TheRhetoricaof Guillaume Fichet

The Rhetorica of Guillaume FichetAuthor(s): George KennedyReviewed work(s):Source: Rhetorica: A Journal of the History of Rhetoric, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Autumn 1987), pp.411-418Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the International Society for the History ofRhetoricStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/rh.1987.5.4.411 .

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GEORGE KENNEDY

The Rhetorica of Guillaume Fichet

he 1471 Rhetorica of GuUlaume Fichet is the first rhetoric printed in France and sets out a complex organization of all five canorucal parts of classical rhetoric in the Ciceronian

tradition. Although never reprinted, and not comparable in influence to some other renaissance works on rhetoric, Fichet's teaching had some influence in his own time, especially on his friend and student Robert Gaguin, and is of interest in a variety of ways. It represents a system of rhetoric that we may compare and contrast to that of George of Trebizond or Laurentius Traversagni or others. It shows how the late medieval tradition of study of De Inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium survived in France in the renaissance and was given a new and fuller development, and it is an apparently unique presentation of rhetoric in scholastic form, consistently worked out in great detaU, which deserves to be known for itseU.

GuiUaume Fichet was born in 1433, the son of a notary in Haute Savoie. He studied at Avignon and then at Paris, where his name appears m the Usts of undergraduates in the period between 1450 and 1454.' He then apparenfly returned to Avignon,^ but reappears

'The best account of Fichet's career—more is known than I summarize—seems to be that in Jacques Monfrin, "Les lectures de G. Fichet et de J. Heynlin," Bibliotheque d'humanism et rermissance, 17 (1955), 7-23; 143-53.

'See Louis Thuasne, Roberti Gaguini, Epistole d Orationes (Paris, 1904), p. 13.

© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Rhetorica, Volume V, Number 4 (Autumn 1987)

411



412 R H E T O R I C A

in Paris as a teacher of the liberal arts and the Bible and as a student of theology after 1460. He became a prieur in 1464, was rector of the University of Paris for three months in 1467, received his doctorate in theology in 1468, and was in charge of the Sorbonne library from 1469 to 1471.' In the Praefatio to the Rhetorica he says he taught the liberal arts and the scriptures for eighteen years in the morrdngs and for almost as long taught rhetoric in the afternoons. If this is true, his teaching of rhetoric went back to his second period at Avignon, and in any event continued during his residence in Paris from about 1460 untU 1471.

Fichet's chief place in history derives from the fact that, together with Jean Heynlin, he sponsored the introduction of the printing press to Paris between 1468 and 1471 by bringing three printers from the Rhineland. The first products of the new press included works of Gasparino Barzizza, Cardinal Bessarion, some classical texts, and Fichet's Rhetorica. Fichet had close ties with Bessarion, who was in Paris at this time trying to awaken in the French court an interest in a crusade against the Turks. In 1472 he left Paris with Bessarion for Rome. The cardinal died at Ravenna, but Fichet continued on to Rome where he was well received by Pope Sixtus IV and presented him with an illuminated copy of his Rhetorica, now in the British Library. In addition to the Rhetorica, Fichet's surviving works include epistles, consolations, and at least one sermon.* The Rhetorica survives in one manuscript (Parisinus Latinus 7762A) and a number of printed copies, of which 1 have used those in the Morgan Library in New York and the British Library.

Fichet had corresponded with Bessarion a year before the cardinal came to Paris, and the surviving letters reveal their shared hostility to George of Trebizond.^ Fichet reported to Bessarion his own alarm at discovering that there were already in Paris certain Georgiani who, 'for the sake of money or for show' were setting up Trebizond as a second Cicero, and were threatening to teach rhetoric from manuscript copies of the Rhdoricorum Libri V. John

^Monfrin (n.l, above), 7-23. * P. O. Kristeller, "An Unknown Humanist Sermon on St. Stephen by GuiUaume

Fichet," Studi e testi della Bibliotheca Vaticana, 236 (1964) (= Mdanges Eugene Tisserant, VI), 459-97.

'To be found in E. Legrand, "Lettres de Bessarion et de Fichet," in Cent dix lettres grecques de Frangois Filelfe (Paris, 1892-3), pp. 223-88.



