the twelfth centary. Other threads noticed, however, work against my idea of a destabUizing of the universe, of the mental world in which the thinking, literate individual found him/herself in the period: "Twelfth centary Eu­rope merits attention as a society that became critical of its magical beliefs and developed scientific conceptions," writes Radding;'^

"'I owe this interpretation of Suger's Vita to a fascinating talk by Gabrielle Spiegel, "Suger and Historiography," (paper delivered at the Abbot Suger and St. Denis, intemational 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.

'"Ch. Haskins, The Rermissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1927); R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London, 1953), chap. 5; M. Stevens, "The Performing Self in Twelfth Century Culhire," 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, "Society and the Supernatural: a Me­dieval Change," Daedalus 104(1975), pp. 133-51; A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1978); Ch. Radding, A World Made by Men: Cognition and Society 400-1200 (University of N. Carolina Press, 1985); Heather Phillips, "John Wyclif's De 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).

'"Radding 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 reasoning" (p. 155) was not, it may be added, general, or political (as Radding would have it), but part of the social experience of particular groups and individuals within the new litterati.

102 R H E T O R I C A

the "deanimisation and demagification of the universe begins in the twelfth centary," says Richard Dales;'" Tina Stiefel claims that an intellectaal revolution occurred in the twelfth centary: a com­plete scientific methodology was developed that anticipated in goal and natare modern scientific methodology: "U began to appear that the whole universe was inteUigible and accessible to human reason: natare is now perceived as an orderly system, not a myste­rious, necessarUy obscure phenomenon;" the "increasuigly wide rejection of rationalist and scientific thinking, in favor of magical and occult thinking" that characterized Europe between the fourth centary B.C. and the eleventh centary A.D. was now reversed.'*' Other writers have stressed a movement away, in the twelfth cen­tary, from archaic, ritaal-based "Old Testament" cultare in the ear­her Middle Ages, towards one based on rational literacy, scholastic reason, clarity, hierarchy, linearity and a calculating mentaUty.^*

How do we reconcUe the "rise of rationahsm" with the de­stabilizing of cosmology that accompanies a rising fascination with the occult and the supernataral? Do we have to do with two com­peting mental universes, the one a world of cosmology, poetry, al­legory, magic, alchemy, and the supernataral, the other a world of literate, bureaucratic, scholastic "reason?" Is this what Brian Stock meant recently by his "logical" and his "rhetorical" interpretative strategies?"*'' The answer to this question cannot delay us here, ex­cept to note that two (or more) mental universes in the twelfth cen­tary, 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 distarbed literate world of

'"Dale, "A Twelfth Cenhiry Concept of the Natural Order," Viator 9 (1978), p. 179,

"*Stiefel, (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.

"* Morris, PhUlips, Murray (above n. 162); L. K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (London, 1978); Janet Nelson, "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.

"•'New Literary History 16 (1984-85), pp. 27-28, and cf. comments of G. Evans, p. 117.

Magic and Rhetoric 103

court service,"* the world of the "vUlain" upstart civis or burgher, the world of the new heretical confraternities, or "textaal commu-ruties," the very competing textaal communities'"' themselves— that based on Aristofle's Organon, that based on the De inventione, on the Timaeus, on the BiWe, on Martianus Capella's De nuptiis, and other texts.

What is abundanfly dear is that a magical view of the universe did not die out with the twelfth centary, or even the fourteenth. Although at aU periods there have been inteUectaals 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 inteUectaals have periodically been drawn to a magical view of the uruverse, and it is with those in­teUectaals, and their less inteUectaal partaers or compeers, with whom the present paper is concemed. The wider question of the extent to which inteUectaal postures reflect or shape movements of general ciUtiural mentahty, from magical to scientific, touch to sight, modular to representational"" 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 (Itahan) Renaissance is compUcated as far as the threads I have been trying to tease out are concemed. On the one hand, as aheady noted, in Europe north of the Alps, from the late twelfth centary on, a dimunition of interest in rhetoric/ techne and rhetoric/magic can be detected.'^ The latter is relegated to incipient vernacular efforts—Latin cosmological poetry dies out"^—and a recent artide by E. H. Duncan indicates the interest­ing possibUity that Chaucer was a master alchemist himself (and had a court background).'" In a sense, however, these cucum-

