The union of wisdom and eloquence before the Renaissance: The Ciceronian orator in medieval thought

Abstract

It is widely supposed among students of Renaissance humanism that one of the unique contributions of the humanists was their ‘rediscoversy’ of the classical, essentially Ciceronian, ideal of the orator as the man who employs both reason and eloquence in order to serve the common good. In turn, this conception of oratory in Cicero's thought is closely aligned with his teaching that human association arises from the awakening of an implicit human gregariousness by means of the eloquence and wisdom of a primitive orator. This paper demonstrates that the Ciceronian idea of oration was a recurrent feature of stochastic thought from the twelfth to the early fourteenth century rather than an innovation of the Renaissance. In support of this claim, a wide range of writings, including the work of Thierry of Chartres, Brunetto Latini, John of Paris and Marsiglio of Padua, is considered. It is shown how these authors all derive from Cicero the lesson that the foundation and maintenance of communal bonds requires the presence of a wise and eloquent orator who will place the public interest above his own ends. In the Ciceronian ideal of oration, such medieval authors found a model for their conception of community and a framework for the determination of the responsibilities of rulers and citizens.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 39 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.