Parisiana Poetria

"John of Garland makes a number of very important contributions to our understanding of medieval literature. His Parisiana poetria offers few individual precepts that are new. Its originality lies rather in its totality: it is the only thorough attempt we have to gather three distinct areas of the medieval arts of discourse (ars poetica, ars rhythmica, and ars dictaminis) under a single series of rules. The work is surely derivative, and yet John's experience both as a teacher and as a writer of poetry is everywhere evident and lends the book an original flavor. It is a summary for students of contemporary thinking, as filtered through John's experience of teaching, on how to learn to write: not a new departure, though something of a new synthesis, in literary criticism"--