Résumé: Trente ans après sa parution, le livre de Laurent Pernot sur La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain reste un ouvrage pionnier dans le domaine de l’histoire de la rhétorique. L’article présente l’impact vivifiant et durable qu’a eu cet ouvrage sur le développement de trois champs de recherche en particulier : (1) le genre épidictique du discours, longtemps resté dans l’ombre des genres délibératif et judiciaire, (2) la rhétorique des époques impériale et tardo-antique, devenue maintenant un champ de recherche florissant, et (3) la rhétorique scolaire et l’enseignement de la rhétorique ainsi que les genres mineurs de la salle de classe (progymnasmata et déclamations), de l’époque de la Seconde Sophistique jusqu’à nos jours. On montrera dans quelle mesure l’ouvrage de Pernot a fait date et a inspiré de nouveaux chemins de recherche dans ces domaines.

Abstract: Si, à la fin du xxe siècle, le genre dit “épidictique” était peu considéré par les chercheurs, l’enquête menée dans La rhétorique de l’éloge a fait apparaître l’importance historique de cette forme rhétorique, la richesse de sa technique et la complexité de ses enjeux sociaux, qui visaient à la formation d’un consensus. Sur cette base, des pistes de travail restent ouvertes pour l’avenir: elles portent sur l’envers du consensus (les sous-entendus éventuellement critiques), sur la périodisation de l’histoire de l’éloge (en prenant en compte, notamment, l’époque hellénistique, l’Antiquité tardive et la Troisième sophistique) et sur des enquêtes philologiques restant à mener dans le domaine de l’édition de textes et à propos de l’atticisme et des rythmes de la prose.

Abstract: The article focuses on blame, the less fortunate pole of the pair on which the epideictic genre has traditionally been built. Picking up on Pernot’s idea that, despite its apparent symmetry, the relationship between praise and blame is in fact strongly unbalanced in favor of praise, a reflection is proposed on the role that the aggressive word, if relocated within the horizon of the epideictic genre, can still play in the public sphere.

Abstract: The preface provides a brief introduction to the five contributions collected in the issue and related to Laurent Pernot’s book La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain thirty years after its publication. The preface also highlights the main breakthroughs that Pernot’s book has made, constituting a methodological model for any research on ancient rhetoric. The book’s comprehensiveness and modernity in its approach to authors, works, genres, contexts and ideas is also emphasized.

Reviewed by: Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities by Stephen M. Monroe Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Stephen M. Monroe, Heritage and Hate: Old South Rhetoric at Southern Universities. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 256 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2093-5. How much do we know about our own university and its past? Stephen M. Monroe asks this question of his university—University of Mississippi—as well as a few other peer southeastern U. S. schools. Monroe examines how these universities "have struggled with their linguistic and [End Page 452] symbolic inheritance" (1). The controversies covered in the book are shown to have deep roots in the Lost Cause ideology that developed almost immediately after the Confederacy surrendered to the Union in the Civil War. Monroe explores how the Lost Cause formed, and continues to inform, notions of race and identity in universities of the American South and beyond. Monroe builds a conceptual frame called "confederate rhetoric." Put simply, confederate rhetoric "is historical, gathering any and all symbolic behavior that is rooted in or that recalls the Old South" (2). The concept extends beyond just Lost Cause discourse in its attention to a larger variety of texts, objects, and sources. As Monroe explains, "confederate rhetoric encompasses many modes of communication, including words, sounds, colors, statues, flags, photos, architecture, and more" (2). The widening of the communicative aperture allows Monroe to study less traditional forms of discourse, like ephemera, collegiate fight songs, and nicknames, as well as more traditional forms such as public arguments and deliberations. Heritage and Hate is composed of seven chapters, along with a preface, introduction, epilogue, and postscript. Most books do not have all of these sections preceding and proceeding the numbered chapters of a book. The various entry and exit points of the book express the recurring relationship amongst racism, identity, and tradition. Chapter one and two analyze vernacular discourses from the University of Mississippi. Chapter one traces the contested meaning of the nickname of the University, "Ole Miss." Originally the name given to the first University of Mississippi yearbook in 1897, Monroe explains that the quick uptake of the term as a nickname for the school owes to the racialized hierarchy of the late nineteenth century. The person responsible for suggesting the name noted that they often heard Black people working on southern plantations "address the lady in the 'Big House' as 'Ole Miss'" (25). Monroe builds upon this origin story to show how "'Ole Miss' has been invoked to glorify and defend the Old South and its outmoded way of life, used to punish and exclude Black people, … and served as code, container, and protector of nostalgic feelings for the Lost Cause" (20). Monroe tracks the various public debates about whether to keep the nickname, showing how appeals to unity and tradition betray a sympathy to the past rather than an effort at inclusion. Chapter two also takes up a vernacular discourse at the University of Mississippi, specifically the school cheer known as "Hotty Toddy." The central question posed in this chapter is, "how should southern university communities (and other intuitions) handle expressions or symbols less glaring than Confederate statuary but perhaps just as troubling?" Monroe makes the case for why "Hotty Toddy" rises to the same level of scrutiny by examining six moments in which the chant was "weaponized as a racial taunt" (63). Chapter three and four focus on controversies that feature an inciting event and significant discursive responses. In chapter three, Monroe analyzes a 2015 incident in which Black students at Missouri staged a peaceful protest and white spectators used the traditional M-I-Z-Z-O-U chant "to [End Page 453] drown [the protestors] out and to communicate anger and disapproval" (91). Monroe draws from newspaper articles, social media posts, and institutional responses to capture the intense emotion of the discourse from various individuals and groups. Chapter four moves back to University of Mississippi to address a controversy based on the response of students to the re-election of Barack Obama in 2012. On November 7, when the election was called in favor of Obama, many students took to public spaces and yelled racial...

Abstract: Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (192–260/808–873) is mainly known as a translator of Greek works into Arabic, but he was also a prolific author. This article focuses on one of his least known treatises, On Vines ( Kitāb al-Karma ), which still remains unedited. On Vines is an eclectic and unclassifiable work that combines different genres. It has been traditionally considered a dietetic treatise on the properties of vine products inserted in the Galenic tradition. But On Vines is also a disputation on the excellence of trees written in the form of questions and answers and, ultimately, a polemical encomium of wine that relies for its effect on the opinions of ancient Greek authorities such as Homer, Diogenes, Aristotle, Socrates or Theophrastus. In this article I analyse the structure of the treatise, identifiying its generic affiliations and the rhetorical strategies deployed by Ḥunayn. I discuss specially the long sections on wine and Ḥunayn's defence of the virtues of this drink against its critics, arguing that the structure of the treatise is also determined by the religious implications of praising wine in an Islamic environment.

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of rhetoric within ancient medicine by setting medical writings in dialogue with contemporary forensic texts. Reading across these two genres allows us to capture the shared ways in which early medical and forensic discourse mobilise rhetoric in response to the epistemological limits of medical and forensic practice. Both medical and forensic discourse frame factual and practical knowledge as the remedy to the slippages of words, but at the same time they need words to formulate and validate their tentative knowledge of those very facts. Select readings from the Epidemics illustrate the importance of a rhetorically structured narrative in response to uncertain scenarios. Much like the narrative of forensic texts, I argue, the case-histories of the Epidemics try to shape elusive realities through a rhetorical gesture that confers a precise meaning upon them. Rhetoric, the paper concludes, is not merely an embellishment nor a skill. It is, instead, a medium for the communication of knowledge and the negotiation of its limits, even in texts that at first glance seem, or claim, to be devoid of any rhetorical features.

Madeleine de Scudéry's Les Femmes illustres (1642) comprises fictional speeches by famous women of antiquity and includes coin portraits reproduced from Guillaume Rouillé's Promptuaire des medalles (1553). The portrait illustrations invoke connections between Scudéry's text and the genre of Rouillé's text—the coin image anthology. Comprised of coin portraits accompanied by biographies, anthologies of coin images draw from ancient visual traditions and grant prestige to women's images. As backgrounds for Les femmes illustres, these texts enhance the ethos of Scudéry's heroines because the coin portraits encourage readers to see the women as people worthy of public commemoration. Scudéry's prefatory epistle echoes the visual arguments and guides readers into ways of seeing women speakers as competent rhetors deserving of respect.