The Rhetorica of Fichet 413

Monfasani has a good discussion of this in his book on George of Trebizond.* Elizabeth Eisenstein has suggested that a major factor Ut Fichet's mterest in printing was the desire to circulate his Rhetorica and counteract Trebizond's influence.' This is perhaps supported by the fact that most of the surviving copies are presentation copies, sent to important people with letters of transmittal. Although Trebizond can be said to have won the day in rhetoric, Fichet, Gaguin, and Tardif delayed his influence in Paris, where the fust printing of Rhdoricorum Libri V did not occur untU 1520. Monfasaru has identified four sections of the Rhetorica where concepts or terms are, without acknowledgement, borrowed from Trebizond," including material ultimately deriving from Hermogenes. Monfasaru has also identffied Fichet's own copy of Trebizond's rhetoric, as weU as another manuscript of it in circulation in Paris about this time.'

Richet's Rhetorica consists of a Praefatio and three books of his account of rhetoric, with a verse panegyric of the author by Robert Gaguin at the end, the total running to 191 folia. The Praefatio opens with an apparent imitation of Quintilian's Preface to the Institutio Oratoria: both authors claim to write in response to the earnest demands of students; both point out that the authorities on the subject disagree among themselves; both claim to be unequal to the task, but wish to oblige; both mention extensive experience in teaching, twenty years in QuintiUan's case, eighteen in that of Fichet. But Fichet says that QuintiUan pUed up too much detail for students to assimUate. So far as 1 can see, Fichet makes no further use of QuintUian and possibly had read only the Preface.'" He claims that his work wUl be based on Cicero and 'other' unspecified sources, and he clearly identifies himself as working in the Ciceronian tradition, but he notes that Cicero's practice was not always consistent with his theory, and that his youthful views (De

''George of Trebizond. A Biography and a Study of his Rhetoric and Logic (Leiden, 1976), pp. 215-16; 227; 321-2.

'The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1979), p. 399n. "Monfasani (n.6, above), 322; Fichefs 13 modes of confutation are taken from

the 15 solutions of Maximus cited by Trebizond; Hermogenean ideas are incorporated into Fichet's discussion of sententiae and loci communes and later in the discussion of figures; Fichefs 12 types of arguments are based on the 10 in Trebizond.

'John Monfasani, Collectanea Trapezuntiana (Binghampton, N.Y., 1983), 44. '"Since the Preface is not contained in the mutUated Quintilian known in medi

eval France, Fichet had seen a version of the complete text.




Inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium are meant) are not always consistent with his later views. So far as I can see Fichet makes no use of De Oratore or other later works of Cicero on rhetoric.

Another point made in the Praefatio is that Paris is the modern Athens or Rome, but no one in Paris has emerged as the equal of Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, or Theophrastus in knowing and teaching rhetoric philosophically. Though named here, these writers are not sources in the treatise. What Fichet means by knowing and teaching rhetoric phUosophically seems to mean dialectically, that is, systematically by definition and division in the scholastic manner. He views rhetoric as useful under contemporary conditions in France. Eloquence will open up offices and rewards to the student, and it will also make possible the propagation of the Christian religion abroad. This might suggest that his treatise will, Uke that of Traversagni, discuss preaching, but it does not. On the other hand, it does discuss in detail the forms of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic oratory as used in civic life. Fichet is aware that civic oratory is dependent on freedom of speech: eloquence died, he says, with liberty.

The rest of the Praefatio is devoted to the style and technical terminology of the treatise itself. Fichet apologizes for his 'pedestrian and thorny' style (by the latter he again means its definitions and divisions). Although he says he wUl often excerpt Cicero word for word, he will have to restate some material and create new words in the process for the sake of disciplina, secrdio (i.e., divisions), and memoria; he is thus apparently trying to create a system that can be memorized. For the use of novel words he cites the authority of Cicero, Horace, and Priscian. Nevertheless, the extensive non-Ciceronian vocabulary in the treatise often seems to take us from the humanistic writing of the later fifteenth century back into the language of medieval scholasticism.

Fichet belonged to two separate intellectual worlds, one scholastic and medieval, the other humanist and classical. This has been well brought out in Jacques Monfrin's study of Fichet's reading." We know the tides of books borrowed by socii of the Sorbonne during much of the fifteenth century. Those chosen by Fichet do not include any rhetorical treatises, which he must have owned or had access to elsewhere. He did, however, once borrow a copy of

"See note 1, above.




