This essay aims to show how one remarkable practitioner of vernacular scholastic literary theory, Reginald Pecock (d. c. 1361), Bishop of Chichester, deployed it to service diverse orders of worth in his works by at once upending and apparently re-accepting authorised ecclesiastical discourses, including the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed and orthodox definitions of God as creator or as infinite. Focusing especially on the theoretical category of ordinatio, it investigates how Pecock both upsets and re-accommodates such discourses in places where the articulation and control of spiritual authority in this world and the tapping of divine authority from the next were at stake. In both his rejection of standard doctrinal discourses and his (re)accommodation of them in his own new system, Reginald deploys a full repertoire of scholastic terms, practices and attitudes. Pecock’s novel and astoundingly ambitious reconfiguration of Christian knowledge and doctrine was a gargantuan programme, endeavouring to efface and outdo traditional discourses of the Church whilst at the same time taking pains palpably, even anxiously, to be equivalent or answerable to that which it would displace. Pecock, in attempting re-cognition of the familiar, ended up recognising it dissonantly within his own unfamiliar discourse.

The following offers an account of the prodigious publications of Alastair Minnis, stretching from 1970 to the time the present volume has gone to press. (And he is still at work, so what is assembled here is necessarily open-ended and will quickly be in need of supplementing by the reader.) Like the scholastic texts of which Minnis is the expositor eximius, this chapter has a rather technical and precise ordinatio. Entries are arranged by year, and, for each year, monographs are listed first, followed by edited collections, articles and chapters, and finally reviews (titled and then untitled, the latter organised by author’s surname).

When did the emotions become political? It would be natural to view a formal political analysis of emotions as a classical phenomenon that was reprised under new and more decisive terms in late humanism and reimagined in the eighteenth century. In such a history we would expect to encounter the work of Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico. It would also be natural to take Hobbes and Vico at their word and read this recovery of the political dimension of emotion as a rejection of medieval philosophy. I will propose the opposite: the grounds for this political turn were laid in late medieval scholasticism. The precedent for humanist and Enlightenment-era political thought about emotion lies with a repudiated scholasticism and its reinvention of classical Greek thought. It is the history of rhetoric that reveals this turn to the political. The thread that links these transformations together is the political reception and re-absorption of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the modern assimilation of the Rhetoric began in earnest with the most influential statecraft treatise of the Middle Ages, De regimine principum, written about 1277 by the scholastic theologian Giles of Rome.

Classical and medieval rhetorical theorists had many names for the figure of thought that we call ‘personification’ or prosopopoeia. This fundamentally hybrid figure occurs at the confluence of different kinds of discourse; definitions range across a spectrum from the ‘animate abstraction’ to the ‘person introduced to speak’. The essay explores the diverse rhetorical theory behind this figure. It then discusses the hybridity of this figure, and in particular its striking capacity for multivalency, change and even disintegration (paradiastole), in medieval vernacular narrative allegory. It focuses on Langland’s Piers Plowman, with reference to the figures Clergie, Patience, Conscience, Wil, Haukyn and Piers Plowman. Finally, the essay investigates another aspect of this hybridity that might seem counter-intuitive to readers who assume that prosopopoiae/personifications should have surface or even naturalistic narrative coherence: the way that this figure of thought allows Langland repeatedly to cultivate an ambiguity about whether his prosopopoiae/personifications are lay or ordained. This telling ambiguity reflects the poet’s disengaged attitude to the institution of the church and even the priesthood.

The mystic and hermit Richard Rolle (d. 1349) claimed the authority to interpret biblical texts, to add his understandings of their meanings to the received and authoritative interpretations of the Fathers of the Church. This chapter takes up the question of how Rolle understood his own authority as an exegete and how his various explorations of this topic, across his many writings, in Latin and Middle English, compare to the theories of his contemporaries in Oxford and Cambridge, their understandings of how scholastic exegetical authority relates to the inspiration enjoyed by patristic interpreters and, ultimately, to the authors of the Bible itself. Rolle’s theoretical musings have much more in common with this scholastic material than has previously been appreciated, putting pressure on unfortunately persistent binaries of the devotional, affective or mystical, on the one hand, and, on the other, the scholastic or intellectual traditions of medieval Christianity.

As a complement to the work of Alastair Minnis and Brian Scott on a collection of accessus or introductions to pedagogical texts copied on their own in a collection of such ’Literary Prefaces’, this essay examines the accessüs to a typical series of school texts copied together in a single thirteenth-century manuscript, Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Clm 391. The works included in this manuscript were all widely taught during the Middle Ages and are all known to scholars and available in English translations. Yet they are not automatically included in discussions of literary works studied in the Middle Ages and this essay is meant to support the implications of Minnis and Scott’s term for them.The introductory matter, sometimes more than two accessūs, is significantly more extensive at the beginning of the manuscript and as much as possible has been edited and translated in this essay. Ways that we might look positively upon repetition, variation and contradiction are suggested and the implications of the evolving formats of the introductory material throughout the manuscript are explored. It is hoped that this approach may encourage other scholars to look at the accessūs to school texts in other relevant collections.

