SOURCE: Arrathoon, Leigh A. “Jacques de Vitry, the Tale of Calogrenant, La Chastelaine de Vergi, and the Genres of Medieval Narrative Fiction.” In The Craft of Fiction: Essays in Medieval Poetics, edited by Leigh A. Arrathoon, pp. 281-368. Rochester, Mich.: Solaris Press, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Arrathoon discusses and analyzes a preaching exemplum by Jacques in the context of medieval fiction that is ethically oriented.

Tria sunt item, quae praestare debeat orator ut doceat, moveat, delectat.

Quintilian, Institutionis Oratoriae, 3. 5. 2.

In the third book of his Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian turns to the duties of the orator and to the kinds of questions an orator is likely to treat.¹ The purpose of an oration, he says, is to instruct, to move the emotions, or to delight the audience. This tripartite division of rhetorical purpose, Quintilian thinks, is better than the usual division of oratory into (1) that which relates to things...