- Covers the general period from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the Renaissance in the 14th century.
- Much Classical work was lost or denounced by the Christian church.
- Nevertheless, Classical work didn't disappear completely, and figures like Augustine (later made a Catholic saint) reconciled rhetoric with Christianity.
- In particular, Augustine saw rhetoric as a means to determine biblical Truth (exegesis) and communicate it to believers and potential converts. He denounced rhetoric's ties to probability and ornamentation, however.
- Rhetoric largely was neglected, but manifested in three visible ways:
- Preaching
- Letter writing
- Poetry
- Rhetoric was inextricably intertwined with education and the Medieval university.
- The seven liberal arts were formalized by Martianus Capella as an educational sequence:
- Trivium
- Grammar
- Dialectic (Logic)
- Rhetoric
- Quadrivium
- Geometry
- Arithmetic
- Astronomy
- Music (Harmonics)
- Rhetoric was the method of education through lecture and disputation
|
|