Decorous Spectacle: Mirrors, Manners, and Ars Dictaminis in Late Medieval Civic Engagement

Abstract

Focusing on the confluence of mirrors, manners, and ars dictaminis in the late Middle Ages, I argue that thirteenth-century civic engagement organized itself as a decorous spectacle: a well-mannered, highly codified visual performance that reflected and reinforced the structure of medieval Europe's stratified society. Marked by display, courtesy, and participation, decorous spectacle evolved from a groundswell of cultural factors including the emergence of mirror-making technologies, politesse, and, especially, ars dictaminis. Exploring this groundswell provides a way to understand the evolution of late Medieval decorous spectacle and a template for understanding the nature of civic engagement in any era.

Notes

¹I wish to thank RR reviewers George Kennedy and Andrew King for their invaluable responses; I thank as well Nancy A. Myers and Sue Hum for their contributions to this essay.

²Although ars dictaminis existed as a stable rhetorical form, it was also subject to tensions and diversity. First, the conflict between lay and clergy dictatores, or the professional teachers of letter- writing, played a part in the whole history of the art (Camargo, Ars 32–33; Murphy 213). Second, the art of letter-writing changed as it traveled from Italy throughout Europe. For example, the French practices of ars dictaminis, taught predominantly by professors of grammar, emphasized stylistic ornamentation and extensive reliance on classical sources (Camargo, Ars 33). In addition, whereas Italian dictatores in the twelfth century focused on missive letters, French dictatores put together textbooks that included models of legal documents. By the thirteenth century, the combination of notarial and rhetorical material characterized Italian ars dictaminis, too, eventually giving way to the formal creation of the discipline of ars notariae, with separate faculty, textbooks, and so forth in fourteenth-century Bologna (Camargo, Ars 35–36). In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, Oxford teacher Thomas Sampson taught an extracurricular “business course” resembling ars notariae, designed to provide secretarial skill sets and document models for young men in service to political and aristocratic masters (H. G. Richardson), while ars dictaminis was taught by the university's arts faculty in the regular curriculum (Camargo, Ars 37). Thus, while we can make general statements concerning the influence of ars dictaminis and its role, we must remain cognizant of the limits of those statements.

³While Camargo notes the political, economic, and commercial developments that provided a context for the rise of ars dictaminis, he does not address the technological factors (Ars 31).

⁴Grabes notes that a rising number of Latin manuscripts with mirror-titles accompanied the “renaissance of the twelfth century” (25). Vernacular titles reflecting the mirror metaphor began to appear in the thirteenth century (26).

⁵Latini's The Book of Treasure provides a provocative example of a mirror because it addresses a political situation in which the ruler is chosen by a constituency. Thus the health of the state results from the good manners of both rulers and ruled.

⁶The study of optics, so ardently pursued by medieval theologians and natural scientists, reveals a subtle tension, circulating below the surface of medieval thought, between mirrors as egress into spiritual insights and as tools of scientific insight. For instance, both Dominican Albertus Magnus and Oxford Franciscan Roger Bacon aggressively studied the “properties of mirrors” in the fourteenth century for predominantly scientific reasons. As Lindberg points out, mirrors and vision were inextricably linked in the Middle Ages as both metaphor and tool, a confluence that teetered between spirituality and worldliness. By the Renaissance the balance began to tip toward worldliness as the technological-instrumental mirror replaced the spiritual-textual mirror, transforming the mirror into a practical tool for the study of image production and reproduction.

⁷As a crucial ingredient of civic engagement, participation is vital to the health of any public sphere regardless of time and place. However, I contend that the nature of participation—the way it is both theorized and practiced—changes historically and geographically. Because a mode of participation is inextricable from the complex network of beliefs and technologies circulating throughout a particular place and time, citizens will engage with each other and with language in ways that reflect that complex network.

⁸For an alternative viewpoint, see Burnyeat.