' - ' a . above n. 82. "^Stock (above n. 73); N. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millenium (Paladin, 1970),

chap. 3. ""See the interesting trilogy of artides in Viator 6 (1975), pp. 309-90. '"'Murphy, Medieval Eloquence, p. 54. '"Wetherbee (above n. 134), pp. 255-56. '"Above n. 68 and note Robert M. Schuler, 'The Renaissance Chaucer as Al­

chemist," Viator 15 (1984), p. 305ff. For the Roman de la Rose and alchemy, see Ogrinc (above n. 74), p. 108. Note also the curious conjunction of "oratio . . rethorica . . encantativas divinativas . . nigromantia . . " in J. Anglade, ed.. Las Leys d'Amors I (Toulouse, 1919), pp. 73-74. Note that both Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella, his slightly younger contemporary, were Hermetidsts and poets (Yates, n. 43 above), p. 393. See Dennis Costa, "Poetry and Gnosticism: the Podiai of Tommaso Campanella," \'iator 15 (1984), 405ff.

104 R H E T O R I C A

stances represent not so much a dechning interest in rhetoric as techne as a routinizing of that interest: rhetoric/ techne subsides into the fourth book of Boethius' De differentiis topicis; even Aristofle's Rhetoric, when it came in for stady, was deaU with rather under the headings of ethics and politics than of Ciceronian rhetoric. This re­tarn of a monohthic institational/uitellectaal environment and a consequent streamlining of rhetoric as techne is, in fact, accompa­nied by a growing concern to control the urational in other areas. It is the conclusion of all stadents that the later Middle Ages wit­nessed 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'AUly, Henry of Langenstein, Nicolas de Sauer, Jean de Francfort, Henri de Gorkum, Deitrich de Miinster and other members of the ruling theological caste devote to the condemnation of the occult suggests the same conclusion."^ "The ferment of diabolism," writes Seznec, has regained all its old virulence and the "astrolatry" expressly rec­ommended by Picatrix takes us back to the time of Apuleius, to the 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 centary from oriental and HeUenistic ele­ments. It was translated into Spanish at the court of Alfonso el Sabio (thirteenth centary), but there are no Latin manuscripts ex­tant before the fifteenth centary, when it became popular in that guise too.'^'

Bernard Chaput in the volume on marginality mentioned ear­lier,'"* locates the impetas for the fascination with madness in the trials and woes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centaries—war, plague, cold winters, drought, famine, and a mortality rate so high that in some years, the grave-diggers could not cope. But the link

"••See Coopland (n. 67 above); N. H. Steneck, Science and Creation in the Middle 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; F. Bonney, "Autour de Jean Gerson: opinions de theologiens sur les superstitions et la sor-cellerie au debut du XV« siede," Le Moyen Age 77(1971), pp. 85-98. Thomdike and others have stressed that magic was not marginal to intellectual Ufe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance generally. This does not, however, deny the obvious evi­dence for a rise and fall of interest in the subject.

'"Seznec (above n. 100), pp. 53-56; Thomdike II (above n. 53), p . 813. '"AUard (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" dajrs before the onset of the Black Death and economic recession. Paget Toyn-bee, for example, in her Dante Alighieri, dtes a document in which Dante is mentioned as a person on hand who could, by image-magic and incantations, procure the death of euiyone."^ In the Con-vivio, according to Jean Seznec, "Dante outlines a complete system of knowledge, corresponding point for point %vith the astrological system."'^ In this system Dante assodates the planet Venus with rhetoric.'" Although Dante himself seems to have been responsible for this assodation, he derives the allocation of rhetoric to the third planetary ring from an earher rhetor, Buoncompagno, who ar­ranged knowledge in a series of concentric planetar\' rings thus: trhrium, tptadrixmim, medicine, law, theolog)-, then the subtUes (or in other readings futUes) spheres of geomanc%', necromancy, pyro­mancy, spatomancy, aldiemy. Dante's equation of rhetoric and Venus breaches the usual equation of rhetoric and Mercury,'* and opens up a whole new view of the irrational power of rhetoric, foreshadowed by the role of Merciuy, Venus, love, and rhetoric in the Metamorphosis Goliae, and, in other wa)rs, in the poetry of the troubadours. In the Commedia (Paradise) Venus returns to her primary assodation with love,*^ and spell-casting, witchcraft, al­chemy, fortune-telling, and magidans like Michael Scott are con­demned."*^ Pico della Mirandola provides another example of such

'"' Faget Toynbee, Dante Alighkri: His Ufe and Worts, ed. C. S. Singleton (N.Y., 1965). p. 101.

