The most striking development in the area of this topic has been the growing interest in orality. Rhetoric has traditionally been an oral art, although scholarship has focused on it as a written art. Since Chrétien's voice has fallen silent, scholars have examined manuscripts for clues as to how his poems were performed and how spoken word and even gesture may have featured in such performances. Corollary to the interest in orality has been the awareness that performances could be quite diverse, and that different kinds of evidence illustrate that diversity. Study of versification in particular has benefited from these approaches since verse can reveal features of oral performance. Indeed, the common medieval practice of reading aloud requires attention to some features of the Old French language; see sections Kc and Kd. More recently it has been proposed that we distinguish radically between scholastic rhetoric and jongleur or minstrel performances. Some have relocated Chrétien among the latter, thereby depriving him of his clerical status and the education that went with that status, including rhetoric.

For recent work on the medieval arts of poetry, see Paul Klopsch, Einführung in die Dichtungslehren des lateinischen Mittelalters, Das lateinische Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980); Douglas Kelly, The Arts of Poetry and Prose, TMA, 59 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991); and Jean-Yves Tilliette, Des mots à la Parole: une lecture de la ‘Poetria nova’ de Geoffroy de Vinsauf, RRG, 16 (Geneva: Droz, 2000).