The seven liberal arts of mediaeval education carried the blending almost
to the absorption of poetic by rhetoric, and the debasement of rhetoric
itself to a consideration of style alone.

As for poetic, it had no distinct place except in the analyses of the
grammaticus, who from classical times had prepared boys for the schools of
rhetoric partly by analyzing with them the style of admirable passages.
These passages were commonly taken from the poets, whose art was thus
considered mainly as an art of words and applied to the art of the orator.
Consequently, as a result of this tradition, poetic in the middle ages was
commonly grouped with grammar or with rhetoric, although Isidore includes
it in his section on theology.[108]

The rhetorical treatises of the middle ages exhibit two phases. On the one
hand the earlier post-classical treatises composed by Martianus Capella,
Cassiodorus, and Isidore, all inhabitants of the Mediterranean basin, are
fairly close to the classical tradition of Quintilian. Their weakness
consists not in that they restricted rhetoric to style, but in that their
whole treatment of rhetorical theory was compact, arid, and schematic. The
second phase of mediaeval rhetoric is characteristic of a geographical
position more remote from the center of classical culture. Thus it is in
the rhetorical treatises of England and Germany in the middle ages that
rhetoric was to the greatest extent restricted to a consideration of
style. Illustrative of this tendency is the fact that the only surviving
rhetorical work by the Venerable Bede is a treatise on the rhetorical
figures.

But although the conventional study of rhetoric in such condensed
treatment as that of the sections in Martianus, Isidore, or Cassiodorus,
was definitely intrenched in the educational system of the seven liberal