""Seznec (abo\-e n. 100), p. 49. and G. Hofanes. Dante (Oxford, 1980). pp. 37-39. ""Coirprpib II xiv, p. 85 of fl Convito. Tfer Banquet of Dante Aligliieri. trans. E. P.

Sayer (London. 1887). •"H. Wieruszowski (abo\-e n. 106). ch. 7 pt. II, pp. 530fF. Dante's assignment,

though astrological in pattern. dep>arts from the usual identification. For example, Maisilio Fidno, in tus De vHa coelitus comparantia (1489, Shumaker—abo\'e n. 141— ch. in pt. iii) assigns NJercurv to "wit," "industry-." "inN-entiveness." i.e., the spedal qualities of man \-ersus beast, induding speech, and \"enus to "iv-armth and soft­ness." i.e., a "companiable capadt\-."

'"Paradiso canto Vm. etc. '^Inferno 29,11, 20: Inf. 20.118: Guido Bonatti. an astrologer (tibrr astronomicus).

Professor at Boiogna: G. Scaitazzini. La Dimna Ccmtmedia di Dante .Aligliieri Bologna (1889). I pp. 341-2. In the Paradiso (IV 37-42). Dante takes refuge in a "scholastic" view of language—as a straight-forward mediator of a realit\- be ixmd words. See Anderson (above n. 101). pp. 376-77. Compare Petrarch's condenmation of Al­chemy"; Ogrinc (abo\* n. 74). p. 109.

106 R H E T O R I C A

a change of position. His Disputationes adversus astrologiam divi-natricem (1495) has been described as a "volte-face" of his earUer views.'^ 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. Hyde'** asso­ciate this with the development of a deeper interest in antiquity; a simUar 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 wUchcraft preoccupations of the eleventh and twelfth centaries A.D.'^ There seems, however, in the Renais­sance, to be somethmg 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 burning its heretics and sorcerers. . . . The advent of humanism coincided with a revival or sorcery persecution," writes Brucker, of the period 1375 to 1430."** "The first effect of humanism was to en­courage astrology" writes Seznec.'*' "Of the great humanists, orUy

'"Shumaker (above n. 141), ch. I pt. ii. Yates (above n. 43), however, sees it as, but a defence of magia naturalis. Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples was another beUever in magic who later recanted.

iM pgtgj. Burke, "Witchcraft and Magic In Renaissance Italy: Gianfrancesco Pico and His Strix," ed. S. Anglo, 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, according to Anderson (above n. 101), pp. 418-19, gave him insight into antiquity's "irrational side, its dependence on prophecy and witchcraft." His own practice as a prophet/poet caused him to saU dose to the Inquisition and this may explain why he so vehemently condemned contemporary wizards and necromancers in the Divine Comedy.

'»= Above n. 69. '"G. Brucker, "Sorcery in the Early Renaissance," Studies in the Rermissance

10(1963), pp. 7-24, p. 8. '"Seznec (above n. 100), p. 57 and Trinkaus (above n. 65), though it should be

noted that the humanists tried (p. 60) to free human wiU from steUar determinism. Cf. Dante, Divine Comedy, Purg. XVI 106-08; D. later min, Savormrola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Rermissance (Princeton, 1970), pp. 88ff deal with the cre­scendo of interest in astrological prophecy in fourteenth and fifteenth century Italy. E. Garin, Lo Zodiaco della vita: la polemica sulV astrologia del trecento al cinquecento (Bari, 1982). H. Carey, "Astrology and Divination in Later Medieval England," (Ph.D. diss. Oxford, 1984), esp. pp. 15-16, 126, 157, 314, deaUng with the rapid growth of interest in the subject outside Italy. On the considerable popularity of geomancy in

Magic and Rhetoric 107

Erasmus held reservations about magic and faUed to share the world view of his contemporaries . . . [an] . . irrational magical world view that threatened the very foundations of Christianity" m the person of a figure Uke Giordano Bruno, burnt at Rome ui 1600 A.D."* The year 1520 marks a peak of witch-hunting m Italy; Yates speaks of a "rise in the statas of the magician in the fifteenth and sixteenth centaries."'*' A long list of eminent humanists, en­couraged by a faith in the inteUectaal powers of man, showed in­terest in the potential that magic and astrology had for uiUocking secrets as yet hidden from man concerning the natare of things. Amongst these we might mention Petrarch, Marsiho Ficino, Giro-lamo Cardano, Giovanni Pico deUa Muandola, Giordano Bruno, Pomponazzi, ComeUus Agrippa, Giovanni Pontano. Pomponius Laetas copied a Geomancy in his own hand; Coluccio Salutati wrote a polemic against Cecco d'AscoU in his Defato, fortuna et casu which conunented on Dante's theory of deterirunism and astrology. "It seems that the cognitive validity and authority of occultism grew stronger in the Renaissance thanks to the attention which MarsUio Ficino and Pico deUa Mirandola gave to astrology. Cabala, the Her-metica, magic and other species of occultism." "The occultist tradi­tion lost this "cogrutive authority between the last quarter of the fifteenth centary and the first quarter of the eighteenth." "The dan­gerous impetas that astrology had gained in the thirteenth centary

