Seconde Rhétorique

From the Online Encyclopedia :

In late medieval Fr. poetics, a distinction came to be made between the art of persuasion or oratory as applied in prose, rhet., the figures and tropes, and the art of persuasion in verse, versification or prosody; the former came to be called “first rhet.” and the latter “second.” Patterson dates these treatises on the art of verse from 1370 to 1539; they form the middle link between the few Occitan and OF treatises and the Arts poétiques of the Pléiade in the Ren.

How prosody came to be allied with rhet. is one of the chapters of medieval poetics In Med. Lat., prosody was treated primarily as a branch of grammar, being either included in grammars as a chapter called “Prosodia” or else written as a separate manual, e.g. Bede's De arte metrica (both types are collected in Keil). Rhet. took a parallel but distinguishable course except in encyclopedic works like Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae (prosody and rhet. are the subjects of the first two chapters). Alternatively, some theorists viewed prosody as a branch of music; these two traditions devolve from the metrici and rhythmici of the ancients. In the 12th and 13th cs. emerged the treatises known as artes poeticae , such works, following the inspiration of Horace, treated both rhet. and prosody together. These are instanced in John of Garland's Parisiana poetria (much on prosody), Matthew of Vendome's Ars versificatoria (virtually nothing), Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova , Alexander of Ville Dei's Doctrinale , and Eberhard the German's Laborintus (collected in Faral). Dante's unfinished essay on poetry, De vulgari eloquentia, which treats chiefly diction and prosody, provides the transition to the vernaculars. By the 15th c., in France, manuals distinguish not between rhet. and prosody but prose and verse, and since prosody treats of precisely those devices that are the differentia of verseform, it became a “second rhet.”; “pleine rhétoriques” treated both. Langlois collects 7 principal texts by Jacques Le Grand, Baudet Herenc, Jean Molinet, and 4 anonymous authors, but the most influential was Deschamps' L' Art de dictier (1392).