Mary Carruthers has devoted her scholarly life to the in-depth study of the canons of rhetoric as they were understood and practiced in the long Middle Ages, extending from late antiquity to the fifteenth century. Her now-classic study, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (1990, 2008), and her equally wonderful sequel, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (2000), have demonstrated the intimate connections between memory, invention, and arrangement. The book here under review is Carruthers’s study of style. Following the thrust of her edited collection Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages (2010), Carruthers argues here for a close association of pleasing style with persuasion. The actual subject matter of the book is thus much narrower than its title suggests.

The introduction announces Carruthers’s intent to redress a one-sided emphasis in previous studies of medieval aesthetics on the Neoplatonist tradition. This emphasis has produced, she contends, “a criticism of the medieval arts” that is “over-theologized and over-moralized” (8). Although she cites medieval theologians (Augustine, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Aquinas) throughout the book, Carruthers concerns herself insistently with the ordinary beauty of man-made, crafted things, including selected passages from poems, letters, sermons, and biblical commentaries, alongside occasional examples from visual art — all of which she analyzes using the rhetorical vocabulary of style as it can be (and was) translated from one medium to another.

The book consists of six chapters. The first, “Artful Play,” renews a basic insight of Johan Huizinga’s influential Homo Ludens (1938): medieval people knew how to make believe, to imagine talking objects, to argue on opposite sides of an issue, to joke, to construct wordplays and riddles, and to interpret puzzles and allegories. The second, “Sensory Complexion and Style,” introduces the key Latin adjectives of Carruthers’s analytical vocabulary: dulcis, suavis, altus, clarus, acutus, varius, pulcher, foedus, asper, amarus, pinguis, elegans, subtilis, etc. — all of them meant to describe the particular intended effects of an artwork on the perceiver.

Chapter 3, “Taking the Bitter with the Sweet,” details the medieval background to Edmund Spenser’s defense of poetry as sweet-tasting medicine. This excellent chapter demonstrates the depth of the semantic connection between the “sweet” (“suavis,” “dulcis”) and “good” (“honestus”), on the one hand, and the persuasive, on the other. Carruthers argues for “the rational aspect of sweetness,” which “is a way to knowledge,” and “not simply an affect or sensation” (98–99). Chapter 4, “Taste and Good Taste,” continues the theme of sweet tasting, but combines it with a sense for what is honorable (honestus), beneficial (utilis), and befitting (dignus). Carruthers explains how a combination of biblical-sapiential and classical language led to the later association of the sense of taste with discriminating judgment. Chapter 5, “Varying and Variegated,” insightfully observes the temporal sequence of change involved in variation, as distinct from the simultaneity of abundant variety. Here, as elsewhere in the book, Carruthers lays stress on the ductus, or directed flow, of a text, which emerges as it is being read through patterns of verbal association: “the variety of a work constitutes its ductus” (137).

In the final chapter, “Ordinary Beauty,” Carruthers distinguishes that beauty available to the mind through the physical senses, from the supernal beauty that can be recognized only through the awakening of illuminative spiritual senses — the beauty, in short, of mystical experience, which alters and transforms ordinary sense experience. Setting subjective experience (“beauty is in the eye of the beholder”) against the philosophical claim that beauty is simply the forma of the object, Carruthers strangely overlooks here the theoretical possibility of reconciling the two. One standard definition of beauty, “beauty is a relation,” bridges the beholder and the beheld as reciprocal termini. It builds upon a key etymology that Carruthers, who delights in profuse and instructive etymologizing throughout the book, does not mention: namely, that which links the Greek adjective kalon, meaning “beautiful,” with the Greek verb kalein, which means both to “call out” and to “name.” Fortunately, Carruthers’s own practice throughout the book enacts this relation.