later medieval EngUsh and French courts, see Therese Charmasson, Recherches sur une technique divirmtoire: la georrmncie dans I'occident medidjal (Paris, Geneva, 1980). Pa­tricia Eberle pointed out (at the 22nd Intemational 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 discus­sion above at n. 42 and n. 43.

'"John Burke, "Hermetism as a Renaissance World View" in Kinsman (above n. 58), pp. I l l and 115. Giordano Bruno "was deeply involved in the humanist movement and the revival of dassical learning," D. W. Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (London, 1950), p. 55. He wrote on artificial memory (an essential aspect of the rhetorical curriculum and a key access to power), logical topics, the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum, LlulUan 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 Her­metic Neoplatonism, the Cabala, cosmic aUegory and a beUef in magic, witchcraft and natural divinahon that were characteristic of his age, fean 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.

'*'Burke (above n. 184), p. 33.

108 R H E T O R I C A

was accentuated in the fifteenth and sixteenth. Here, again, the Re­naissance was to prove a continuation of the Middle Ages." "Thus, at the very moment when great thinkers are striving to throw off the humUiating yoke of the cosmic bodies as such, they tremble be­fore the mysterious divinities which inhabit them.""" Accordmg to Foucault, "from the fifteenth centary on, the face of madness has haunted the imaguiation of western man,""' an mtensffication, as it were, of the theme of death which "up to the second half of the fifteenth centary or even a Uttle 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 centaries, of interest in rhetoric/ techne. This is the period and place from which most of the commentaries on the glossed and unglossed texts of the Ad Heren­nium and De inventione derive. As in later antiquity, where a rising interest in rhetoric/fec/zne was accompanied by a growing sensi­tivity towards rhetoric/magic, the humanist period in Italy is char­acterized 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.""^ Landino in the fffteenth centary as­serted the "prUnacy of poetry over the 'Uberal arts '" and tells us that poets "are moved by a divine madness""^—in this harking back to antique views, expressed most clearly in Plato's dialogue Ion where Socrates maintauis that poets "are possessed by a spirit not their own when they compose, lUce Bacchantes possessed by the God, or the Corybantes who lose aU control of reason in then enthusiasm for the sacred dance, in a state of divine insaruty.""* Grassi stresses the notion of language as "rhetorical, imagistic, and

""See: Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, p. 679 (Laetus); D. Thompson and A. F. Nagel, eds.. The Three Crowns of Florence: Humanist Assessments of Dante, Pdrarca and Boccaccio (New York, 1972, Coluccio); Brian Copenhaver, Symphorien Champierand the Reception of the Occultist Tradition in Rermissance France (The Hague, 1978), pp. 34-35; Seznec (above n. 100), pp. 57, 61.

"'Foucault, p. 15. The first western hospital to house the mad is mentioned in the statutes of the Order of the Holy Spirit at MontpelUer, founded 1178-79 (p. 44).

'"E. Grassi, "Can Rhetoric Provide a New Basis for Philosophizing? The Hu­manist Tradition," Philosophy and Rhetoric 11(1978), p. 14.

' "Md. , p. 81. "*A. D. Lindsay (above n. 37).

Magic and Rhetoric 109

metaphorical" among the humanists."' 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 weU as rational aspects of thought-as-experience.""^ Richard Lanham says: "You cannot read Renaissance Uteratare for long without noticing everywhere a dehght in words, an infataation with rhetoric, a stylistic explosion.""^ This efflorescence is accom­panied by a heightened interest ur musical chromaticism, that is, hi a preference for the direct emotion of textaal homophony versus the diffused experience of polyphony, in an attempt to captare the "powerfiU pyschological and sometimes even miraculous effects on Usteners that Greek music was supposed to have been capable of producing.""*

