Date Published:

Abstract:

In the ancient rhetorical tradition and its medieval afterlife, the question of letter and intention (scriptum et voluntas) provides a theoretical framework for considerations of the literal sense. Is the word — as encountered in writing, in an authoritative text — to be the repository of the author’s intention? Or is that intention to be found somehow behind the word, in action or voice, or perhaps hovering around the word in a spiritual meaning to be inferred by reading beyond or against the letter? These are problems that haunt any field that takes its theoretical vocabulary from rhetoric, especially law, theology, and textual interpretation. But there is another question, subsidiary to that of scriptum et voluntas, that proves to be even more difficult to pin down: ambiguity. Legal rhetoric does not like ambiguity, because it gets in the way of clear arguments and outcomes. Theologians are wary of ambiguity. But poetry and poetic theology can veritably embrace and even weaponize ambiguity as a kind of escape clause from arguments that might bind too much. Because ambiguity troubled rhetorical theorists, studying its fortunes as a necessary element of rhetorical thought gives us insights into the real social problems that teachers, speakers, and writers expected their audiences to encounter on the ground. In this way, ambiguity can be an index of the most resistant questions of social experience and language practice. This essay begins with the problems of scriptum et voluntas and ambiguitas in the rhetorical theory of the ancient Roman West, surveying these complexities up through the fourth century CE and Augustine’s Christian rhetoric. Then crossing the centuries to the Ciceronian “revival” of the late 11^th and early 12^th centuries, we turn to the roles of ambiguitas in medieval rhetorical and legal thought, and finally to the exploitation of ambiguity in poetic theology.

January 2024: In the ancient rhetorical tradition and its medieval afterlife, the question of letter and intention (scriptum et voluntas) provides a theoretical framework for considerations of the literal sense. Is the word — as encountered in writing, in an authoritative text — to be the repository of the author’s intention? Or is that intention to be found somehow behind the word, in action or voice, or perhaps hovering around the word in a spiritual meaning to be inferred by reading beyond or against the letter? These are problems that haunt any field that takes its theoretical vocabulary from rhetoric, especially law, theology, and textual interpretation. But there is another question, subsidiary to that of scriptum et voluntas, that proves to be even more difficult to pin down: ambiguity. Legal rhetoric does not like ambiguity, because it gets in the way of clear arguments and outcomes. Theologians are wary of ambiguity. But poetry and poetic theology can veritably embrace and even weaponize ambiguity as a kind of escape clause from arguments that might bind too much. Because ambiguity troubled rhetorical theorists, studying its fortunes as a necessary element of rhetorical thought gives us insights into the real social problems that teachers, speakers, and writers expected their audiences to encounter on the ground. In this way, ambiguity can be an index of the most resistant questions of social experience and language practice. This essay begins with the problems of scriptum et voluntas and ambiguitas in the rhetorical theory of the ancient Roman West, surveying these complexities up through the fourth century CE and Augustine’s Christian rhetoric. Then crossing the centuries to the Ciceronian “revival” of the late 11^th and early 12^th centuries, we turn to the roles of ambiguitas in medieval rhetorical and legal thought, and finally to the exploitation of ambiguity in poetic theology.