Geoffrey of Vinsauf - Works and Bibliography

Works and Bibliography

The Poetria nova is a 2,000-line poem written around 1210 in Latin hexameters and dedicated to Pope Innocent III. The Poetria nova aimed to replace the standard text on verse composition, Horace's Ars poetica called the Poetria in the Middle Ages, which was widely read and commented upon in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Karsten Friis-Jensen suggests that Geoffrey of Vinsauf's "main incentive for writing independent arts of poetry was probably a wish to systematize the exegetical material which generations of commentators had collected around Horace's text, in a structure that was in better accordance with traditional didactics in the closely related art of rhetoric" (364). The medieval teacher intended to reshape the Ars poetica into an elementary textbook on composing poetry, "modeled on the Ciceronian rhetorics and their medieval derivatives, such as the artes dictandi and the treatises on the colores rhetorici" (Camargo 949). The Poetria nova almost immediately became one of the standard textbooks in England and was incorporated into the curriculum on the Continent very soon thereafter. To its popularity testifies the number of manuscripts (200) in which this work is found and extensive commentary, which takes form of marginal glosses around a text of the Poetria nova and a text copied separately by itself.

Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi (Instruction in the Method and Art of Speaking and Versifying) written after 1213 is a prose counterpart of the Poetria nova which expands on amplification, abbreviation, and verbal ornamentation. It is preserved complete in three manuscripts and nearly complete in another two manuscripts. The thirteenth-century copies explicitly attribute the treatise to "magistri Galfridi" or "magistri Galfridi le Vin est sauf". Two other works are attributed to him: Summa de Coloribus Rhetoricis (A Summary of the Colors of Rhetoric), a briefer work, primarily on figures of speech, and the "Causa Magistri Gaufredi Vinesauf" ("The Apology of Master Geoffrey of Vinsauf"), a short poem of topical and political interest. He used to be regarded as the author of Itinerarium Regis Ricardi, a narrative of the Third Crusade, but this is certainly false.

The texts of the Poetria nova, Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi, and Summa de coloribus rhetoricis are included in Edmond Faral, Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1924; reprinted Paris, 1958), pages 197-262, 265-320, and 321-327 respectively. The Poetria nova has been translated into English three times: by Margaret F. Nims, Poetria nova (Toronto, 1967), by Ernest Gallo, The Poetria nova and its Sources in Early Rhetorical Doctrine (The Hague, 1971), and by Jane Baltzell Kopp, Poetria nova, in Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts, ed. James J. Murphy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), pp. 32–108. Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi is translated by Roger Parr, Instruction in the Method and Art of Speaking and Versifying (Milwaukee, 1968). In this article, quotations are from Kopp's translation.