Poetics and Rhetorics in Early Modern Germany

Summary

From Antiquity on, Reflection on Means of communication — on texts in general and poetic texts in particular — brought about two distinct genres of theoretical texts: rhetorics and poetics. Theoretical knowledge was systematized in these two genres for instructional purposes, and its practical applications were debated down to the eighteenth century. At the center of this discussion stood the communicator (or, text producer), armed with procedural options and obligations and with the text as his primary instrument of communication. Thus, poeto-rhetorical theory always derived its rules from and reflected the prevailing practice.

This development began in the fourth century B.C. with Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics, which he based on the public communicative practices of the Greek polis in politics, theater, and poetic performance. In the Roman tradition, rhetorics reflected the practice of law in the forum (genus iudiciale), political counsel (genus deliberativum), and communal decisions regarding issues of praise and blame (genus demonstrativum). These comprise the three main speech situations, or cases (genera causarum). The most important theoreticians of rhetoric were Cicero and Quintilian, along with the now unknown author (presumed in the Middle Ages to have been Cicero) of the rhetorics addressed to Herennium. As for poetics, aside from the monumental Ars poetica of Horace, Roman literature did not have a particularly rich theoretical tradition. The Hellenistic poetics On the Sublime by Pseudo-Longinus (first century A.D.) was rediscovered only in the seventeenth century in France and England; it became a key work for modern aesthetics.

The classical theoretical works from antiquity were available in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Their use in communication and textual theory, however, remained the exclusive domain of scholars who had little interest in vernacular texts and whose theories reflected the hermetic Latin discourse of classroom exercises. Certain poetics and rhetorics written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, became particularly influential; these included Galfridus de Vinosalvo’s Poetria nova (ca. 1210) — so named to contrast with the “old poetics” of Horace’s Ars poetica — which was transmitted in hundreds of manuscripts into the fifteenth century. It is a kind of textual grammar with rules and techniques for formulating Latin verse and prose. The only poeto-rhetorics by a German from this period was the Laborintus (Labor Within, before 1250), written by the grammarian Eberhard the German, who was educated in Paris and Orléans.