Reviewed by: The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past by Matteo Barbato Christine Plastow (bio) Matteo Barbato, The Ideology of Democratic Athens: Institutions, Orators and the Mythical Past. Edinburgh, GB: Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 252 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4744-6642-4. Barbato's book offers a new analysis of Athenian ideology through the application of a New Institutionalist approach to the city's democratic institutions as demonstrated by their use of stories from the mythical past. He argues for a middle ground between Marxist and culturalist understandings, characterising Athenian ideology as value-neutral, flexible, normative, constructive, and bidirectional. This is illustrated through an analysis of the varied presentations of four myths across several institutional contexts: particularly the epitaphioi logoi, but also tragedy, Assembly and forensic speeches, and private genres. An introduction lays out the structure of the book and summarises previous approaches to Athenian ideology; there is a particular focus on the Marxist approach of Nicole Loraux and others, and the culturalist approach illustrated by the work of Josiah Ober. The second chapter explores Athenian knowledge of mythology, identifying the theatre as its main source but also noting the importance of religious festivals such as the Panathenaia, public institutional contexts, and private learning. The third chapter establishes Barbato's theoretical approach, drawing on New Institutionalism to argue that the different democratic institutions of Athens had their own discursive frameworks and that discourse within them was necessarily structured by these: the need to create an imagined community in the funeral speeches; the requirement to argue in favour of justice in the law courts; the principle of advantage for the Athenians in the Assembly, and both justice and advantage in the Council; and the ability to play with the ideological frameworks of other institutions and the need to appeal to a diverse audience at the dramatic festivals. The subsequent four chapters examine the use of four stories from the Athenian mythic past in these institutional contexts and in private genres: the concept of Athenian autochthony, the sheltering of the Heraclidae, the Amazonomachy, and the assistance provided to Adrastus against Thebes. A short conclusion summarises the book's arguments and contextualises its contributions to the study of Athenian ideology, democracy more broadly, and interactions between Classics and political science. [End Page 88] There is much to commend Barbato's book. His analysis of Athenian ideology highlights two important points that are not prominent in the work on the subject to date. First, he emphasises that Athenian ideology was not fixed but fluid and dynamic, and that the presentation of ideological material necessarily differed based on the context in which it was delivered. This is an important point to grasp to understand the Athenians' apparent tendency to contradict themselves from source to source. Barbato successfully illustrates the appropriateness of different perspectives in different institutional contexts. For example, his nuanced analysis of the various versions of the myth of Adrastus presented in Lysias' funeral oration, Euripides' Suppliant Women, and Assembly speeches convincingly shows how the emphasis on or exclusion of certain narrative features—such as the hybris of the Thebans—can be manipulated to evoke aspects of the democratic ideology suitable to the setting. Second, he is right to draw attention to the fact that ideological material not only describes the audience's viewpoint but also moulds it by demonstrating a norm to which they are expected to conform, touching implicitly on an important point regarding the cognitive effects of rhetoric. Indeed, this methodology in combination with a cognitive approach could produce a particularly strong reading: for instance, how was the ideological result affected by the movement of audience members between the institutions and their memory of the different versions they had heard in other arenas? Barbato is working within a particular school of thought in the study of Athenian oratory that proposes that strict expectations of acceptability were in place in the various contexts of public speaking. Indeed, in his conclusion he summarises that the institutionalist reading of fixed discursive parameters in the institutions "corroborates the view that Aristotle's subdivision of the discipline into three genres was based on the observation of actual oratorical practice" (219). While the...

Reviewed by: Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells Timothy Barr Susan Wells. Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge. RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 211 pp. ISBN-978-0-271-08467-1. Pauline Reid. Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 283 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0069-6. David Wiles. The Players’ Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-49887-6. The works reviewed here celebrate the openness and indefiniteness of rhetoric’s domain by arguing against its assimilation of a disciplinary mode of scholarship. They work from three distinct positions while drawing from the early modem and (mostly) English archive. Susan Wells’s argument for a “transdisciplinary rhetoric” (it is part of the RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric) is sustained throughout each chapter of her reading of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, refiguring what Nancy Struever has called rhetoric’s “theoretical insouciance” as its value for playing tavern-keeper at a crossroads of other disciplines’ inquiries. Pauline Reid’s work explicitly targets the boundaries between new media and bibliographic studies by showing how early modem print involved visual modalities beyond the oft-rehearsed oral-print divide. David Wiles offers a fresh perspective by taking counsel for the discipline from a position without one: the professional actor of the early modern English and French stage. Each has a distinct refrain: transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and a kind of “undisciplining”—unlearning the trained incapacity of academic theorization. Wells opens her book with an autobiographical note. She first read The Anatomy of Melancholy for her comprehensive exams in the mid-1970s. Although her scholarship did not initially take her into uncovering the allusive world of Burton’s massive work, she describes being impressed by the voice of his prose. It was one “utterly at ease with its learning ... thin, rhythmic, quizzical, the voice of an eccentric and intimate friend” (1). Although such notes are often left in the prefatory material, here it is germane to the work. Reading Wells is to hear her performance of just such a voice witty, opinionated, with an erudition that feels like an inviting gesture at a cherished library rather than the intimidating cage of fingers pressed against the don’s lips in office hours. Wells’s style is part of her argument: like Burton, she is a scholar writing for other scholars, but—also like Burton—she refuses any idée fixe, a symptom of melancholy and today of too academic a discipline. Her second chapter, published in an earlier form in Philosophy & Rhetoric, is a contribution to genre studies. Is a genre like a genus, a category [End Page 325] for an assembling of species? Or, as she argues, is it a kind of space for exchange rather than classification? The Anatomy is a sui generis work. Rather than merely dismissing all the previous scholarship devoted to locating it in a taxonomy—an admittedly “old-fashioned project” (40)—Wells reflects on the underlying metaphors of the field. Even the idea of a “hybrid genre” relies upon the species metaphor (49). Burton identifies his work variously as “satire, as a treatise, as a cento, as a consolatio, or as a drama, satire, and comedy, but not as a satiricocento or a dramatic treatise” (40). His use of genre is often skew, bent to his peculiar and often-changing purposes. He delves into the medical genre of observationes less for clinical knowledge and more for the narrative color and moral insight that these cases might provide. Sometimes he interpolates speech into these stories for dramatic effect, as when in a case of love-melancholy he has the stricken Lady Elizabeth say, “O that I were worthy of that comely Prince ...” (66). Elsewhere he neglects the more florid detail of the original observation in order to make a point. One case tells of “two Germans who drank a lot of wine and within a month became melancholy.” Their symptoms were diverse: one “sang hymns...

This article explores the history of the English-language style guide, a genre of writing with beginnings in the eighteenth century. Gaining popularity in the Victorian period, the style guide began to solidify as a genre dedicated to preserving certain linguistic usages. I argue that, from the nineteenth century on, the best style guides have used rhetoric as the cornerstone of their linguistic philosophy. Guides which ignore rhetorical scholarship tend to be reactionary and of limited use to the reader. To emphasize these two types of guides, I look specifically at The Queen’s English and The Dean’s English, two extremely popular, polemical style guides written in the mid-nineteenth century.

