Abstract

Sometime during the third quarter of the twelfth century, while teaching grammar and rhetoric in the schools of Orléans, Matthew of Vendôme apparently invented a new genre of academic text, the comprehensive guide to composing Latin verse and prose. Most of the doctrine in Matthew's Ars versificatoria had been available to medieval teachers for centuries, in rhetorical treatises such as the De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium and above all in Horace's Ars poetica and the medieval commentaries on it; but Matthew's selection and arrangement of those familiar materials clearly filled a need. In the course of the thirteenth century, the grammar teachers Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Gervase of Melkley, John of Garland, and Eberhard the German composed similar treatises, one of which, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, was among the most versatile and influential textbooks of the late Middle Ages