This essay approaches the vernacular style of Henry Daniel’s Liber uricrisiarum (c. 1379) through his Dominican order’s preoccupation with a properly calibrated preacher’s style. Good preachers must strike a balance to communicate their learning, but never obscurely; to speak plainly but not without grace. Thomas Waleys called this mode a grossus stilus, a simple style, and this is an aptly gross name for Daniel’s way with Middle English, as he instructs his readers in the medieval art of inspecting urine for medical diagnosis. I contextualise Daniel’s own stylistic programme (as articulated in theory in his prologue and then proved in practice in the rest of the Liber) within a long tradition of literary theorising around jargon and plain speech found across the rhetorical manuals and guides to preaching of the Dominican curriculum. While they expressed their arguments in Latin, these texts offered a theory of vernacular eloquence that – as the Liber would prove – could circulate amongst the apparently disparate fields of preaching and Middle English medicine.

Focusing on the Middle English poem, Pearl (with evidence from other literary works), this essay considers how the initial situation of the Dreamer explores a half-dozen principles for literary invention that are distinctively medieval, including personal displacement and feelings of anxiety, bewilderment and marvelling. These qualities define the initial state of mind which enables the Dreamer’s visions to occur and develop. Aristotle wrote in his Metaphysics (I. 2) that philosophising begins with wondering and questioning, a principle revered throughout the Middle Ages. Though all these elements of what we now call ‘creativity’ have their roots in practices of invention and argumentation described in ancient philosophy and rhetoric, the particular shapes that these classical principles assume by the late Middle Ages derive from long-established traditions of monastic meditation and contemplative envisioning more than from academic rhetoric and logic. Bonaventure’s opening to his Itinerarium mentis ad Deum recounts the marvel of Francis of Assisi’s seraphic vision, adapting it as a general method for meditation; Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale turns the marvels of the flying horse and visionary mirror into problems in optics and engineering. Pearl turns the dreamer’s initial wondering within a brilliant fantasy to the means for understanding his own human condition.

There is a fair likelihood that the most widely read work of a late medieval English author was Robert Holcot’s extensive Super Sapientiam Salomonis. More than 170 copies of the work, the standard late medieval commentary on the text, have been identified. But Holcot – and the implications of his work – have remained strangely uninvstigated, since Beryl Smalley first drew him to attention some sixty years ago. (And neither Judson Allen’s study of Holcot’s colleague John Ridewall nor a recent Oxford University Press volume have done much except repeat Smalley’s contentions.) Smalley was a great scholar of Christian exegesis, but her comments on Holcot (and others of her ’classicising friars’, like Ridewall) were handicapped by her very strengths; she could only identify his behaviour, an interest in classical culture the display of which she found tedious, as exegetically divergent. The essay, beyond a close reading of Holcot’s programmatic prologue, examines one of his more diverting ’authorities’, the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula, and explores some reasons for Holcot’s fascination.

In medieval classifications of the sciences, poetics occupies the lowest position, insofar as its language is starkly opposed to the sort of the scientific language represented, ideally, in the Word of God. Yet, between 1240 and 1260, reflections on the necessary presence of poetic language in the Bible gave rise to what might be called a theological science or rather theology as science. How, then, were the resources of poetics (as pertaining to the analysis of the language of poetry) themselves made part of biblical exegesis? Likewise, was Aristotle’s Poetics put to the service of exegesis in the same way as the Philosopher’s writings on logic, ethics and even physics? The present chapter will address these questions, drawing on thirteenth-century hermeneutic theory as well as selected commentaries.

The Consolatio philosophiae of the Roman statesman and philosopher Boethius (fifth/sixth century) was read and studied intensely in medieval western Europe and repeatedly translated into vernacular languages. Medieval commentaries on this text and translations of it claim attention today as case studies in a history of reading, for they exemplify the practices of medieval literary scholasticism. In an English context, the final flowering of this reading tradition may be placed in the year 1556, when John Cawoode printed a new translation of the Consolatio by a ‘George Coluile, alias Coldewel’. The translator remains unidentified. The translation is a medieval throwback in its treatment of Boethius’s text. Whereas subsequent English translators of the Consolatio separate text from commentary, Colvile permitted these categories to interpenetrate. He transmitted a wealth of exegetical material traceable to a commentary on the Consolatio attributed falsely to Thomas Aquinas. Pseudo-Thomas’s commentary and Boethius’s Consolatio were often printed together after their editio princeps in 1473. Colvile probably worked from a book printed in Lyon between 1486 and 1498.

What was literary theory in the Middle Ages? What was literary criticism? How did medieval scholars record their interpretations of texts? What forms did those interpretations take? And how do the forms of medieval literary criticism contribute to the shape of medieval literary theory? By teasing out answers to these questions from a series of examples of medieval (chiefly twelfth-century) commentary on classical literature, this chapter offers an introduction to the study of literary texts, its norms, assumptions, sources and priorities in the Latin Middle Ages. It concludes with an overview of the volume as a whole, focusing on how the various chapters relate to three overarching concepts: interpretation, invention and imagination.

This chapter explores late twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts from theological encyclopaedias to treatises on falconry and cosmetics to argue for more complicated relations in England’s franco-latinate culture than Latin-vernacular binaries. Far from dully derivative didacticism, the large corpus of francophone treatises in this period is an explosion in vernacular poetics and a burgeoning field of experimentation in the forms and modes of knowledge. This argument entails acknowledging the historically situated nature of scientific paradigms and the importance of literary–philosophical textual strategies alongside texts’ social and performative capacities in manifesting knowledge as knowledge. Finally, it is suggested that established francophone knowledge-writing contributes to fresh notions, further developed in later fourteenth-century French and English texts, of narratorial witness as an element of textual authority, whether in instructional or overtly fictional works.