Citation:
Date Published:
2024Abstract:
Ancient and medieval rhetorical theorists gave much attention to discovering an author’s intent (voluntas) from the letter of a document (scriptum). By contrast, resolving ambiguity (ambiguitas) was supposedly easy. But in fact, ambiguity proves the more slippery problem because it functions somewhere between argumentation (a controversy to be disputed) and stylistic embellishment. Legal discourse often tried to impose limits on ambiguity, but at the same time ambiguitas could be quietly weaponized — in both law and poetry — to transform legal and even theological meaning. Where rhetorical theorists such as Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, William of Champeaux (c. 1100), Geoffrey of Vinsauf (c. 1210), and Boncompagno da Signa (c. 1235), as well as legal theorists such as Henry de Bracton, try to pin down how ambiguity works, poets such as William Langland seem to revel in the slippages that it affords.
January 2024: Rita Copeland is Sheli Z. and Burton X. Rosenberg Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvnia. Her publications include Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991); Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1996); Pedagogy, Intellectuals and Dissent in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge 2001); Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300-1475 (with I. Sluiter; Oxford, 2009); The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (with P. Struck; 2010), The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, 800-1558 (2016), and most recently, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2021). She was a co-founder of the journal New Medieval Literatures. She is General Editor (with the late Peter Mack) of the forthcoming Cambridge History of Rhetoric in five volumes. She has been the recipient of NEH, ACLS, American Philosophical Society, and Guggenheim fellowships. She is a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America. She has been a visiting professor at Hebrew University, University of Iceland, and University of Oxford, and a visiting fellow at the Warburg Institute, London.