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Rhetoric and Rhythm in Byzantium takes a fresh look at rhetorical rhythm and its theory and practice, highlighting the close affinity between rhythm and argument. Based on material from Byzantine and Old Church Slavonic homilies and from Byzantine rhetorical commentaries, the book redefines and expands our understanding of both Byzantine and Old Church Slavonic prose rhythm. It positions rhetorical rhythm at the intersection of prose and poetry and explores its role in argumentation and persuasion, suggesting that rhetorical rhythm can carry across linguistic boundaries, and in general aims to demonstrate the stylistic and argumentative importance of rhythm in rhetorical practice. Along the way, it challenges the entrenched separation between content and style and emphasizes the role of rhythm as a tool of invention and a means of creating shared emotional experience.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1987.

This article explores antiphilosophical polemics written by Muslim and Jewish thinkers in the medieval Mediterranean world. These writings demonstrate, in both traditions, a struggle with the incorporation of nontraditional texts and interpretations of theology and textuality. My examination of these writings “against the philosophers” suggests that, far from constituting the reflexive, antiphilosophical fundamentalism that typically characterizes assessments of these texts, authors like al-Ghazali, Halevi, and Ibn Arabi were concerned with what they believed to be the subordination of Jewish and Islamic tradition to Greek philosophy—a rhetoric that, for them, undermined the “conditions of identification” for Muslims and Jews. I argue that these antiphilosophical texts highlight the extent to which these thinkers believed that writing was the battleground for identity in the medieval Middle East.

Written by a leading expert on the late medieval scholastic sermon,Medieval Artes Praedicandiis an essential resource for scholars and advanced students interested in using scholastic sermons in their research.

Designed to encourage the study of the medieval art of discourse, this bibliography has served for fifteen years an as invaluable guide to modern works on the theory of communication in Europe from the time of Saint Augustine to the Renaissance. Now a new edition brings the material up to date and presents it in a completely reorganized format. The history of medieval rhetoric can be understood only as part of medieval efforts to understand the manifold uses of language. To this end, Murphy includes works which show the relation of grammar to rhetoric and the impact of logic upon both. Cross references are provided where appropriate and key works are annotated.

Paul Zumthor’s “La Brièveté comme forme” analyzes the relations between brevity and form and addresses such matters as narrative time and the definition of narrative as a genre. Zumthor summarizes classical rhetorical theories of brevity in narration, and he considers the roles played by variations in time, space, and cultural milieux in the objects to which the term “brevity” is applied. Drawing examples from geographically, generically, and culturally diverse traditions, from ancient to modern practices, he notes that the length of a text in terms of its linguistic materiality does not necessarily give the measure of its duration, and argues that discussions of brevity must take into account the real time of performance or reading and the immediate spatial and temporal contexts within which these works function in a given sociocultural situation. Zumthor concludes by listing a series of attributes found at the heart of all brief medieval narrative literature: the unity of the event narrated; the finality of the ending, in which the conclusion exhausts the narrative premises; a relatively explicit and univocal significance or meaning; and a cluster of shared stylistic features found in narratives of less than a few hundred lines.

Although highly innovative in its blend of medieval Aristotelian with Horatian and Ciceronian doctrine, the Poetria by the fourteenth-century Swedish writer Mathias of Linköping survives in only one manuscript copy and appears to have had little or no influence outside Sweden. Likely reasons for its failure to gain traction among late medieval teachers of Latin composition are (1) its sharp separation of prose from poetry, (2) its implication that verse composition is a more advanced subject than prose composition, and (3) its disproportionate reliance on theoretical precepts rather than illustrative examples.