A book about varietas must necessarily begin with an account of its central term. This chapter outlines the basic theory and practice of varietas in classical Latin, before using the descriptio Britanniae tradition to explain how varietas could become a framework for conceptualizing insular history. A simple definition for varietas is fairly easy to provide. At its most basic level, literary varietas denotes formal variety – that is, any shift, temporary or permanent, in the style or structure of a text. Medieval writers conceptualized literary form as the combination of style and structure. For this reason, ‘formal variety’ is a suitable translation of Latin varietas, and one I will employ frequently throughout this book.

It is far more difficult, however, to offer a comprehensive account of the workings and significance of varietas, and not only because of the gap between medieval and modern understandings of variety. Even ancient writers struggled to explain this concept in straightforward terms, resorting instead to metaphors or connections to other concepts to clarify their meaning. Variety lacks clear parameters: we cannot simply call a text “varied” because it mixes X number of styles in Y number of lines. Variety is the sort of literary quality we define using guidelines such as “I know it when I see it”. To complicate matters further, the word varietas was regularly applied to textual units of any length, ranging from individual words, phrases or sentences to large sections of a text or even whole books. Nevertheless, this chapter will compile insights from several auctores to produce a clear picture of this concept.

Rhetorical varietas

As an action, varietas (along with its cognate variatio) could mean either adorning a text with figures and tropes or employing different words with the same meaning to avoid repetition. Quintilian refers to the first of these senses when he describes how ‘plurimis figuris erit varianda expositio ad effugiendum taedium nota audientis’ (‘the Narrative should be varied by a generous use of Figures, so as to avoid boring those who find themselves hearing things they already know’).