Flowers of rhetoric: from history to contemporary treatment
The term Flowers of rhetoric has no connection with the classic rhetorical canons, whose aim was to convince the audience. This expression appeared in the Middle Age when the destination of the rhetoric reduces to the expressive forms. The medieval authors transformed the ancient philological knowledge into a system of sophisticated allegorical images, so natural to the mentality of a medieval man. Their task was not to invent something new, but to explain the approbated and wellknown ideas. The most fruitful of them came up to now and were creatively revised and newly elaborated by the outstanding contemporary philologists, professor E.M. Beregovskaya among them. The rhetoric, through passing the long way from the antic clearness and the sophisticated medieval constructions, adopted lots of metaphoric and stylistic traditions, elements of diverse languages and cultures, and maintained the initial functions, notoriously expanding them. The investigations of professor E.M. Beregovskaya, considering multiple factors, bring us some brilliant examples of modern philological analysis.