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature by Carol A. Newsom Davida Charney Carol A. Newsom. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 130. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 382 pp. ISBN 978-3-16-157723-9. In Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, Carol A. Newsom has collected eighteen of her essays that appeared between 1989 and 2016 and one previously unpublished essay. Unlike many volumes of this sort, the whole greatly exceeds the sum of its parts. Apart from its usefulness as a survey to scholars and students, the book advances Newsom’s scholarly agenda. Newsom works with texts circulating in and around Jerusalem during the late Second Temple period. This was a time of intellectual ferment: proto-gnostic sects proliferated; established religious practices were being challenged, defended, and modified. Newsom argues persuasively that these groups were led by sophisticated readers and rhetors. The leaders grasped that the Hebrew Bible, still undergoing canonization, is polyphonic and intertextual. Further, the texts that they created deployed polyphony, enargeia, and other rhetorical techniques to shape communal identity, attract adherents, and help individuals cope with the precarity of their status. These arguments are advanced in each of the book’s four topical sections. First are six essays that explain and apply Newsom’s methods of rhetorical criticism. Second are four essays illustrating how the Qumran community—responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls—shaped communal and individual identity. Third are three essays that lay out an ethno-psychological model for mapping conceptions of self and agency across cultures. The essays apply the model to the Hebrew Bible and a variety of Second Temple texts. Last are six reception studies that examine how narratives of the period are taken up and transformed both in antiquity and in modern times. Newsom, a chaired emerita professor of theology at Emory University, has published on so many aspects of Second Temple literature over her career that she has plenty of essays on method, theory, and application to choose from. As a result, even without additional commentary, the sections build coherent arguments. Each section opens with introductory issues of [End Page 322] theory, method, and scope and develops with close textual analysis and suggestive implications. The first section on methods reveals what Newsom means by rhetorical criticism and what theorists she relies on most. Like many biblical scholars, her immediate rhetorical touchstone is George Kennedy. But he does not inspire her to read widely in the Greco-Roman tradition. She is not concerned to trace possible cross-influences during the Hellenistic period. Instead Newsom turns to Bakhtin and Burke and the more literary strand of twentieth-century rhetorical criticism. For Newsom, rhetorical strategies in scripture reflect the identities and ontologies of their compositors and shape those of readers and writers to come. Accordingly, this section accomplishes two tasks for Newsom. First, the section launches Newsom’s larger claims that Second Temple communities deployed rhetorical strategies to shape individual and communal identities with case studies of Job (chapter 2), Proverbs 1—9 (chapter 3), Jewish apocalyptic texts (chapter 5), and texts from Qumran (chapter 6). Second, for biblicists new to rhetorical approaches, it introduces concepts and methods of rhetorical criticism, including Bakhtinian polyphony and dialogism (chapters 1 and 3), genre studies (chapters 2 and 4), and a variety of basic rhetorical concepts (chapters 5 and 6) such as epideictics, arrangement, enargeia, and kairos, though she doesn’t always employ these terms. While displaying nuanced rhetorical sensibilities, Newsom would clearly benefit from additional reading in rhetorical scholarship, particularly Carolyn Miller’s classic “Genre as Social Action”1 and William FitzGerald’s Spiritual Modalities for its use of Burke’s religious terministic screen to draw Burkean implications for prayer and religious practice.2 In Section Two, Newsom argues that the Qumran community—a break-away Jewish sect that deliberately positioned itself against the practices in the Second Temple—was “intentional and explicit in the formation of the subjectivity of its members” (159). First, she argues that the Dead Sea Scrolls served as a library for the community (chapter 7), based...

Reviewed by: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan Sarah Walden Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2038-6 In Lives, Letters, and Qailts, Vanessa Kraemer Sohan argues for the value of “everyday rhetorics of resistance” or “the conscious, purposeful recontextualization of the seemingly ordinary means and materials available in order to mediate thought and action, and to persuade others” (3). She examines three women or groups of women who demonstrate the power of persistent, everyday acts that recontextualize the means available to them in a particular time, place, and space. Throughout the book Sohan emphasizes two key arguments. First, she argues for the importance of a translingual and transmodal framework in order to avoid oversimplifying language, to understand difference as the norm, to “recover and reclaim the ways individual composers recontextualize within and across languages, genres, modes, and media,” and to adopt “more democratic and descriptive approaches to language” (9). Sohan’s second key argument involves the need to expand what counts as rhetoric, to redefine resistance, and to reframe how scholars situate rhetors who do not necessarily fit within the typical heroic narratives. For example, when Sohan discusses the ministry of Eliza P. Gurney, she describes the legend that one of Gurney’s letters was in President Abraham Lincoln’s breast pocket the night he was assassinated. She writes, in one of the most powerful lines of the book, that this myth serves as “a reminder of how a powerful, feminist rhetorical figure can be pigeonholed and, as a result, remain hidden in plain sight, because her rhetorical practice is evaluated solely in relation to the men with whom she came in contact, rather than on its own merit” (70-71). Sohan’s commitment to feminist rhetorical scholarship is clear throughout the book as she works to articulate and examine the everyday rhetoric available to women and to argue for its value as a site of study. In chapter one, Sohan explores the letter-writing campaigns of the Townsend Movement, a populist movement that advocated pension reform for the elderly by establishing local clubs that could organize and promote the plan through letter-writing campaigns, voter-registration drives, and petitions. These clubs promoted literacy through workshopping letter-writing, which allowed members to “collaboratively imagine” their future without financial worries (41). Pearl Buckhalter, president of the Oregon [End Page 209] City, Oregon, Townsend Club No. 1, is an example of a leader who recontextualized the means available to position herself as an expert, using her own experience as her ethos, rather than simply repeating the words prescribed by Townsend headquarters (52). Sohan argues convincingly that the translingual and transmodal literacy practices of the Townsend Movement allowed individuals like Buckhalter to transform their lives through the literacy training they receive as part of their activism, even if the movement they promote ultimately fails, as the Townsend Movement did. Nevertheless, she argues, this is exactly why rhetorical scholars must fight against the impulse to examine only heroic narratives of activism and must include the everyday in their analyses. In chapter two, Sohan examines the life and work of Quaker minister and activist Eliza P. Gurney. Gurney, Sohan argues, skillfully blends the epideictic form of classical rhetoric with the “nondirective, nonconfrontational, conversational rhetorical approach” of the Quaker community (71-72). Sohan examines several key parts of her ministry: her development as a minister, her traveling ministry in Europe, and her relationship with President Lincoln. Sohan argues that Gurney harnessed silence and kairos to establish an ethos with potentially hostile audiences, at a time when ethos was assumed to be more fixed than fluid. In her discussion of Gurney’s meeting and correspondence with Lincoln, Sohan demonstrates how Gurney recontextualized the epideictic to develop a relationship with the president and to plead with him to imagine a more peaceful and just world. In this chapter, Sohan significantly builds on prior scholarship on Gurney to establish her as a skillful activist and rhetorician through a detailed exploration of Gurney’s speeches, letters, and meetings. Chapter three is perhaps...

Reviewed by: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach by AlessandroVatri Vasiliki Zali-Schiel AlessandroVatri, Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 344 pp. ISBN: 978019879590 Vatri has produced a well-researched book that helpfully and skilfully marries the cultural-historical and the linguistic character of his work. The excellent use and review of scholarship enables Vatri to achieve the purpose of the book, which is to examine, with the help of modem psycholinguistics, whether there is any linguistic difference between classical Attic prose texts intended for public oral delivery and those intended for written circulation and private performance. The book starts with a thorough discussion of the complicated relationship between oral and written style (Chapter 1). The medium alone is not a decisive divisive factor because there is a great variety of communicative situations and priorities one needs to take into consideration even when the same medium is used. And this is indeed the case with Attic prose, where we cannot clearly distinguish between “literally” oral and written texts. However, the distinction between a written and a non-written conception can be traced very early in the development of ancient Greek stylistic theory (e.g., Alcidamas, Isocrates, Aristotle). For example, Isocrates in his Philip clearly marks the difference between speeches meant to be read and those meant to be delivered: those meant to be read may not be timely, hence their persuasive ability is compromised. Speeches for reading may also not manage to persuade the listeners because they may not be successfully delivered by the reader. This affects the reception of a text and changes the emphasis of the distinction between writtenness and non-writtenness from composition to performance. [End Page 96] Chapter 2 turns to contexts of reception. In classical Athens, close scrutiny of prose texts was possible in solitary and private group reading (“off-line” perusal) but not in situations whose norms of interaction excluded this possibility, such as public oratorical performances and semi-formal small- scale epideixeis. In such public competitive contexts, there was no room for anything but clarity (saphēneia) to convince an audience unable to revisit the text (“on-line” reception). Public texts could therefore not afford obscurity of expression by contrast to private texts (“where off-line perusal is possible, there is no need to take excessive pains to ensure the optimal on-line comprehension of a text,” 35). Hence, the different contexts of reception may be associated with linguistic difference. In Chapter 3, Vatri looks at the distinction between texts that were meant for off-line perusal/reception (scriptures) and those meant for on-line reception (scripts). The writing of Attic prose texts was quite a complex process, with several oral stages—and plausibly even oral composition— preceding written dissemination. But there were also revisions of publicly delivered texts (scripts), such as deliberative and forensic speeches, after their performance and often for the purpose of making a new version of the text public through written dissemination. After examining literacy and reading in classical Athens, Vatri determines the conception of written prose texts as scripts or scriptures proceeding on a genre-by-genre basis. Chapter 4 focuses on clarity (saphēneia), which was extremely important for texts meant for on-line reception (scripts) and especially so for public speeches in particular. The centrality of clarity of expression is already highlighted in ancient Greek rhetorical literature. For “Demetrius” (for example), clarity and familiarity are key to persuasiveness; persuasiveness and clarity can be achieved through plain style—an idea that can be traced back to the criticism of Aeschylus’ obscure language in Aristophanes’ Frogs. According to “Demetrius,” plain style is distinguished not only by its clarity but also by a vividness generated by precision (aknbeia). Both Aristotle and Isocrates consider precision an important feature of texts meant for reading, which may also generate saphēneia. Vatri then looks closely at a range of examples from ancient Greek rhetorical literature to examine what they say about the rhetorical devices employed to produce saphēneia. A recurrent issue in ancient discussions is ambiguity, which can be generated by vocabulary (e.g., ambiguous character of certain...