Cicero's orations. Otherwise, the books fall into two groups: Latin Uterature (Seneca's Epistulae, Ovid's Pasti, Claudian, Juvenal, and Lucan) and scholastic philosophy. He lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and borrowed annotated copies of it and commentaries, as weU as works of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and other scholastics. As Monfrin points out, Fichet's theological interests were traditional, conservative, and essentially medieval. He does not seem to have sought an intellectual synthesis between his theological and literary studies, except in one respect. That exception is the way he recasts classical rhetorical theory into the systematic, logical form of medieval scholasticism. Peter's Sentences are a partial formal model, but a better one is the Summulae Logicales of Peter of Spain. Fichet's Rhetorica is to rhetoric what the Summulae Logicales is to dialectic, a summa. It consists almost entirely of a series of definitions, divisions, definitions of subordinate categories, and often further division and definition. As noted already, this method is followed for the sake of doctrina, secrdio, and memoria. Though highly complex, it creates a unified system that is intellectuaUy satisfying and can be held in the memory, though only after considerable effort on the part of the student. As the Praefatio indicates, in order to fUl out all the logical possibilities Fichet has often to create new categories and thus employs terms not found in classical, or so far as 1 can discover, in any subsequent theory of rhetoric.

Book I of the Rhetorica opens with an accessus, like those often found in medieval treatises on technical subjects. Some of the definitions given here and elsewhere are derived from De Inventione or Ad Herennium, but others appear to be original. Fichet says there are five communes elementae in rhetoric: facultas, finis, officium, materia, and instrumentum. Facultas is defined as the certain, easy, and ready power of speaking, and consists of art, imitation, and practice, each of which is defined. The source is Ad Herennium 1.3, but the concepts are introduced here at the beginning under the influence of a reference in Ad Herennium 1.1. Finis is to persuade by speech and officium is to speak appropriately for persuasion, both of which definitions come from De Inventione (1.6 and 9), but how Fichet seeks a tighter logical organization is seen in his identification of the five canonical parts of rhetoric—inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and pronunciatio—as the five parts of the officium. In both De Inventione and Ad Herennium no connexion is made between officium and the five parts of rhetoric. The materia, Fichet says, is what contains the propositum and the causa, and this makes it pos-




sible for him again to integrate another concept, that of the quaestio as found in De Inventione (1.8) into his communes elementae, for what he means by propositum is what is there separately treated as quaestio infinita. This usage of propositum for quaestio infinita is found in Sulpicius Victor (1, p. 314, 7 Halm) and Isidore (2.15.2) and is the first indication that Fichet may have made use of the writings we call the Rhetores Latini Minores. I have also found a number of passages early in the treatise that seem to draw on Victorinus.'^ The instrument of rhetoric is defined as speech, suitable for persuasion. The concept does not appear at all in De Inventione or Ad Herennium and Fichet shows no knowledge of QuintUian's chapter (12.5) on instrumenta. He uses the concept to integrate the parts of the oration into his system, and thus to define exordium, narratio, divisio, confirmatio, confutatio, and conclusio, choosing the term di-visio from Ad Herennium rather than partitio as found in De Inventione. This use of instrumenta to mean the parts of the oration can be found in Boethius' De Topicis Differentiis (4.1208c), which gives us another probable source for Fichet's work.

Throughout the treatise Fichet does not accompany his definitions with any illustrations from orators, prose writers, or poets, thus leaving the bare bones of the theory in a very arid condition, but there is evidence that in his actual teaching of rhetoric he supplied examples and comments on them. According to Monfrin, the Bibliotheque de Troyes contains a manuscript (1414) which, in addition to other things, provides examples and comments to accompany the Rhetorica;" whether they are Fichet's or that of some other teacher 1 do not know.

As a sample of Fichet's method, consider his extended discussion of loci, which he calls one of the five stages (cogitationes) of invention in general. They are first divided into loci proprii and loci communes. The proprii are attributes of personae or negocia, and are of two types, intrarium and extrarium. Of the interior attributes of persons used as loci there are nine divisions: nomen, natura, vidus, studium, fortuna, consenateum, consilium, affedio, and habitus. There is some similarity here to De Inventione 1.34 and Victorinus 1.24, but Fichet proceeds to further subdivision. Nomen, for example, is of four types: praenomen, cognomen, agnomen, and proprium nomen; the

"Fichet's definition of ratio seems to come from Victorinus 1.13; of nomen from 1.8; of qualitas perhaps from 1.8 (but cf. De Inv. 1.12).

