"Lucca" Summa on Rhetoric. The Earliest Italian Ciceronian Treatise in the Middle Ages

"Lucca" Summa on Rhetoric is a late twelfth-century, paraphrasing commentary on De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium, presenting in full scale the classical doctrines on invention, disposition, style, memorization and delivery, not concentrating on, or even alluding to, dictamen, as was the usual means of rhetorical instruction at its time. It is transmitted in two good, Italian manuscripts not long after it was composed in the 1170s or 1180s by an anonymous, but learned rhetorician from the Veneto region. The author is well informed in the late classical commentary tradition of Victorinus and Grillius, but also with full access to the commentaries on De inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium by Thierry of Chartres ( ca. 1157). Lively, fictitious exemplifications, based on Cicero's own, illustrate the detailed precepts on argumentation in a civil context, suited for the law courts as well as for contemporary, political debates in the 1170s. Apart from Cicero, the author quotes or alludes to the poems of Horace, the speeches of Sallust, and the Bible. The edition is preceded by an introduction dealing with the author's intentions and the subject matter and scope of the treatise in a Christian society, with a description of the manuscripts, and terminates with an index verborum et rerum.