Review of: Janie Steen, Verse and Virtuosity: The Adaptation of Latin Rhetoric in Old English Poetry. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008

This book is a timely, thorough and learned re-evaluation of the role of classical rhetoric in Old English poetry and of the extent of classical learning in Anglo-Saxon literary tradition more generally.Although "the bond between Old English literature and Latin learning" (p. 5) is undeniable, many scholars seem to take it for granted that the use of particular figures and tropes by Anglo-Saxon vernacular poets is indicative of their rhetorical schooling and familiarity with classical nomenclatures.As Janie Steen shows (in chapter 1, Knowledge of Rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England), this assumption is in conflict with historical evidence.In terms of chronology, there were three focal periods when the study and practise of rhetoric flourished in early medieval Britain: the first one is represented by the Romano-British authors from before the Anglo-Saxon-settlement age, the second one by the late-seventh-to mideighth-century alumni of Canterbury and York, and the third one is connected with the Benedictine reform of the late tenth century.Thus Old English poetry, which was written either later or earlier than the respective heydays, that is between the mideighth and mid-tenth century, cannot support the claim that Latin rhetorical figures were employed by poets formally trained in them.Not only do we lack manuscript evidence for the seminal rhetorical works of Cicero, the elder Seneca, Quintilian, and the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium, but we also see that ideologically rhetoric was deemed and sometimes condemned in the Christian context as oversophisticated and pagan.Is it then possible to explain the "presence of 'Latin rhetorical patterns' in Old English verse" (p.15) in some other way?Steen suggests that, even though rhetorical theory was probably unknown for most of the Anglo-Saxon period, in practise its devices could have been introduced into vernacular poetry through the medium of rhetorically trained Christian Latin poets of late Antiquity such as Juvencus, Caelius Sedulius, and Arator, whose verse was widely read, quoted and recycled at the time.But in order to be able to say that a particular device was indeed introduced from Latin rhetoric into vernacular poetry, we have to establish what rhetorical patterns characterised the two traditions, whether there was any overlap between them, or predominance or underuse of some poetic devices.This is done in chapter 2, The Patterns of Latin and Vernacular Verse, which on the one hand examines the dissemination of Latin rhetoric to Anglo-Latin poetry, and on the other hand compares this poetic tradition to Old English verse.The two insular poesies are exemplified by Bede's metrical Vita S. Cuthberti and Old English Andreas.Steen shows that several rhetorical devices are shared by both texts, e.g., metaphor, alliteration, paronomasia, puns, and to some extent assonance and rhyme.Many more, however, are characteristic (that is they are employed more frequently) only of one of the two verse traditions, e.g., hyperbaton, zeugma, ecphrasis, etc. of the Latin, and echoic repetition, compounds, kennings, doublets, etc. of the Old English one.The chapter further emphasises the influence of Sedulius, Arator, and Juvencus on both the structure and rhetoric of Bede's poem, and the rhetorical parallels between Andreas and Beowulf and The Wanderer.The four chapters that follow are case studies of selected Old English poems, in which the influence of Latin rhetoric on the vernacular verse is assessed in more detail.The first among them is The Phoenix examined in chapter 3.Because this poem is a rendering of the Carmen de aue phoenice by Lactantius, its rhetorical figures can be traced directly to their Latin source.Steen characterises the original as

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