'•"Monfrin (n.l, above), 15.




latter is a name that not only distinguishes one person or thing from another, but that is appropriate to the particular. These four kinds of names are then said to be useful in arguments in eight ways: definitio, parivocatio, interprdatio, derivatio, denotatio, mulatto, circumscriptio, and adoptio. Though each is defined, the whole account cries out for some Ulustration. Fichet then goes on to define and subdivide each of the other attributes. His definitions here and elsewhere might conceivably be useful to a modern rhetorician seeking terms to describe rhetorical phenomena.

The discussion in Book II of deliberative and demonstrative oratory might also be useful in describing features of renaissance oratory, since Fichet gives a fuller treatment of those subjects than other writers. He describes a full set of parts for each, analogous to what he has set out in judicial oratory, though in demonstrative there wiU only rarely, he says, be a confutatio, and if one is introduced it shorUd be brief. One of the more interesting points is the way Fichet deals with the ancient question of whether the end of deUberative oratory is the useful or the honorable or some combination. He says that deliberation is bipartita. Sometimes it is content with its own end as useful and honorable, sometimes as possible and useful, or useful and easy, or easy and honorable, or honorable and praiseworthy, or necessary and effective, but sometimes deliberation can be tripartita or even quadripartita. This is, I thirU<, unprecedented. The discussion of demonstrative oratory has some simUarity to that in Ad Herennium (S.lOff.), but is unusual in its consideration of how to create benevolentia in the audience. We may say that we speak as a duty to the person praised, or that we speak by invitation, or we may use complacentia, by which we graduaUy reveal the virtues of our own character through the virtues of our subject that we choose to praise. As this suggests, Fichet thmks there is a place for insinuatio in epideictic. Though he does not say so, I assume he thought prejudice might exist either against the subject or the speaker and could be overcome by an indirect approach.

The discussion of style in Book 111 follows traditional lines, but again is more fully categorized. Figures are classified as sublimis, mediocris, and humilis and thus adapted to the three traditional kinds of style. The discussion of rhythm contains tables naming and explaining twenty-eight metrical feet, taken from some grammatical source. Fichet understood classical quantitative rhythm and shows no interest in the medieval cursus. For clausulae he rec-




ommends the ditrochee (-u-u), the antipastos (u-u) , and the ionic a minore (uu—), but his more general advice is to seek euphony and variety, to avoid faUing into verse but to preserve a rhythmical flow, and to use many long syllables, long words, and long membra for weighty subjects, including most deliberative and demonstrative oratory, and a preponderance of short syUables, words, and membra for humble subjects, abrupt deliberation, and most judicial oratory. The discussion of style concludes with a few words on what Fichet calls 'the quiet kind of occupation' This can be either prose composition of dialogues or history or verse composition, which falls into three styles of elevation represented by the Aeneid, the Georgics, and the Bucolics of VirgU. At least in terms of style, the major literary genres thus fall within the teaching of rhetoric.

Soon after Fichet's departure from Paris GuUlaume Tardif emerged as the leading teacher of rhetoric there. Two of his compendia of rhetoric were printed (1475 and about 1483). Surviving copies are very rare, and my knowledge of their contents is chiefly dependent on the study of Franco Simone.'* Tardif's works are less than half the length of Fichet's Rhetorica and drop the elaborate scholastic definitions and divisions. They may be said to continue the Ciceronian tradition of Fichet in their emphasis on civic oratory, but are far more humanistic in spirit and contents, have much to say about the uses and values of speech, and a more mature understanding of literary problems. Simone has shown that Tardif owed a major debt to Lorenzo Valla, which is not true in the case of Fichet. The extent to which some of Fichet's specific teachings and coinages of technical terms may have persisted in late fifteenth and early sixteenth century French rhetoric in the teachings of Gaguin, Tardif, or others, or later in the accounts of style of Omer Talon and Petrus Ramus, has not yet been studied.'^

'•"'Robert Gaguin ed U suo cenaculo umanistico," Aevum, 13 (1939), 410-76. "For additional discussion of Fichet, see Jules PhUippe, Guillaume Fichet, sa vie,

ses oeuvres (Annecy, 1892); Franco Simone, "GuUlaume Fichet retore ed umanista," Memorie della reale accademia delle scienze di Torino, II, 69, 2 (1939), 103-44; ibid.. The French Rermissance. Medieval Tradition and Italian Influence in Shaping the Renaissance in France, tr. by H. Gaston Hall (London, 1969), esp. pp. 93-100; 146-8.



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