GRAMMAR AND RHETORIC: CLASSICAL THEORY AND MEDIEVAL PRACTICE
Organized by Carol D. Lanham, Harvard University

[The panel as described in the Call for Papers]
No legacy from antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages was more pervasive and more enduring than that of grammar and rhetoric. Cicero's son would have felt at home in a Tudor schoolroom--and we can recognize the classical curriculum in that of the Tudor schoolroom. And yet grammatical and rhetorical theory and practice did change during those 1500 years, in ways that continue to demand, and richly reward, investigation. The most obvious influence is the Christian religion, but other cultural factors were also at work. Although important studies and new editions of late antique and medieval texts have appeared in recent years (grammar has been much better served than rhetoric in this respect), much work remains to be done. Evidence for how classical traditions and practices were transmitted to, and changed by, medieval writers on grammar and rhetoric must be sought in several different kinds of sources. We particularly hope to receive papers that in some way emphasize the continuity between antiquity and the Middle Ages. Topics that might be addressed include:

• Latin knowledge of Hellenistic Greek treatises on rhetoric and style (works on rhetorical figures; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Demetrius, Longinus)
• Latin grammars before and after Donatus; commentaries on Donatus and Priscian; the Insular tradition; Virgilius Maro grammaticus
• Teaching manuals and other evidence for the teaching of grammar and rhetoric; the progymnastica
• Rhetorical analysis of Christian genres (the Bible, sermons, hagiography, apologetics) and of newly important or increasingly favored forms (epistolography, panegyric, historiography); the application of classical rhetorical theory to Christian texts (Augustine, De doctrina christiana)
• Medieval doctrines of style; prose rhythm; cursus
• Manuscript studies; transmission of texts; commentaries on e.g. Cicero, Donatus, Boethius, Priscian; grammatical and rhetorical compilations
• The increasing importance of dialectic
• Antecedents of speculative grammar
• Ars dictaminis and ars poetriae

Kenneth Mayer, University of Iowa
Significationum Industria: The Poetics of Figuration

James W. Halporn, Harvard University and Indiana University
After the Schools: Grammar and Rhetoric in Cassiodorus

Michael I. Allen, University of Chicago
Ancient Grammar and Rhetoric in the Historiae of Frechulf of Lisieux

Mary Carruthers, New York University
Some Influences of Monastic Meditational Practice upon the Revival of School Rhetoric in the
Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries