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Notes on Chaucer and The Rhetoricians
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Professor Manly, in his British Academy lecture, Chaucer and the Rhetoricians, has shown with his usual brilliance that certain features of Chaucer's technique resulted from his study of manuals on the art of writing. As yet, however, little attention has been given to such handbooks as possible sources for the matter of passages in Chaucer. For instance, no one, I think, has suggested that rhetorical treatises may have supplied Chaucer with quotations from Latin writers; yet the rhetorics are as likely sources as the grammars and florilegia, which have long been mentioned in this connection. Indeed, two of the three arts of poetry with which Professor Manly's lecture is most concerned, the Ars Versificatoria of Matthieu de Vendôme and the Documentum de Arte Versificandi of Geoffrey de Vinsauf, contain numerous citations from Horace and Juvenal, as well as from those Latin poets to whom the Troilus is commanded to pay especial homage, “Virgile, Ovyde, … Lucan, and Stace.”
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References
1 Bk. 1, Sect. 84.—See Faral's Les Arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe Siècle, p. 138.
2 Lines 1191–94.
3 Consolation of Philosophy 2, Prose 5.
4 Convivio 4.13, 108–110.
5 Bk. 1, Sect. 25 (p. 115 in Farai). The italics are mine.
6 Chaucer's “Etik,” MLN, xxv (1910), 87–89 See also Lowes' “Chaucer and Dante's Convivio,'” Mod. Phil. xiii (1915), 33.
7 Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, B. 164–166.
8 Analekten zur Geschichte des Horaz am Mittelalter, bis 1300, 9 n., 68, 81, 83.
9 Compare Dante's “Horace, the Moralist” (Orazio Satiro), Inferno 4.89.
10 Ars Versificatoria 3.51 (p. 179 in Faral).
11 Troilus 2. 1037–43.
12 Documentum de Arte Versificandi 2.3.154 (p. 314 in Farai):
Si vero diffuse tractare velimus et amplum tractatum construere, in primis consideremus universum corpus materiae et omnia linamenta corporis illius prosequamur, … ut in tractatu materiae diffusae omnes partes materiae sibi cohaereant. … Et ita vitabimus vitium illud quod appellatur incongrua partium positio. Quod vitium tangit Horatius in Poetria sub his verbis.
13 Chaucer and Horace, MLN, xxxi (1916), 304.
14 Troilus 2. 1028–29.
15 Chaucer and the Rhetoricians, p. 17.
16 Bk. 2. 523–527.
17 Bk. 3. 1101–03.
18 Poetria Nom, 43–48, 55–56, 58–61 (In Farai, pp. 198–199):
Si quis habet fundare domum, non currit ad actum
Impetuosa manus: intrinseca linea cordis
Praemetitur opus, seriemque sub ordine certo
Interior praescribit homo, totamque figurat
Ante manus cordis quam corporis; et status ejus
Est prius archetypus quam sensilis.
Circinus interior mentis praecircinet omne
Materiae spatium …
Opus totum prudens in pectoris arcem
Contrahe, sitque prius in pectore quam sit in ore.
Mentis in arcano cum rem digesserit ordo,
Materiam verbis veniat vestire poesis.
19 See Professor Kittredge's article, “Chauceriana,” in Mod. Phil. vii (1910), 481.
20 Bk. 1, 1065–69.
21 Lines 4395–99.—Since returning galley proof I find support for my conjecture in C.S. Baldwin's Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic, p. 294, note 39. He has compared Chaucer and Geoffrey de Vinsauf on this point.
22 Poetria Nova 364–365 (p. 208 in Faral).
23 Ibid. 288–291 (p. 206 in Farai).—Other examples are:
Quod magis optatur, magis effluit. Omnia lapsum
Spondent et citius sunt prospera prompta ruinae.
Insidias semper ponit sors aspera blande
Anticipatque fugam melior fortuna repente.
(181–184; p. 202 in Faral).
Tristis ab incauto fuerit aura sub aere laeto.
Nubilus exsudat aer sub sole sereno.
(194–195; p. 203 in Faral).
24 Lines 324–366.—The lines about fortune are 359–360:
Res fortuna secundas
Imperat esse breves.
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