Gower and rhetoric

Rhetoric was one of the three verbal arts known as the trivium (rhetoric, grammar, and dialectic), yet of these three, it could be argued that rhetoric was the most fundamental, the most ingrained, in medieval culture. As Rita Copeland posits, “If grammatical Latinity had to be learned by rigorous introduction and exercise, rhetoric was absorbed by example even before one learned its rules systematically: simply by going to church and hearing a sermon or hearing any formal discourse would have naturalized the basic rules of rhetoric.” ¹ Key here is the ubiquity – and accessibility – of rhetoric, at least in theory, so that even those without Latin learning can be seen to display what Radulphus Brito in the late thirteenth century identified as “customary rhetoric” or rhetorica usualis, found in daily life. ² That natural saturation of rhetoric is conveyed in Book VII of the Confessio Amantis, which contains the first treatise on rhetoric in English. ³ In its origins, as Gower narrates them in his treatise, rhetoric comes ready-made; no rules of rhetoric are named, no Chaucerian lament of a laborious “craft so long to lerne” ⁴ – only a statement that rhetoric is a divine gift bestowed on man: Above alle erthli creatures The hihe makere of natures The word to man hath yove alone, So that the speche of his persone, Or forto lese or forto winne, The hertes thoght which is withinne Mai schewe, what it wolde mene; And that is noghwhere elles sene Of kinde with non other beste. (CA VII. 1507–15) ⁵