Here, then, in the later Middle Ages we find aU the phenomena in which we are interested competing, exactly as in the eleventh century, in disorder: the growth of a rationahsm aimed in part against occiUtism, the growth of interest in the "irrational" and oc­cultism, an upsurge of interest in both rhetoric/ techne and rheto­ric/magic. These conjunctions demand an explanation that moves beyond the somewhat simplistic chronological sequence of ratio­nahsm plus rhetoric/techne followed by an oscUlation of the pen-

"'Grassi, p. 84. '"Struever (above n. 4), p. 67, and see also p. 81. '"Lanham (above n. 14), p. 33. The assodation between "Renaissance," "Hu­

manism" and "rhetoric" grows stronger with each decade: H. H. Gray, "Renais­sance Humanism: the Pursuit of Eloquence" in Rermissance Essays from the Journal of the History of Ideas, ed. R O. KristeUer and P. P Wiener (N.Y., 1968), pp. 199-216; W. J. Bouwsma, "Changing Assumptions in Later Renaissance Culture,'' Viator 7(1976), pp. 421-40; "The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History," Ameri­can Historical Review 84 (1979), pp. 1-15; The Culture of Rermissance Humanism (Ameri­can Historical Association pamphlet, 1973); "The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought," Itinerarium Italicum, ed. H. A. Ober-man and T. A. Brady (Leiden, 1975), pp. 3-60, esp. p. 3; "Anxiety and the Forma­tion of Early Modem Culture," After the Reformation: Essays in Honor off. H. Hexter, ed. B. C. Malament (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), pp. 215ff (especially 234, "fluidity" in the Renaissance replacing "certainty," with rhetoric being the sci­ence of probability and fluidity "valued in the Renaissance for its plasticity, its abUity to flow into and through every area of experience.") Cf. also Maurice Finocchiaro's exhausHve emphasis upon the rhetorical aspects of Galileo's work: Galileo and the Art of Reasoning: Rhetorical Foundations Of Logic and Scientific Method (Reidel, 1980).

'"See the interesting chapter (17) by H. M. Brown in E. Cochrane, The Late Ital­ian Renaissance 1525-1630 (MacmiUan, 1970), and Brian Vickers in Rhetorica 2(1) 1984.

110 R H E T O R I C A

dulum towards rhetoric/magic and irrationalism suggested by our initial reading of De Romilly's book. In outlinuig such an explana­tion I bring this paper to a close.

JV 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, primarUy rural, and oral so­cieties in which the Uterate, intellectaal class is a smaU beleaguered minority, and complicated, plurahst societies in which hteracy is relatively widespread, in which different (Uterate) worlds can co­exist, in which there is an observable power struggle for control of literacy, word power, and scientia that results in some groups and individuals emerging victorious, whUe others become marginal­ized. In simple societies, a simple chronological pattern of chang­ing interests on the part of the smaU literate elite may well emerge as that eUte encounters different influences and embraces them homogeneously. In our second type of society, competing cultaral universes will coexist and conflict one with another. The high points in the period we have just surveyed, the fourth, tweffth, and fif­teenth centaries (to use crude and rather too narrowly stated con­ventional chronological delineations) are significant points of diver­sification and conflict between cultaral universes and the groups that sustain them, not simple swings of De RomUIy's pendiUum. In later antiquity the advent of Christianity, of the mihtary Emperors and their new social class of palatini, of increasingly sigruficant eastern influences, and the rich matarity of Graeco-Latin cultare across the whole canvas of sophisticated urban imperial territory, created new dimensions of cultaral conflict—between palatini and senatores, between Christians and pagans and gnostics and here­tics, between new social groups and old ones, for example—that resulted in radical cultaral and mental shffts, the ramifications and dimensions of which have been charted with great insight by R. F. Newbold.'" In the period of the 'Twelfth Centary Renaissance' Eu­rope lurched decisively and irrevocably into an age of archival gov-

•"Cf. 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 eUte emerged that was to shape for all subsequent time the cultural mentahty of the European world. In the period of the "Italian Re­naissance," a precocious shift of hteracy took place further from the monopoUst studium/universitas/ecclesia power centers of an ear­Uer age, into the market place, the commune, the court, with the consequence that, as in the twelfth centary, new recruits to literacy were sucked into the new literate vortices from the rural world. These changes and shifts accentaated the conflict of cultaral uni­verses and sensitized the interconnections among them with con­sequences of duect relevance to our theme.

