Epilogue

Abstract

The reception of Aristotelian rhetoric was gradual and often partial. It did not overthrow established rhetorical theory; it did not displace the school rhetorics that foregrounded stylistic facility as the main source of emotional appeal. Indeed, we might characterize much late medieval rhetorical thought and practice as hybrid, balancing—sometimes nervously—between older systems that were learned consciously and theoretical models that were absorbed through later cultural influences. This concluding chapter considers some later medieval experiments with the rhetorical vocabulary of emotion before looking forward to the canonical expansions and more synthetic directions of early renaissance rhetoric. After a brief look at Ramon Llull’s Rethorica nova, the chapter turns to the French Eschéz d’amours and Evrart de Conty’s Eschéz amoureux moralisés, Christine de Pizan’s Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V, the anonymous Tractatus de regimine principum ad regem Henricum sextum, and Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue invectif. The chapter ends with a brief look at the “mixed rhetorics” of the early Renaissance, where Aristotelian rhetoric found greater traction alongside the growing corpus of Ciceronian rhetoric.