The principles of rhetoric, the second of the three artes liberales, were certainly known to the Irish, although not as much explicit evidence of its study, as opposed to practice, survives as does for Anglo-Saxon England. The Irish were well aware of the use of rhetorical embellishments in the early Christian tradition: the best of their surviving Latin compositions show that they understood the Augustinian doctrine that Christian rhetoric must reveal the truth of Scripture, make it pleasing, and move the reader/ hearer. Almost certainly they had access to handbooks of rhetoric, not just Augustine De doctrina Christiana, the standard manual for teachers and preachers throughout the Middle Ages, and Cas-siodorus’ Institutiones but also Martianus’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, one of the standard textbooks on the liberal arts in the Middle Ages, and perhaps the compositions of Victorinus and the Latin panegyrists. However, the only tract on rhetoric of Irish composition that we know by name is the Retho-rica Alerani, written probably by Aileran, lector of Clonard (d. 665). Although no trace of it survives, it was still in the monastic library of St. Florian, near Linz, up to the twelfth century.
The epistles and sermons of Columbanus (d. 615) are our earliest evidence of a developed form of Latin rhetoric. They are marked by a complex clausular structure, prose rhythm and rhyme, alliteration, and other rhetorical devicesthat presuppose an education in quite advanced rhetoric, which he would have received at home. The sustained use of rhyming prose is very evident in the seventh-century moral-theological treatise De XII abusiuis and in other homiletic and exegetical pieces of the seventh and eighth centuries. The style of extravagant Latin composition known as hisperic contains a great many rhetorical devices and may have been inspired by the rhetorical style of Gaulish Latin authors of the fifth and sixth centuries. The Irish were also addicted to learned word play and the interweaving of their sources, biblical and patristic, into complex mosaic patternsthat can be seen in abundance in seventh-century exegetical and homi-letic material.
There are rhetorical forms in Old Irish, used in saga texts especially, known as roscada that contain passages in rhyming prose with obscure vocabulary and strings of alliterative nouns or adjectives and nouns. Evidence of rhetorical practice in the epistolary style in Irish does not survive before the twelfth century. The earliest example is a letter written to Aed mac Crimthaind in about 1150 by Finn mac Gormain, bishop of Kildare (d. 1160), which has the usual parts of a rhetorical epistle: the salutatio greeting him, the captatio benevolentiae praising him for his learning as "chief historian of Leinster in wisdom and knowledge." The petitio (request) asks that the tale Cath Maige being dictated to his scribe by Finn be completed by Aed, who apparently had access to a better or fuller copy, a quatrain in praise of Aed, and a request that a copy of the duanaire (poem book) of Mac Lonain be sent him. It concludes with a pious subsal-utation. This is rhetoric in the Latin mode, very effectively transposed into Irish idiom.