Reviewed by: L’art du sous-entendu: histoire, théorie, mode d’emploi by Laurent Pernot Mike Edwards Laurent Pernot, L’art du sous-entendu: histoire, théorie, mode d’emploi. Paris: Fayard, 2018. 334 pp. ISBN: 9782213706054 In July 2008, on behalf of Laurent Pemot, I represented the International Society for the History of Rhetoric at The First Biennial Conference of the Chinese Rhetoric Society of the World. Since this global event was scheduled to take place less than a month before the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, my first idea was to give a paper on ancient Olympic speeches. On second thoughts, I realized that talking about the content of Lysias 33, with its proposed attack on the despotic rulers of Persia and Syracuse, might be taken as a veiled reference to China’s socialist democracy—a sous-entendu. Twelve years later, with the Tokyo Olympics postponed because of a threat allegedly emanating from Japan’s old foe, I find myself reviewing a book written by Pemot that will become a standard work on the art of innuendo. Pemot covers an extensive range of material from Graeco-Roman antiquity to the present, to which this review cannot hope to do justice, with examples drawn from rhetorical works, other genres of literature, and elsewhere. Thus, in chapter 1 Pemot discusses types of sous-entendu (as often, the French word is best) in daily life, with politeness such as “you shouldn’t have” to mean “thank you” for a gift. There is an understandable French bias throughout, but Pemot’s versatility is indicated by analyses of authors such as George Orwell, Boualem Sansal, and Arthur Miller. Other topics include politics (the subtle war of words between Giscard d’Estaing and Mitterrand in 1974); fables and riddles (the Sphinx, naturally, but also Jean Paulhan with his translations of enigmatic Malagasy poetry); and conspiracy theory (such as Kennedy, Coluche, the Da Vinci Code). An excellent opening. Sous-entendu in the ancient world is the subject of chapter 2, where Pemot discusses the unsettled place of figured speech in rhetorical theory, and the frequently difficult relationships in declamation between fathers and sons that led to ambiguous remarks like “I married the woman who [End Page 94] pleased my father” (57). Pernot returns to antiquity in a very strong chapter 5 that examines how Greek authors represented Rome with figured speech. Here, on his specialist research terrain, he offers perceptive discussions of Dio Chrysostom’s On Kingship (cf. the much earlier treatment of the theme in Isocrates) and Aelius Aristides’ To Rome, highlighting the latter’s numerous significant omissions, not least of the word “Rome” itself (similarly, the story of Paul Valéry’s grudging eulogy of his illustrious predecessor in the Académie française, Anatole France, in which he managed to avoid using the name “Francé” in reference to his subject, is a little gem). Among the interesting topics of chapter 3 is connotation, as in publicity slogans like “Tendre est la nuit à bord du France” (69), which for Pernot might recall a line of Keats, a novel of Scott Fitzgerald, a film of Henry King or a song by Jackson Browne (yes: type “tender is the night” into Google). Analysis of literary critics (Barthes, Luc Fraisse, William Empson, Roger Callois) and Gide’s The Counterfeiters, with its expression mise en abyme, contributes to another excellent chapter. In chapter 4 Pernot turns to the risks attached to interpretation, especially when an unintended (often sexual) message is received. In the theatre this may be designed to cause laughter (Much Ado About Nothing), but there is nothing funny about De Clerambault’s Syndrome (erotomania). Pemot’s discussion references Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, but it made me think of Play Misty for Me. Arbeit macht frei? In chapter 6 Pernot turns to twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, focusing on the intellectual resistance to the Nazis of Louis Aragon in a poetic method he called “contrabande.” How could such works have escaped the censor (not all did)? One way was the use of historical parallels, as with Jules Isaac’s Les Oligarques and its analogy between ancient Athens under the Thirty and the German Occupation...

Reviewed by: Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics by Olga V. Solovieva Mark Clavier Olga V. Solovieva, Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780810136007 Few images have carried as much rhetorical power as corpus Christi, the Body of Christ. Originating in Jesus’ performative presentation of his own Body at the Last Supper and interpreted through the lens of the crucifixion, it quickly became one of the primary theological metaphors for the church. For example, Paul draws on the imagery of Christ’s Body in 1 Corinthians to demonstrate the mutual dependence and deep communion that should characterize the Corinthian church. Paul’s own use points to an integrative understanding of the image that not only promotes Christian unity but also establishes that unity as integral to Christian identity. In this way, the Body of Christ has been used to persuade would-be schismatics and heretics to “submit themselves one to another.” In short, Christ’s Body is more than simply an object of veneration—it contains rhetorical potency. In Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics, Olga Solovieva demonstrates how this rhetorical power has also been regularly and paradoxically deployed subversively, even iconoclastically. She does this by rooting her study of the rhetorical power of Christ’s Body in Paul’s highly rhetorical argument in 1 Corinthians 1.18-31 that Christ’s crucified Body profoundly challenges the powers of the world. Drawing on Dale Martin, Alam Badiou, and J. L. Austin, she proposes that Christ’s Body serves here a performative function—what she terms “an ideological operator” (10)—that both inaugurates and persuades: “It means not the destruction but the substitution of one system of meaning by another within a shared cultural horizon” (11). But because these rhetorical practices invariably result in the weakening of power, she interprets them as subversive rather than substitutionary. In Chapters 1–6, Solovieva carefully studies and explains how Christ’s Body is employed in this way in six completely disconnected historical situations: the iconoclasm of Epiphanius of Salamis, the 15th-century alchemical Book of the Holy Trinity, in the aesthetics of Johann Caspar Lavater, Dostoevsky’s Genealogy of Ethical Consciousness, the cinematography of Pier Paolo Pasolini, and by the Right in contemporary American politics. The span of genres covered here speaks not only to the breadth of Solovieva’s [End Page 88] expertise but also her particular perspective as a scholar of comparative literature. While some who may be interested in the underlying theology or ideological power of corpus Christi may find the basis for her broad comparative approach problematic, it would be hard to deny her ability to draw key insights from each of her case studies. Collectively, they also highlight how Christ’s Body has transcended confessional boundaries to shape the rhetoric and practices of people and groups even on the margins of Christian orthodoxy. For example, in her chapter on Epiphanius, Solovieva persuasively argues that one of the foundations for Epiphanius’s iconoclasm was his concern about the rhetorical impact of venerating the image of Christ on the Christian’s self-awareness of being part of the Body of Christ—in effect, seeing Christ’s Body compromised the worshiper’s sense of being Christ’s Body. Articulating this in the context of contemporary arguments (as in Eusebius) of church buildings functioning symbolically as Christ’s Body in zvhich Christians worship is enormously helpful. It allows the iconoclastic argument to move beyond mere aversion to idolatry (though that remains) and stand out more starkly as a challenge to Roman imperial power, the rhetoric of which was based in part on the worship of imperial images. Similar striking analyses abound in this volume. Solvovieva’s overall argument, however, is weakened by the disparity of her examples. While she does fine work in each chapter of demonstrating the cultural subversiveness of Christ’s Body, her lack of a conclusion that draws her argument together is striking in light of the expanse of time and genres she covers. Although each chapter is masterly in its grasp of...

As professor of Greek and theology at the University of Wittenberg, Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) authored three of the most important rhetorical textbooks of his era. Melanchthon’s addition of a new genre of rhetoric, the didactic, to the classical genres of demonstrative, judicial, and deliberative oratory illuminates his view of rhetoric as an instrument for the renaissance and reformation of traditions and institutions. Cultivating faculties of judgment and understanding was Melanchthon’s prescription for survival amid theological and political chaos—a prescription that continues to hold value for rhetors in the current historical moment.

