Disputatio 5: Medieval Forms of Argument: Disputation and Debate Disputation and Debate

These studies illustrate the various high and late medieval transformations of formal and formalized argument, from a broadly interdisciplinary perspective. They challenge today's dominant disciplinary approaches to what was and is still a pervasive mode of thought in the West. Many current treatments of medieval disputational texts have a narrow focus either on the history of scholasticism, rhetoric, and pedagogy, or the genesis and function of such period-specific forms of academic altercation as demonstrative, dialectic, or sophistic disputation, or the later quaestiones, quodlibeta, and sophismata. Moreover, scholarship in literature often ignores the parallel structures of academic argument and narrowly focuses on the narrative and aesthetic functions of debate poem.