Jacques de Dinant: Ars Arengandi

The Ars arengandi is a handbook of public speaking by Jacques de Dinant (Iacobus de Dinanto), a monk born at Dinant who taught rhetoric, probably at Bologna, in the late thirteenth century. It opens with a prologue in rhyming verse in which the author says he offers briefly an art of discreet speech, that Solomon and Cicero are its true authors and he only an extractor, and names himself and his monastic vows. The prose treatise defines the office of the public speaker (concionator) as speaking on matters of civil life established by laws and customs, and then treats invention and arrangement, the parts of a speech from exordium to conclusion.

Public speeches (arengae) before councils and assemblies were an essential part of political life in the Italian communes, and handbooks such as this applied Ciceronian rhetoric, especially the Rhetorica ad Herennium, to the needs of civic oratory. Jacques’s treatise is a witness to the revival of oratorical teaching alongside the ars dictaminis in the generation before the humanists. Little is known of the author’s life beyond what he says of himself in his works.