Reviewed by: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work ed. by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey Jennifer Keohane Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey, eds. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 274 + xviii pp. ISBN: 9781611177978 Feminist rhetoricians have pursued recovery projects for many years. Seeking to demonstrate that women had multifaceted impacts on public life, they dove deep into archives to find the forgotten fragments of their public statements. In the engaging introduction to this collection, Letizia Guglielmo labels this practice “recollecting,” which she defines both as an act of bringing to mind but also as an act of “gathering or assembling again what has been scattered” (2). Indeed, this volume serves as such recollection, bringing together fourteen eclectic essays on women’s contributions to many arenas of symbolic and collective life. As with many feminist rhetorical projects, the editors—Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey—insist that recovery of forgotten women is not the end goal of their volume. Instead (and inspired by work by Jessica Enoch and Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch), they explore the rhetorical work required to remember women alongside how the memories of women come to be created, used, or erased in various situations (x). The editors segment the book into four different sections: new theoretical frameworks, erased collaborators, overlooked rhetors and texts, and disrupted memories. To the editors’ credit, the afterword recognizes that alternative organizational schemas could also have served to organize these diverse essays into a readable flow. Organization by chronology, methodology, or genre of text would facilitate additional insights into female reputation management and construction. The editors have selected the organizational scheme they use to “provide a structure for thinking about ways to re-collect existing narratives [and] create a heuristic for suggesting new research possibilities and venues” (257–8). As a result, however, each section contains rhetors and projects that are quite different. The collection as a whole features rhetors stretching from Byzantine historian Anna Komnene to Nigerian anticolonial activist Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti to oral expression teacher Anna Baright Curry. [End Page 342] The collection’s greatest contribution is in recovery. Indeed, the rhetors and rhetorical practices studied here will likely be unfamiliar to most. And, for more recognizable speakers like Crystal Eastman and Dorothy Day’ authors bring new insights and lenses to examine their rhetoric. Many of the authors in this “re-collection” answer Enoch’s call to examine rhetorical work broadly with great creativity and strength. That is, they interrogate questions of why some of these rhetors have been forgotten or have had their reputations tarnished throughout history. In the first section, “New Theoretical Frameworks,” the editors feature essays that “suggest new methodologies for reexamining the work of women” (xi). Essays by Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher, Alice Johnston Myatt, Maria Martin, and Ellen Quandahl foreground new ways of engaging the memory of women. In one particularly interesting contribution, Myatt explores the phases involved in reclaiming women’s reputations. Using Rosalind Franklin, a largely unknown scientist integral to the discovery of DNA’s structure, she shows how and why her reputation passed through erasure, refutation, reclamation, and restoration (41–2). Other contributions look to indigenous theory and social circulation as ways to understand the struggle and successes of women as anticolonial activists, physicians, computer programmers, and historians. The second section, “Erased Collaborators,” explores how women’s work can be expunged when women collaborate with men, who are often subsequently credited for their contributions. Essays from Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart, Henrietta Nickels Shirk, and Suzanne Bordelon provide insights into the way these collaborations often disadvantaged women. Shirk, for instance, creatively analyzes the partnership between John James Audubon and painter Maria Martin by reading both their exchanged letters and the images on which they collaborated—he painted the birds and she the backgrounds for the famous Birds of America almanac. Yet, of course, Audubon’s fame and status far outshone Martin’s own, and her artistic skills are forgotten. In the third part, the editors call our attention to “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts” and examine activity that is not included in traditional definitions of...

Reviewed by: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash by Richard Hidary Brandon Katzir Richard Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107177406 Recent scholarship on the Second Sophistic has demonstrated the extent to which that period, in the first centuries of the common era, had a profound influence on rhetoric as a cultural practice. In particular, as Timothy Whitmarsh has noted, “[Oratory] was one of the primary means that Greek culture of the period, constrained as it was by Roman rule, had to explore issues of identity, society, family and power” (5). The Second Sophistic lays the groundwork for the Byzantine tradition, which itself had an enormous influence on the European rhetorical tradition. Yet, the literary cultures inspired by Roman Hellenism were not limited to Greek speakers. Classical Jewish texts like the Mishna, the Talmud, and various midrashim were composed or redacted in the same literary culture that gave rise to Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists. Richard Hidary’s Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric argues that the Jewish culture which produced the Mishna was affected by the cultural and literary ferment of the Second Sophistic. Hidary observes that the Second Sophistic bears numerous similarities to its contemporary rabbinic movement. He notes, “the rabbis also pushed to uphold their own distinctive Jewish identity and pride in the face of Roman dominance and they too studied and taught inherited religious traditions from antiquity” (5). Like the Greek orators, the Talmudic sages “studied, codified, and lectured about their own past traditions and in a similar way used this as a strategy for upholding their culture and values” (6). The strength of Hidary’s approach lies in his nuanced examination of a range of rabbinical genres. Each of the chapters proceeds in a similar fashion: they begin by explaining the significance and structure of a particular genre of rabbinical writing followed by an explanation of how that genre intersects with rhetorical genres of the Second Sophistic. Hidary explores some rabbinical writing—such as aggadic midrashim, the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Talmud Bavli—as well as some lesser known genres, like the progymnasmata in rabbinical literature. He compares the role of lawyers in Roman and rabbinical courts, the heavenly court in rabbinical literature, and Plato’s heavenly court. Hidary offers a fresh perspective to each genre. Of particular interest is his analysis of Sabbath sermon, which, according to [End Page 340] Hidary, is the mainstay of rabbinical declamation and has its origins in the Second Temple period, which ended in 70 CE. Hidary argues that there is a formal connection between rabbinic homilies and the aggadic midrash. He observes that while some scholars have suggested that “works of midrash aggadah are transcripts of actual synagogue sermons,” most believe they are literary creations, even if they were perhaps sometimes read aloud. Each chapter of aggadic midrash begins with a proem which expounds upon a Biblical verse. Hidary notes that “the verse usually lacks an obvious connection to the Torah lectionary and thus raises the curiosity of the audience. The audience is kept in this state of suspense until the speaker finally manages to connect the opening verse with the first verse of the Torah lectionary, thus delivering his main point with a memorable punch line” (50). Hidary argues that the exordium is the model for the midrashic proem, pointing out that Aristotle “writes that the prooimion of epideictic speeches should begin with an unrelated subject and then transition into the main topic of the speech” (53). But Hidary emphasizes that while the rabbis’ rhetorical form may look Greek, their arguments are designed to demonstrate the superiority of the Jewish people and the Sinaitic revelation. Hidary draws a connection between the Hellenistic orators of the Second Sophistic who “turned to Attic oratory to revive Greek pride in the face of Western Roman political domination” and the rabbis who “[apply] the rhetorical technique of the Greeks to their teaching of Torah,” an application which was ultimately aimed at demonstrating “the perfection of Scripture” (77). The later chapters of Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric compare classical and rabbinic...

Reviewed by: Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions ed. by Christa Gray et al Christoph Pieper Christa Gray, Andrea Balbo, Richard M. A. Marshall, and Catherine E. W. Steel, eds., Reading Republican Oratory: Reconstructions, Contexts, Receptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 366 pp. ISBN: 9780198788201 Studying antiquity means studying fragments, given the highly fragmented nature of our knowledge of its politics, art, and literatvire. Within [End Page 346] this mosaic of bits and pieces, texts that have been transmitted as fragments are a specifically challenging field of research, one that has attracted lots of scholarly attention in recent decades. Fragments of oratory are a specific case within this field: as the editors of the volume stress in their introduction, every speech we read as text is, in a way, already a fragment, as it is the textualized reduction of a complex form of communication that includes words and arguments. Also, the vocal qualities of the speaker, his performance and auctoritas—all these aspects are lost to our immediate perception, even if the full text of a speech is transmitted. And yet, the relevance of fragments for understanding the persuasiveness and impact of oratory in the ancient world is huge. Studying the fragments of Roman Republican oratory therefore means more than simply reading and interpreting the fragments and testimonies in Malcovati’s Oratorum Romanorum fragmenta; in order to reconstruct their rhetorical potential, one needs a thorough understanding of their historical and cultural embeddedness, and a good grasp of the transmitting author’s own agenda. The volume under review, one of the preliminary proceedings that prepare the new edition of the Fragments of the Roman Republican Orators (FRRO) by Catherine Steel and her Glasgow team, has an outspoken interest in the fragments’ context that goes beyond textual representation: it includes reconstructions of performance and sensory surrounding. It reflects on the relevance of the speaker’s authority and on the changing cultural climate in the second and first centuries bce, when the interaction with Greek culture increased in Rome and when rhetoric challenged the traditional political hierarchy based on auctoritas (Alexandra Eckert). The authors of the volume approach the methodological challenges in an admirably undogmatic way that includes traditional philology, historical studies, and modern theoretical approaches. In this short review, I can merely offer some lines that run through the volume (by no means an exhaustive list). The volume is divided into two parts: transmission and reconstructions; but as happens with good conference volumes, important questions return throughout the book. A first important theme is the transmitting author, whose reasons for quoting or summarizing must be taken into account when studying (not only oratorical) fragments. S. J. Lawrence convincingly argues that Valerius Maximus’ collection of dicta should not be understood as neutral; instead Valerius wants to demonstrate the limits of oratory in Republican times (which influences his choice of exempla). Armando Raschieri, in a rather additive overview, analyses the contexts in which Quintilian quotes Republican orators. Generally, one of the aims of studying fragmentary Republican oratory has always been to get beyond Cicero for our knowledge about what speaking in the Republic meant and looked like. But as Cicero’s canonical status and his canon of orators in the Brutus were so powerful after his death, one has to be aware of the Ciceronian intertext that shapes later ancient readers’ perceptions. Alfredo Casamento tackles the problem of how to deal with Cicero’s legacy in his treatment of [End Page 347] Sulpicius Rufus and Cotta in the Brutus, whereas Ian Goh and Elena Torregaray Pagola look for genres not influenced by Cicero in which relevant information on Republican oratory can be found: Republican satire (Goh with a very dense, associative, and inspiring reading of Lucilius’ book 2), and comedy (Torregaray Pagola with a close reading of a section of Plautus’ Amphitruo). John Dugan contributes a methodologically far-reaching chapter for the case of Macrobius’ quotation of the second-century bce orator Gaius Titius. His working method has the potential to offer unexpected results for other fragments as well: based on New Historicism and Clifford Geertz’ concept of thick descriptions, Dugan concludes that “the only Titius we will read will be that which...

