Auxesis: A concept of rhetorical amplification
This essay examines and analyzes the classical concept of auxesis, a device used for amplification in Greek and Roman rhetoric, and redefines it through association with contemporary principles and practicess
Amplification: A central theme in late medieval rhetoric
Even though medieval rhetoric appears to lack direction and theme, an understanding of the society of the Middle Ages, the sources available to theorists, and the content of the ars dictaminis and ars praedicandi indicates that amplification provided such unity.
Rhetoric in the Middle Ages
MEDIAEVAL and Renaissance rhetoricians and philosophers, following the example of Cicero, seldom omit from their treatment of rhetoric some consideration of the subject matter, nature, and end of the art. Long before Cicero rhetoric had become one of the focal points of the differences of philosophic schools, and the practice and application of the art had long wandered from field to field, reflecting, and sometimes even affecting, the complexities of philosophic discussions. Yet rhetoric is treated as a simple verbal discipline, in histories which touch upon it, as the art of speaking well, applied either as it was in Rome to forensic oratory and associated with the interpretation of laws or, more frequently, applied as it was in the Renaissance in the interpretation and use of the works of orators and poets, and associated with or even indistinguishable from poetic and literary criticism. The history of rhetoric as it has been written since the Renaissance is therefore in part the distressing record of the obtuseness of writers who failed to study the classics and to apply rhetoric to literature, and in part the monotonous enumeration of doctrines, or preferably sentences, repeated from Cicero or commentators on Cicero. Scholarly labors have reconstructed only a brief and equivocal history for rhetoric during the Middle Ages. The development consists of slight and unoriginal increments of erudition in the compendia composed from the fourth to the ninth century which were derived largely from the De Inventione of Cicero and the Ad Herennium and in later commentaries and treatises until in the twelfth century they reflect and use doctrines from Quintilian and from the later rhetorical works of Cicero, the