6 - From antiquity to the Middle Ages II: rhetorical invention as hermeneutical performance

Summary

So far this book has emphasized the status and condition of exegesis, its relationship with rhetoric, and its role within vernacular translation. Now it is necessary to reverse that emphasis and to consider the fortunes of rhetoric, and specifically the role of rhetorical inventio in vernacular translation. The translations that I have discussed so far, Notker's translation of Martianus Capella, the Ovide moralisé, and the Old French and Middle English versions of the Consolatio, define themselves in terms of exegetical practice. In the final chapter I will consider translations that offer themselves as forms of rhetorical invention. In order to understand this latter form of translation we must first take account of how the value of invention changes from the context of classical oratory to that of medieval poetics. My interest in this chapter will be to retrace the history of the relationship between rhetoric and hermeneutics, but this time directing my focus to how this relationship defines the meaning of rhetorical inventio for the later Middle Ages.

INVENTION IN ANTIQUITY

In ancient rhetoric, invention is the discovery of a plausible and persuasive argument through a system of proofs. Inventio (Greek heuresis) literally means a “coming upon,” a discovery of that which is there, or already there, to be discovered. The term has little to do with originality or with creation ex nihilo. In all of its theoretical avatars among the ancients, invention is what Roland Barthes has aptly termed an “extractive” operation.