FLB home News resources for undergraduates graduates faculty staff graduate assistants flb business office flb graduate student services   staff directory FLB directories UIUC home old browsers 2004-2005/035 March 31, 2005 History of rhetoric in Middle Ages topic for lecture April 6 Rita Copeland, chair of comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania, will discuss the history of rhetoric in the Middle Ages, on Wednesday, April 6, at 5 p.m. in the Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana. The lecture is free and open to the public. In her talk, Copeland will ask the question: How was the history of rhetoric conceived in the Middle Ages? Linear narratives of the history of rhetoric are mainly a modern confection, products of a modern alienation from rhetoric. But one can look to Vico's “New Science” and to the modern Annales-School for alternative models of historical narrative that are useful for thinking about the way that the Middle Ages produced histories of rhetoric. Medieval writers imagined rhetoric's history, not through linear narratives, but in terms akin to what would now be called a longue durée, a "long-term" understood in mythic terms. They and their audiences could participate in this longue durée by inserting their contemporary moments into a long and unchanging myth which had accumulated the baggage of time. Rhetoric's mythical past is a subject of continuous attention, from Neoplatonist circles of the twelfth century to Lydgate's political apotheosis of rhetoric in his “Fall of Princes.” Copeland is chair of comparative literature and literary theory at the University of Pennsylvania, and this year visiting professor in English and comparative literature at King's College, London. She has published widely on medieval rhetoric and literary theory, medieval heresy and dissent, and Middle English literature. Her books include “Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts” (Cambridge, 1991), “Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages” (Cambridge, 1996), and “Pedagogy, Intellectuals, and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages: Lollardy and Ideas of Learning” (Cambridge, 2001). She is co-editor of “New Medieval Literatures” (Oxford) and the book series “Medieval Cultures” (Minnesota). Professor Copeland is currently working on two major editing projects, “Medieval Literary Theory: The Grammatical and Rhetorical Traditions” (Oxford; with Ineke Sluiter), and the “Cambridge Companion to Allegory in the European Tradition” (with Peter Struck). The lecture is sponsored by the UIUC Program in Medieval Studies, Center for Advanced Study, and Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities.