Pathos as Rhetorical Strategy in Drama and Art of the Middle Ages

Gabriella Mazzon: Pathos as Rhetorical Strategy in Drama and Art of the Middle Ages: A Comparison of Visual and Verbal Acts of Communication

Pathos was a common instrument of public communication in the Middle Ages, an era in which emotion-based rhetoric superseded other strategies of influencing and instructing the populace. Gabriella Mazzon asserts that verbal and visual elements are often employed in tandem to impress the public and to aid the memory.
These new communication types were particularly prevalent in the later centuries of the Middle Ages, when new mendicant monastic orders introduced novel methods of preaching. To instruct the congregation - which employed the vernacular, and not Latin - these orders believed that the use of a local language, the insertion of comic episodes, and a closer attention to worldly matters could be more potent than mystical ceremonies.
This synergy emerges very clearly in the verbal and visual aspects of drama and of iconography. Representations of pain and suffering are especially relevant in constructing this rhetoric. While aspects germane to the history of art, literary criticism, and iconography have been widely examined, a systematic, integrative analysis of these factors from a linguistic perspective is outstanding. By analysing, e.g., specific dialogic structures or the repetition of particular words and figures of speech, a linguistic approach sheds light on how people were made cognizant of the value of suffering in their progress towards salvation.