Presents a history of the ways in which authors of the Middle Ages mobilized the force of emotion in their rhetorical writings, and explores the changes that the role of emotion in rhetorical theory underwent during this period in relation to means of textual transmission and conditions of rhetorical teaching.

Rita Copeland is Professor of Classical Studies, English, and Comparative Literature and Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. She is author or editor of eight books and is a General Editor of the five-volume Cambridge History of Rhetoric. She has received grants and fellowships, including the Guggenheim, American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and American Philosophical Society.

• Introduction


• 1: Before the Middle Ages: Emotion from Invention to Style


• 2: Christian and Literary Rhetorics of the Early Middle Ages: Emotion as the Property of Style


• 3: Emotion in the Rhetorical Arts and Literary Culture c. 1070-c.1400


• 4: Aristotle's Rhetoric in the Latin West: The Fortunes of the Path?


• 5: De regimine principum: Emotion, Persuasion, and Political Thought


• 6: Political Poetics and the Aristotelian Turn: Dante, Chaucer, and Hoccleve


• 7: Preaching, Emotion, and the Aristotelian Turn


• Epilogue: Mixed Rhetorics