Its intuitive yet detailed formulae have structured oral traditions from Beowulf to modern Yugoslavia. Numerous medieval literary genres bore its imprint in moments as varied as the complicated ratiocinations of Chrétien's Cligés, Christine de Pizan's mnemotechnical prologue to the Cité des dames, and the divine or all too earthly allegories of Guillaume de Deguileville's Pelerinaige de la vie humaine, Alain Chartier's Quadrilogue invectif or the ubiquitous Roman de la rose. Moreover, given its influence in the medieval university's trivium, where it cohabitated with grammar and dialectic, it informed both pre-modern literary criticism and satires about the excesses of scholasticism. It was rhetoric, the art and science of persuasion which, whether school-taught or instinctive, was especially influential in the theatre.

The subject of countless legal, ethical, moral and aesthetic debates from Plato onward, rhetorica was largely Ciceronian in medieval France, where it constituted a bona fide habit of thought and where its five parts or canons were just as adaptable to literary communication as they had been long ago to the usually forensic contexts in which Graeco-Roman theorists had codified its principles. Invention (heuresis or inventio) referred to the authorial act of finding (invenire) one's subject along with the arguments liable to assist in its reception; and its considerable literary resonances are just as clear in the Old Provençal poets who sought to trobar as they would be in the twelfth-century Poetria nova, where Geoffrey of Vinsauf describes a painful, even torturous, self-reflexive wresting of the subject from his own mind.