To explain adequately the links between the phenomena en­countered so far in this paper, we need to develop the sociological patterns hinted at earlier in our discussion. For example, the tide of "Urationalism" in the later Middle Ages, most evident in the growth of the witchcraft phenomenon, is nowadays reckoned to be the product, in large part, of a particular intellectaal class in a particu­lar 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.^™ Peaking of interest in the irrational, as we have seen, derives as much from socio-political changes of a very particular type, associated for example with the rise of courts and bureaucratic monarchies, as it does from the changing cultaral 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 centary, together with the tentacular elabo­ration of ecclesiastical and papal governments created a critical cU-

'"For an attempt (that has been criticized) see Kieckhefer (above n. 45). P. Riche, "La Magie Carolingienne," Comptes Rendus de I'Acaddnie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, (Paris, 1973), pp. 127ff comments on the increase in magical beUefs in aU classes during the Carolingian period. Does this phenomenon, however, represent a mania of the intellectuals (who are at the same time fascinated by the power of classical rhetorical and poetic writing) or their reaction to a developing passion among the lower orders? Does it represent their own heightened 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 RomiUy's remarks require this quaUfication. For the general prevalence of occultic beliefs among the masses cf. Cambridge Medieval History, VIII, pp. 664-66. See also above n. 29.

112 R H E T O R I C A

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 intellectaal goals and standards) rather than in spe-ciaUzed institations of administrative and dictatorial skills. The re­sult was a class of "aUenated" inteUectaals, producing novel, non-estabUshed literary forms—Gohardic verse, cosmological poetry, Romance, history, belleslettres, letters, and farragines like John of Salisbury's Policraticus or Walter Map's De nugis curialium or Ger­vase 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, leading up to Dante's day. Becker in an interesting article entitled "Dante and His Literary Contemporaries as Political Men" has de­scribed the literary activities of Dante, Dino Compagni, and others as a unique combination of eloquence and poUtics.^' A third peak­ing of interest in rhetoric as magic is associated with the later Ital­ian humanists. Lauro Marlines characterizes this class as sprung "from famUies of a middling sort, often professional, rather than from well-established upper class families; . . . dozens . . . were 'outsiders' in the sense that they won patronage or major public positions in cities to which they were not native . . . they were av­idly ambitious, socially mobUe, proud, touchy and combative . . . they clung to the ideal of eloquence . . because it was the skUl that

. took them up in the world . . . from middling social positions. Sooner, therefore, and more faithfully than men to the manner born, the professionals—new men, men on the make—were able to articulate the values of the eUtes which they had entered or to which they aspired, or in whose service their pens were arrayed . . . but fundamental social trends—such as the centary's deepen­ing stress on birth, class and privUege—also had the effect on them, as parvenus, of intensifying then touchiness, snobbery and esteem for the intellectaal vir taes ."^ Some members of the dicta­tor/humanist class were sprung from relatively aristocratic origins: Dante derived from a 12th centary Ghibelline noble famUy, and in his Commedia adopts a socially conservative and aristocratic stand-

'»' Speculum 41(1966), pp. 665-80, esp. p. 679. For the twelfth century, see Mor­ris (above n. 162) chapter 6 and Frappell (n. 82 above), chap. 7.

" 'L. Marlines, Power and Imagination: City States in Renaissance Italy (N.Y., 1979), p. 206.

Magic and Rhetoric 113

point; Brunetto Latini was sprung from an imperial knight/notary, and Marlines has noted others.^"^ Nevertheless the precocious in­terest that inteUectaals in the three periods just mentioned show in rhetoric as magic derives from their own class experience, not from the general featares 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 bureau­cracy" in Florence. There was a five-fold increase in the "number of officials hired by the Florentine treasury," a vast expansion in the vicariate and the captaincy "throughout the burgeoning Flor­entine Empire," "a movement towards the bureaucratization of the polls," the rise of a "new officialdom.""" Such a development must have accentaated the primacy of Uteracy and put a new premium on the skiUs possessed by a class of persons many of whom must have come from less literate backgrounds and felt the sharp edge of their new social sitaation. At the same time, Brucker stresses a new emphasis upon rhetorical skiUs 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 persua­sion.^"' This rhetorical and historical awareness blossomed into the sustained classicizing rhetoric that Hans Baron has associated specifically with the wars against Giangaleazzo Visconti.^"* Such a close association is, of course, unnecessary. The characteristic fea­tare of the Florentine polity 1382-1434 is a recurrence of the conflict between "formal" and "informal" power, between the processes of the government and the constitation 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 "belonged to important families or were men of law" (Anderson, above n. 101, p. 82). Guido Cavalcanti was a member of one of Florence's wealthiest famUies. See also Martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists 1390-1460 (London, 1963), p. 14. For Giovanni VUlani, 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).