Reviewed by: The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Durée of Black Voices ed. by Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson Mudiwa Pettus Young, Vershawn Ashanti, and Michelle Bachelor Robinson, eds., The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices, New York: Routledge, 2018. 894 pp. ISBN: 9780415731065 In their preface, Vershawn Ashanti Young and Michelle Bachelor Robinson herald The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric: The Long Duree of Black Voices as a landmark publication in the field of rhetorical studies. The reader, they contend, is the only comprehensive rhetoric anthology to “speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, religious, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslaved period in America to our present era, as well as to the Black Diaspora” (xxi). As expressed in their introduction, Young and Robinson hoped to meet two goals in undertaking their editorship of the anthology. First, they aimed to deliver a collection of “unequivocally rhetorical” texts that reveals how African Americans have sought to influence American society. Second, they intended to illustrate that African American rhetoric exists “all around us,” performed in every genre and mode of communication (xxi). In the final analysis, Young and Robinson achieved these goals marvelously. The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a singular pedagogical and reference text that presents African American rhetoric in all its contours, complexities, and, even, contradictions. Containing almost 900 pages of primary and critical works, the reader is wonderfully expansive. Interviews, autobiographical writings, folktales, speeches, social media posts, poetry, and theoretical treatises are among the genres showcased. Expertly, this wide-ranging content is organized into [End Page 237] four major units that are divided into sections based on themes. While Young and Robinson provide introductions to each of the major units, thirteen “expert editors,” a cohort of scholars culled from a wide range of disciplines, have provided introductions, selected readings, and crafted explanatory annotations for most of the reader’s subsections. Part 1, “African American Rhetoric—Definitions and Understanding,” presents readers with the contextual and theoretical framing for navigating the anthology. In the unit’s first half, Young and Robinson delineate the book’s purpose and codify the six elements of African American rhetoric: language, style, discourse, perspective, community, and suasion. The unit’s second half is composed of the work of Molefi Asante, Geneva Smitherman, and Keith Gilyard, foundational theorists of African American rhetoric who clarify the philosophical underpinnings, linguistic features, and the history of the systematic study of African American rhetoric, respectively. Part 2, “The Blackest Hours—Origins and Histories of African American Rhetoric,” includes texts that highlight the enduring imprint that African orature has left on African American expressive culture; the varied faith systems through which African Americans have theorized their lived experiences; Black epistemes of language, literacy, and education; and the diversity of African American political rhetoric. Part 3, “Discourses on Black Bodies,” centers the premise that considerations of gender and sexuality are essential to the study of African American rhetoric. The unit features readings on Black feminisms, Black masculinity, and Black queer/quare rhetorics. Part 4, “The New Blackness: Multiple Cultures, Multiple Modes,” is the book’s final and most eclectic unit. Potent readings that parse Caribbean intellectual thought, African American technoculture, the rhetorics of Hip Hop, and the self-reflexiveness of Black artistry are the focus. Indubitably, the anthology’s apparatus provides readers with a wealth of entry points into the study of African American rhetoric. Reinforcing the anthology’s intended pedagogical function, each section is followed by a bibliography and a set of discussion questions. Readers can use these paratextual resources to further process the anthology’s readings independently and/or within a group, in and outside of institutionalized classrooms. A companion website, containing links to recordings of public addresses, comedic performances, musical selections, and other artifacts that complement the anthology’s primary readings and critical introductions, has also been made available. The cumulative effect of these supplementary materials is that individuals with both an advanced and burgeoning knowledge of African American rhetoric can find their footing in the anthology’s vast terrain and that Young and Robinson’s contention that African American...

Marc Fumaroli (1932–2020)In memoriam Laurent Pernot Translated by Jameela Lares Marc Fumaroli aimait à rappeler qu’il avait fait partie du groupe de savants qui, en 1976, conçut le projet de fonder une société consacrée à l’histoire de la rhétorique, avec Anton D. Leeman, Alain Michel, James J. Murphy, Heinrich F. Plett et Brian Vickers. Cette initiative pionnière devait se concrétiser dès l’année suivante, avec la fondation de l’International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR) à Zurich le 30 juin 1977. À cette époque, Marc Fumaroli, né le 10 juin 1932, était déjà un universitaire remarqué. Muni d’une solide formation, agrégé des lettres, ancien pensionnaire de la Fondation Thiers, il soutint sa thèse d’État à l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, en 1976 précisément, et fut élu professeur dans ce même établissement. Spécialiste de la littérature française du XVIIe siècle, il s’inscrivait dans la lignée de grands maîtres comme Paul Bénichou, Raymond Picard et René Pomeau. Natif de Marseille, issu d’une famille corse, ayant passé son enfance à Fès, au Maroc, ce Parisien était un homme de la Méditerranée et de la culture latine. Passionné des arts de la scène, il « écumait les couturières et les premières », selon ses propres mots, et il donna au quotidien danois Jyllands-Posten des critiques qui furent par la suite réunies en un volume hors commerce (Orgies et féeries. Chroniques du théâtre à Paris autour de 1968, Paris, 2002). Dans la décennie qui suivit la fondation de l’ISHR, Marc Fumaroli développa et fit connaître son approche novatrice de la rhétorique, envisagée comme une composante essentielle de la littérature, de l’histoire des idées et du fonctionnement des institutions, tant séculières qu’ecclésiastiques. Il la qualifiait de « nervure » de la civilisation, à cause de son rôle de renfort, de soutien et d’arête saillante. En 1980, parut l’édition imprimée de sa thèse, L’Age de l’éloquence. Rhétorique et « res literaria » de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique (Genève, Droz), puis, en 1985, l’édition commentée des Fables de La Fontaine (Paris, Imprimerie nationale), deux ouvrages qui attiraient l’attention, entre autres, sur l’héritage antique, sur l’influence des jésuites, sur le poids des genres, des topoi et des théories du style. [End Page 1] Directeur de la revue XVIIe Siècle, directeur du Centre d’étude de la langue et de la littérature françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, Marc Fumaroli fut élu professeur au Collège de France en 1986 et donna comme intitulé à sa chaire « Rhétorique et société en Europe (XVIe – XVIIe siècles) ». En 1987, en tant que président de l’ISHR, il eut la responsabilité du VIe congrès de la Société, qui se tint à Tours et à Poitiers et fut applaudi par tous comme une grande réussite. À partir du milieu des années 80, les travaux de Marc Fumaroli changèrent d’échelle. Sans jamais oublier le cœur rhétorique et littéraire de ses préoccupations, il traça des perspectives élargies dans une série de grands livres, dont on ne peut citer ici qu’une sélection. Lecteur infatigable et pénétrant (Exercices de lecture. De Rabelais à Paul Valéry, Paris, Gallimard, 2006), il analysa les échanges feutrés des écrivains avec le pouvoir politique (Le Poète et le Roi. Jean de La Fontaine en son siècle, Paris, de Fallois, 1997 ; Chateaubriand. Poésie et Terreur, Paris, de Fallois, 2003). Il dégagea l’importance, dans l’histoire du monde occidental, du « loisir lettré » (otium literatum), de la conversation et des institutions littéraires, comme les salons ou les académies, qui permettaient le commerce des esprits et l’interaction en matière culturelle (Trois institutions littéraires, Paris, Gallimard, 1994 ; La Diplomatie de l’esprit. De Montaigne à La Fontaine, Paris, Hermann...

