Instruction and Delight In Medieval and Renaissance Criticism

The Horatian formula holding that a poem should instruct and delight raises two obvious questions: what is ‘instruction’ and what is ‘delight’? These are difficult questions, since they seem too broad to be answerable and too central to be dismissed. They are difficult, also, because they refer to paired terms. Are we to see instruction and delight related in some kind of sequence? And what of the cases where only one term appears and the other not at all?These are the basic questions generated by a consideration of the Horatian formula as it occurs in medieval and Renaissance critical texts and it is the purpose of this paper to show that the formula in these texts can be coherently interpreted through the use of the then dominant faculty psychology.