Notes on Chaucer and The Rhetoricians

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.”