This essay argues that Madeleine de Scudéry's engagement with the early modern dialogue genre in Conversations sur Divers Sujets reflects and strengthens the conversational theory that scholars have pinpointed as an important feminist rhetorical strategy. By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudéry enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudéry's Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot's The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudéry's feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

This essay argues that Madeleine de Scudery’s engagement with the early modern dialogue genre in Conversations sur Divers Sujets reflects and strengthens the conversational theory that scholars have pinpointed as an important feminist rhetorical strategy. By imagining and constructing the dialogue to function as a metadiscourse on the conversational theories that provide the speaking points of her characters, Scudery enacts her rhetorical theory of sermo in addition to describing it. After an overview of varying forms of the dialogue genre in Renaissance Europe, a comparison between Scudery’s Conversations and Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Defence of Good Women illuminates Scudery’s feminist construction of the genre and exemplifies her choice to use the dialogue to both perform and advance her theories on conversational practice.

424 RHETORICA balances well her recovery of nineteenth-century women's cookbooks with a critique of "the pervasive social ordering system" of taste in the nine­ teenth century (p. 4). Offering the first book-length study of women's cookbooks as rhetorical texts, Walden makes a valuable contribution to scholarly conversations in interdisciplinary studies of food and food his­ tory, feminist histories of rhetoric, and the history of nineteenth-century American rhetorics. Paige V. Banaji Barry University Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, eds. Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, Leiden: Brill, 2018. 412 pp. ISBN 978904365100; David R. Carlson, ed. Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel. Cambridge, UK: Modem Humanities Research Association, 2018. 345 pp. ISBN 9781781886205 After a brief and unsuccessful career as a diplomat, Sir Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) retreated to his estates and his library and to two life-long scholarly endeavors, the enrichment of the English language and the proper mode of national governance. The former is a task of some interest: it has its flowering a half century later in the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare, Spenser and Sidney. But it is the latter task that is the subject of the two books now under review, one an edition per se, the other an edition and a monograph welded together. Both books publish three dialogues, Pasquill the Playne, Of That Knowlage Which Maketh a Wise Man, and The Defense of Good Women, and one treatise, The Doctrinal of Princes. Only Carson includes The Image of Governance, a book on the duty of kingship in the form of an idealized biography of the Roman emperor Alexander Severus. Between these two books, published virtually simultaneously, there is obviously a great deal of overlap, a circumstance that permits us to reflect on the state of academic publishing as well as on the optimal means of editing and con­ textualizing printed Tudors texts. Before turning to this task, however, we need to say something about the works themselves in the context of the humanist revival in England. A work in translation from the Greek, The Doctrinal of Prince permits Sullivan and Walzer to address the state of learning in Tudor England and to underline the remarkable fact that Elyot's translation may well have been the first directly from the Greek. That without the benefit of any schooling Elyot should undertake the task says a great deal both about him and about the flowering of English scholarship in the Tudor Age. Elyot's focus on the accuracy of his translation is salutary as well. In the first edition, he rendered the Greek "and that they may suppose howe to counsaile for their weal than themselves." In the second edition, this is revised to "that thei maie suppose that you canst counsaile them better tor their weale Reviews 425 than thei can them selfes," a more accurate rendering of the Greek, and a tribute to Elyot's meticulous concern. Despite a concern for translation, rhetorical style is less a focus of Sullivan and Walzer than genre. The Doctrinal of Princes is identified as an Isocratian parainesis, advice to a young prince on proper royal behavior. Its structure is simple, an introduction designed to lay down precepts for monarchs followed by the precepts themselves followed by a short epi­ logue, resembling a peroration. The advice is deliberately not specific. Here is a sample admonition: "Haue no lasse dominion or rule ouer they selfe, than ouer other" (Sullivan and Walzer, 104). This and its fellow admo­ nitions so smack of Polonius's sententiousness that one wonders why Elyot felt compelled to reach back to ancient Greece to retrieve it; one wonders, that is, until one realizes that Elyot was living in the reign of a monarch with a strong tendency to ignore good advice. The genres of two of Elyot's dialogues are a topic of debate. Is Pasquill the Playne modeled on Platonic dialogues, or on later ones by Lucian? Sullivan and Walzer opt for the latter on two grounds: Elyot recommended Lucian in the Governour and he characterized Pasquill as "mery." Although many of Lucian's dialogues can be characterized as...

Reviews 427 Davida H. Charney, Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms. Hebrew Bible Monographs 73; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2017. xii + 156 pp. ISBN: 9781909697805. The tension within rhetorical criticism of the Bible, whether the Hebrew Bible or New Testament in Greek, is how to think of and hence to utilize the Greek and Latin rhetorical traditions. That is, do they consti­ tute the metalanguage for rhetorical criticism or are they exemplified instan­ ces of how the ancients approached rhetoric? In this volume, Charney for the most part attempts to find a middle ground, what she calls "compara­ tive rhetoric" (p. 12). By this she means that, even though she draws heavily upon ancient rhetoric, she does not believe that the ancient Hebrews knew or drew upon Greco-Roman rhetoric. Nevertheless, many of the categories of ancient rhetoric—such as the genres and some of the stylistic techniques, such as stasis theory—are central to the argument that she makes, while she also draws on some of the techniques of the New Rhetoric, such as "amplitude" (Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca) or "amplification" (Burke) and "association" or "identification." She utilizes these helpful categories, pla­ ced in the service of a close reading of selected first-person psalms, to offer rhetorical explications of their persuasive power. Charney is not concerned with the many historical factors that tend to mire much psalm scholarship, but she posits a rhetorical situation appropriate to each psalm and is atten­ tive to each text's rhetorical features. The contents of this relatively short volume include, first, an introduc­ tion that lays out Chamey's view of the psalms as argumentative discourse within Israelite public life, her definition of rhetoric in relationship to literary analysis, and, most importantly, her definition of rhetoric that draws upon both ancient and contemporary theory—all in service of her reading of the psalms as instances of ancient rhetoric, attempts by the first-person speaker to persuade God through various authorial stances. The rest of the chapters comprise various examples of how rhetoric is exemplified by individual psalms. Chapter 1 concerns praise of God as a form of currency used to per­ suade God, what she labels a form of epideictic discourse. She here treats Psalms 71,16, 26, and 131. Chapter 2 focuses upon the few psalms addressed to the speaker's opponents, drawing upon notions of amplitude and amplifi­ cation to establish the focus of each psalm. The psalms here are 4, 62, and 82. Chapter 3 treats psalmic lament as a form of deliberative rhetoric, with an established psalmic form that functions as a "policy argument (pp. 56-58). Charney discusses the lament Psalms 54 and 13 in relation to their lack of amplification, proposing that the speaker was confident in his innocence before God. She usefully draws upon the conversational implicatures of Paul Grice especially regarding the maxim of quantity. In contrast to chapter 3, chapter 4 focuses on psalms in which the speaker argues, sometimes at length (amplitude), for his innocence and attempts to persuade God to act on his behalf, as in Psalms 4, 22, and 17. Chapter 5 concentrates upon psalms in which the speaker draws strong opposition between himself and his oppo­ nents as he seeks vindication from them based upon the fairness of God. 428 RHETORICA The psalms treated here are 7, 35, and 109. Chapter 6 encompasses the few psalms in which the speaker admits to his guilt, with treatment of Psalms 130, 38, and 51. Finally, chapter 7 discusses psalms in which the speaker is involved in persuading himself rather than simply expressing his opinion regarding God or his opponents. Treated here are Psalms 77 and 73. The vol­ ume concludes with a bibliography and helpful indexes, including one on rhetorical terms. There are a few problems with this volume that cannot be overlooked. These include Charney's sometimes appearing to rely too heavily upon the categories of the Greeks and the Romans. These might restrict her categories in some instances where modern interpretation has expanded the resources regarding language function. The categorization of lament as deliberative seems to be forced by her attempt to equate the ancient categories with the biblical...

