Anonymus de Berentino, Colores rethorici seriatim: A Twelfth-Century Treatise on the Figures in Two Parts

Abstract

The subject of this article is a treatise that defines and illustrates the ‹colors of rhetoric› within the medieval tradition that derives from Book 4 of the Rhetorica ad Herennium. It was composed during the second half of the twelfth century (after 1160) and is preserved in English manuscripts from the early thirteenth to the first half of the fifteenth centuries. A critical edition of the Latin text is accompanied by detailed commentary on its date and possible authorship, its sources – the most important being a version of Peter Riga’s Floridus Aspectus –, its structure and contents, its reception and influence on works such as the anonymous Tria sunt, and the nine manuscripts on which the edition is based. The second part of the treatise is a single continuous text – a dedicatory epistle of praise and counsel addressed to «Archdeacon Bartholomew» – that illustrates all the figures of diction in their canonical order.