James J. Murphy is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of English, University of California, Davis, USA.

• Contents: Preface. The Middle Ages: Western rhetoric in the Middle Ages; The rhetorical lore of the Boceras in Byhrtferth's Manual; The teaching of Latin as a second language in the 12th century; Two medieval textbooks in debate; The scholastic condemnation of rhetoric in the commentary of Giles of Rome on the Rhetoric of Aristotle; Dictamen as a developed genre: the 14th century 'Brevis doctrina dictaminis' of Ventura da Bergamo (with David Thomson); Quintilian's influence on the teaching of speaking and writing in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; Poetry without genre: the metapoetics of the Middle Ages; Rhetoric in 14th-century Oxford. Applications of Latin Rhetoric in Medieval English Literature: A new look at Chaucer and the Rhetoricians; John Gower's Confessio Amantis and the first discussion of rhetoric in the English language; Rhetoric and dialectic in The Owl and the Nightingale. The Renaissance: One thousand neglected authors: the scope and importance of Renaisance rhetoric; Rhetoric in the earliest days of printing, 1465-1500; Caxton's two choices: 'Modern' and 'Medieval' rhetoric in Traversagni's Nova Rhetorica and the anonymous Court of Sapience; Ciceronian influences in Latin rhetorical compendia of the 15th century; Raffaele Regio's 1492 Quaestio doubting Cicero's authorship of the Rhetorica ad Herennium: introduction and text (with Michael Winterbottom); The double revolution of the first rhetorical textbook published in England: The Margarita Eloquentiae of Gulielmus Traversagnus (1479); Antonio Nebrija in the European rhetorical tradition; The relation between Omer Talon's Institutiones Oratoriae (1545) and the Rhetorica (1548) attributed to him; Index.

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