in the vernacular achievements of Dante and Chaucer. The opening of this study sets out its plan and stakes: to read medieval rhetoric and poetic historically and in tandem, showing how they descend from late Roman schooling, absorb St. Augustine’s reforming impulse for preaching, and become largely a lore of style in the hands of the medieval grammarian. It then begins with a concise genealogy of sophistic rhetoric, contrasting Plato’s suspicion with Aristotle’s broader, moral theory of rhetoric, and explaining how the loss of deliberative public speech pushed ancient practice toward display and panegyric. Baldwin sketches the “second sophistic” via Philostratus—its virtuosity, theme-based declamation, improvisation, theatrical delivery, decorative dilation (notably ecphrasis), and reliance on fixed patterns. He illustrates how school exercises (the progymnasmata of Hermogenes—fable, chria, encomium, comparison, characterization, ecphrasis, thesis, and more) crystallized habits that prized balance, archaism, clausular cadence, and vehemence over sustained argument. The section closes by implying that such empty technic required a new motive—ultimately supplied by Christian preaching—to restore rhetoric’s larger purpose. (This is an automatically generated summary.)