The History of Rhetoric and the Longue Durée: Ciceronian Myth and Its Medieval Afterlives

by Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania

How would the Middle Ages have written the history of rhetoric up to its own times? There is not an obvious answer to this question. Medieval writers did not produce linear narratives about how rhetoric moved from Greece to Rome, was Christianized, was incorporated into the arts curriculum of different institutional schools, and became attached to different methods and branches of knowledge—whether logic or poetics or theology—or to different practical aims—such as preaching, law, business, or diplomacy.