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Poetry, the Arts of Discourse, and the Discourse of the Arts

Lucian of Samosata’s definition, from his dialogue The Parasite, reached Abraham Fraunce through the mediation of sources that were well known in the scholarly circles of the England of his time: Philipp Melanchthon’s Erotemata dialectices (1549) and Johannes Piscator’s In P. Rami dialecticam animadversiones (1580), the latter an extensive commentary of Petrus Ramus’s influential Dialecticae libri duo (1556).2 Derived from a Stoic conception widely accepted by sixteenth-century humanist pedagogues, this definition understands technē or ars as a rationally organised collection of rules for the teaching or learning of a specific field of human knowledge. Renaissance pedagogy laid special emphasis on the cultivation of those instrumental abilities of the human mind that may be categorised under the umbrella term ‘discourse’. Logic, grammar, and rhetoric are ‘arts of discourse’ (of both ratio and oratio) inasmuch as they devise systems containing definitions, divisions, precepts, and practical exercises whose aim is to instil in the learner habits of apt reasoning, speaking, reading, and writing. The pedagogical programmes of the trivium resulted in the mass production of students’ primers, epitomes, practical handbooks, and more elaborate treatises in sixteenthand early seventeenth-century Europe. Fraunce, a scholar at St John’s, Cambridge, a law student at Gray’s Inn, London, and a member of the thriving literary coteries led by Gabriel Harvey and Philip Sidney, developed his views in a work whose more-than-a-hundred