' "N. Rubinstein, ed., Florentine Studies: Politics and Society in Rermissance Flor­ence (Evanston, 1968), pp. 117-119. D. Heriihy, "The Tuscan Town in the Quattro­cento: A Demographic Profile," Medievalia et Humanistica ns. 1(1970), pp. 99-104 notes the peculiarly immigrant origins of notaries and intellectuals.

'"'G. Bmcker, The Civic World of Early Rermissance Florence (Princeton, 1977), pp. 290ff and 284-302 generally.

'"'Ibid., pp. 293-94, and cf. R. G. Witt, "Florentine PoUtics and the Ruling Class 1382-1402," foumal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 6(1976), pp. 243-67.

114 R H E T O R I C A

ence of the elite of entrenched wealthy, weU-connected families, on the other. We have noted that in late antiquity such a sitaation caused—according to Peter Brown—a rise in witchcraft accusa­tions, 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 centary Florence, those groups and individuals whose power and statas was neither as as­sured nor as predictable as they would have liked, display a height­ened awareness of the power of rhetoric and rhetorical genres (for example, history) in face-to-face persuasive sitaations. That this development should have accompanied a rising incidence of sor­cery accusations^"^ is no surprise.

The social and cultaral experience of the class of new inteUec­taals 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 cultare in this period is but one symptom of a broad change affecting upper hterate elements in society. He caUs this change a process of "dis­tancing," a product of the increasingly and competitively interde­pendent upper class world in and around the courts of the day and the necessary behavioral and linguistic codes used to mark rarUc and distance between individuals. Part of a process of increasing consciousness of a difference between self and natare, self and ob­ject, this "distancing" and "detachment" represents a key featare of later medieval elite urban society, a society progressively domi­nated by the phenomenon of the centralized court.^°* Reflection and calculation, argues Elias, replace spontaneity in social rela­tions. 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.^*"

Part and parcel of "this shift towards an increased conscious-

'<"Cf. n. 186 above. "*See John Lamer, "Europe of the Courts," Journal of Modern History 55 (1983),

pp. 669-681; N. Elias, The Court Society, trans. E. Jephcott (N.Y., 1983), pp. 242-43. On the relevance of Elias' work see Jaeger (above n. 85), pp. 5-16. I have also had the benefit of an unpublished paper on the subject by my colleague M. W. Jackson, entitled, "The Power of Civilization."

""Elias, p. 243. J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Rermissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (Mentor, 1960), pt. I. Jaeger (above n. 85), p. 258: "circum­stances in court society subject action to etiquette, prescribe a stylized speech and posture . . . conduct becomes so highly stmctured that life approaches art: the cour­tier is himself a work of art. . . ."

Magic and Rhetoric 115

ness of the autonomy of what is experienced in relation to the per­son who experiences, towards a greater autonomy of 'objects' in the experience of 'subjects', [which] is closely related to the thick­ening 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 abUity 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 manffestations of this specific uncertainty. While in some areas, particularly that of 'Natare,' the concepts and modes of thought used by people match the observable facts better than ever before, whUe in this sense the image that people form of nata­ral phenomena becomes more adequate and reliable, at the same time people cannot convince themselves that everything they think about this 'reaUty' is not mere ideas, products of the human mind, in short Ulusions. This uncertainty, the doubt concerning the rela­tion of reality and iUusion, pervades the whole period."^'"

This new sense of uncertainty—Bouwsma has called it "anxi-ety"^"—places a premium upon rhetoric as the preserver and codi-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, man­ners, and the proliferation of dictaminal texts in the period.^'^ 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 ritaal 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-rupulation—of the observed world, and by the disappearance (for the groups affected) of the participatory, spontaneous cultare of the archaic world. ' Bouwsma has recently referred to this complex of cultaral attitades as an oscUlatory phase in western culture, be-

"°EUas, p. 252. '"Above n. 197. '"Mark 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. '"See Heather Phillips, in n. 162 above.

