The late Robert O. Payne performed pioneering, seminal work on medieval rhetoric and poetics. The Rhetorical Poetics Of The Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony is an outstanding collection of fourteen scholarly and impressive essays in his honor, and focuses on modernist and postmodernist approaches to the rhetorically inflected poetry of the middle ages. From Charles W. Owen's Chaucer: Beginnings, to Johanna C. Prins' Sandrine's Fable: Courtly Discourse and Courtly Behavior; to Anne Howland Schotter's The Role of the Feminine in Dante's Model of Literary Influence, The Rhetorical Poetics Of The Middle Ages offers informative, insightful, challenging, highly recommended, original contributions to a specialized field of literary criticism.