SOURCE: Kendrick, Laura. “Rhetoric and the Rise of Public Poetry: The Career of Eustache Deschamps.” Studies in Philology 80, no. 1 (winter 1983): 1-13.

In this essay, Kendrick analyzes the theory of rhetoric addressed in L'Art de dictier and demonstrated in several of Deschamps's ballads in an effort to elucidate changing definitions of rhetoric in the late fourteenth century.

Western society has viewed or defined rhetoric in different ways during different historical periods. Changes in ideology usually accompany changes in the political and socioeconomic structures of a society. Classical rhetoric, the art of oral persuasion, depended upon a public forum, a political organization that upheld some degree of free speech and upon an economic system that enabled large numbers of people to live together in cities. With the decline of Roman society and the rise of a highly fragmented, agrarian, “feudal” society, rhetoric lost its practical purpose and hence much of...