116 R H E T O R I C A

tween "Renaissance humanism" and "intellectaal scholasticism."^'^ To this insight we need simply to add that individuals, hke social groups, are pushed periodically into the "relativist mode" by the processes of marginalization, alienation, and environmental shfft associated with the dynamics of expanduig literacy and cultaral di­versification 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 Ut­eracy may not have been characteristic are affected by such dynam­ics, we have what can be recognized as a "Renaissance," to use a term appropriate to an older generation of primarUy phUological historians of cultare.^" Set within these "Renaissances" are ag­gregations of phenomena that may be associated with our theme. Thus, for example, at the heart of the "twelfth centary Renais­sance," in the Romances of Chretien de Troyes, the role of reflec­tion, calculation and the trivium, especially syntactic or hypotactic rhetoric, as described by Vinaver, Hunt and others,^'* reminds us of the close link between courts and rhetoric as magic. Rhetoric emerges as a crucial form of distancing appropriate to an age in which the transforming processes I have been referring to were more than usually evident.

My conclusions, then, briefly, stated, are these. The chronologi­cal sequence of oscillations of the pendulum between rhetoric/ techne and rhetoric/magic that De RomUly presents for antiquity, and, perhaps, implicitly for subsequent cultaral 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/ techne and an urge to "control" and, on the other, rhetoric/magic and an urge to disrupt the clear focus of rational, systematic "control" (as inappropriate to the margins of the court, or the market-place). This second impulse seeks to replace institationally sanctioned forms of discourse with the blurred, impressionistic, imagistic absence of focus inherent in po­etry, practical rhetoric and prestidigitation, divination, and oc-

' " Above n. 197. "*Elias (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 Civi­lization, trans. E. Jephcott (Oxford, 1982).

'"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 peakings obey a broad chronological imperative, as the medieval cultaral world makes the transition from a small scale, primarUy oral, "archaic" cultare, to the beginnings of a court and literacy donunated, pluralist set of proto-modern cultaral uni­verses, but within the broad pictare of intensification from the eleventh century onwards are set minor chronological oscillations or "Renaissances" which have more to do with particular social re­sponses to relatively sudden spurts of the impulse towards archival and Uterate modes of domination within a rapidly diversifying and mataring cultaral pattern than with general featares of an age as a whole. The dynamism or mechanics of these "spurts" seems to have been oscUlatory; patterns of intense activity and competition seem to have been succeeded by more focussed, routinized, mono-Uthic patterns though the geography and timing of the osciUations is hard to work out. The dislocation, diversification, competition, and transformation associated with cultaral changes that took place in the eleventh and twelfth centaries seems to have been suc­ceeded, in some areas at least, by a measure of stabilization or rou-tinization, in which the institations and techniques of inquiry and problem resolution that emerged triumphant from the earlier pe­riod enjoyed some dominance, and cultaral patterns took on a somewhat more homogeneous hue. Such stabiUty as this process may have achieved underwent further dislocation towards the end of the thirteenth centary when, at least in parts of France and northern Italy, a strongly control-oriented clerical estabUshment met head-on the pluralist, competitive, hotbed of lay literacy and emerging socio-inteUectaal structares associated with decentraliza­tion of the imperial bureaucracy in Italy, the emergence of commu­nal 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 PhUip IV and John XXII,^" the rhetorical "magic" of Dante and the other poets of the dolce stU nuovo or of Jean de Meun, the rhetoric of the new dictaminal and preaching trades, the apocalyptic literacy of the spiritaal Franciscans, or the dogged notarial hteracy of Jacques Fournier's chancery,^'* the prod-

'"See my review article in fourrml of Religious History 13 (1984), pp. 92-113. '"Jean Duvemoy, Le Registre d'Inquisition de Jacques Fournier, d)eque de Pamiers

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

118 R H E T O R I C A

ucts of this ferment accentaated the conjunction of the phenomena that have intrigued us throughout this paper.

What began, then, as a rumination upon a half enunciated "thesis" (De RomUIy's) of interest to historians of rhetoric, and, perhaps, of the irrational, has taken the form of a miiu-cultaral his­tory of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. I hope to have demon­strated some of the functional interdependencies between forms of rhetorical practice and theory and attitades towards, or practices of, magic and the occult. If, at the same time, I have tempted some to rethink the holist cultaral 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 wUl pardon the apparent initial incongruity of a paper that proposed to taU< of two topics not normaUy associated with one an­other: rhetoric and magic.

ADDRESSES OF CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE

Carl Joachim Classen, Seminar fiir Klassiche Philologie, Universi­tat Gottingen, D 3400 Gottingen, West Germany

Brian Vickers, Centre for Renaissance Stadies, ETH-Zentrum, Ramistrasse 101, CH-8092 Zurich

John O. Ward, Department of History, Sydney University, Sydney NSW 2006 Australia

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