Reviews Wendy Dasler Johnson, Antebellum American Women's Poetry: A Rhetoric of Sentiment, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 265 pp. ISBN: 9780809335008 Sentimental poetry is not a common subject of rhetorical analysis. Nor is it a highly regarded literary form. However, Wendy Dasler Johnson argues that for a large number of antebellum American women, sentimental poetry served as an important rhetorical space where they could voice their opinions on social and moral issues. Specifically, Johnson presents a deep and focused analysis of the sentimental verse of antebellum America's three most popular female poets: Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Julia Ward Howe. Thanks to three decades of feminist recovery scholarship, Sigourney, Harper, and Howe are not entirely obscure figures in literary and rhetorical histories. Scholars of nineteenth-century American literature have recovered the writing of these three women, and feminist historians of rhetoric have recognized their rhetorical accomplishments as reformers in education, abo­ lition, temperance, and suffrage. However, their sentimental poetry remains a blind spot in both literary and rhetorical scholarship. While rhetorical scho­ lars do not usually consider poetry as part of these women's rhetorical oeuvre, literary scholars have struggled to analyze their verse. Johnson quotes (p. 1) the lament of literary scholar Cheryl Walker, who, upon the rediscovery of antebellum American women's sentimental poetry, said, "The problem is, we don't know how to read their poems." Johnson claims that a rhetorical framework is the solution to this problem. A literary/rhetorical divide has marginalized women's sentimental poetry in both literary and rhetorical his­ tory, and Johnson's study actively traverses this divide. To recover antebellum women's sentimental verse, Johnson argues that poetry, especially sentimental poetry, is a rhetorical genre. "[M]any hold to a modernist view," Johnson writes, "that literature by definition makes no arguments" (p. 4). However, nineteenth-century Americans, influenced by the belletrism and faculty psychology found in the rhetorical theory of George Campbell and Hugh Blair, understood poetry as a sub­ category of rhetoric, and they valued sentimentalism as part of the process of persuasion. Citing Campbell, Johnson demonstrates how eighteenthand nineteenth-century rhetorical theory linked "'sentiment to moral Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 2, pp. 207-212. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.2.207. 208 RHETORICA and 'sensible/ not to an excess of feeling" (p. 7). As Campbell explains, "what is addressed solely to the moral powers of the mind, is not so prop­ erly denominated the pathetic, as the sentimental."1 Thus, as Johnson concludes, poetry is a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism is a rhetor­ ical appeal that "works alongside pathos or persuasion of public feeling" to "invok[e] arguments about ethics, rational values, and judgments" (p. 18). Eventually, sentimentalism "got linked to women pejoratively," alongside the rise of women's literacy and the establishment of elite, white, male English departments (pp. 7-8). This feminization of sentimental verse played no small part in the marginalization of the genre. However, as John­ son demonstrates, in early nineteenth-century America, poetry was a valid rhetorical genre, and sentimentalism was considered a masculine discourse, which women co-opted in order to write about public issues. True to the rhetorical nature of her project, Johnson divides her study into three main parts: "Logos" (or rhetorical aims), "Ethos" (writing perso­ nae), and "Pathos" (audience appeals). In each section, Johnson offers anal­ yses informed by literary research, eighteenth-century rhetorical theory, and postmodern theories of semiotics that work to foreground the rhetoric of sentimentalism in the verse of Sigourney, Harper, and Howe. In Part 1, which consists of one chapter, Johnson examines the "reasoning and theo­ ries of persuasion" that these three women use to justify their right and their duty to write (p. 12). According to Johnson, sentimental logos does not rely on syllogism but rather is found in sentimental poets' use...

Reviews Christopher S. van den Berg, The World of Tacitus' Dialogus de Orato­ ribus: Aesthetics and Empire in Ancient Rome, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107020900 If, as Ronald Syme remarked, "Tacitus gives little away," this is espe­ cially true for the Dialogus de Oratoribus.1 Elusive as Tacitus is in his historical works, he is more so in the Dialogus: Tacitus himself plays no real role in the dialogue (unlike Cicero, who sometimes appeared in his own dialogues), and readers have long puzzled over which speaker, if any, wins the day or repre­ sents Tacitus. The enigmatic character of the Dialogus has led to a variety of readings, most of which seek to pinpoint either a single argument or a single speaker as embodying the text's positive message. Each of these readings faces inter- and intratextual difficulties, as Christopher S. Van den Berg amply demonstrates in this volume. Rather than seek to resolve these tensions by identifying a particular speaker with Tacitus or describing an argument or speech as more persuasive, van den Berg argues that the "manifold contradic­ tions" (p. 124) within and across the speeches are, in fact, intentional and pro­ ductive features of the dialogue. In grappling with these tensions, along with the intertextual and intratextual dimensions of the work, van den Berg deve­ lops an interpretive approach that he terms "argumentative dynamics," an approach rooted in the very dialogue(s) that van den Berg studies. The result is an original and deeply learned approach to a perplexing and important text. The book consists of seven substantive chapters, along with an introduc­ tion, conclusion, and appendix featuring a detailed, outline of the Dialogus. Chapter 1 focuses on the first set of speeches (Aper and Messalla), weaving this analysis together with an overview of Tacitus' biography, the external and internal dating of the Dialogus, the role of rhetoric and declamation in imperial Rome, the work's Ciceronian engagements, and the dialogue genre. The "argumentative dynamic" interpretive approach is outlined in Chapter 2, where it is contrasted with "persuasion oriented" and "character oriented" (p. 56) approaches. The "persuasion oriented" seeks to describe a speech or set of speeches as being more persuasive than others, while the "character ori­ ented" seeks to identify a speaker with Tacitus. Both, though, seek to develop a coherent interpretation of the Dialogus according to which a particular 1 Ronald Syme, Tacitus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), Vol. II, p. 520. Khetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 3, pp. 320-329. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: / /w\nv. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.Org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.3.320. Reviews 321 argument or speaker effectively wins. Both approaches face abundant difficul­ ties: the dialogue is far from the Platonic model, featuring neither Socratic elendms nor deliberative exchange (p. 124), while Tacitus himself undermines his own voice and, in Academic fashion, allows each speaker to subtly under­ mine the persuasiveness of the others without engaging in direct question and answer. Argumentative dynamics seeks, instead, to explore "how dialogue functions to create and communicate meaning" turning to the text itself to recover "these functional strategies" (p. 94). Reading the Dialogus in light of the dialogue form - and as a literary work rather than a philosophical work, per se - focuses our attention on a number of features, the result of which is a rhetorical-literary reading in which the dialogue's "rhetorical aspects" are in fact the "core message" (p. 95) of the work. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 turn to an interpretation of the Dialogus itself. Interstitial passages are the focus of Chapter 3, in which van den Berg explores the way in which interstices contain "categories which describe the evolution of eloqueutia" (p. 99). Chapter 4 centers on what van den Berg describes as a sort of "rapprochement" (p. 164) between poetry (championed, ostensibly, by Maternus) and oratory (championed by Aper). That is, rather than view Maternus...

434 RHETORICA The conclusion of this work is quite substantive. Zali takes up the question of Herodotus' authority as an author as it has been positioned and debated by scholars. He brings in the question of the extent to which Bakhtin's theory of dialogism can inform our understanding of Herotodus and the openness or closedness of the work for the reader. Zali presents and supports the view that Herodotus constructed an open text for readers through the strategic inclusion of Greek and Persian voices in multiple forms. That is, the Histories persistently calls the reader into conversation with historical figures and events. In addition, Zali places his study of the Histories in the context of the recent scholarly trend of interpreting the text metahistorically. Zali sees his treatment of Herodotus as consistent with this interpretive trend and even pushing that trend further in terms of its eluci­ dation of Herodotus' "stance towards current oratorical practices, for his method of writing history, and for how readers are supposed to approach his work" (312). While this is already a lengthy study, the effort would have been stronger had the author better and more fully situated the main study within contemporary and historical studies of Herodotus. More specifi­ cally, given that the author's main claim concerns the significance of Herodotus' Histories in the development of rhetoric in the 5th Century, this work needed to situate the reader within the extensive scholarship of this development which has been generated over the last several decades in the fields of Rhetoric, English, Philosophy, and Communication Studies. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this meticulous and well-presented study of Hero­ dotus and the argument made concerning its role in the development of rhetoric, and I highly recommend it to others. David M. Timmerman Carthage College Bialostosky, Don. Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rheto­ rically. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, LLC, 2016. 191 pp. ISBN 9781602357259 In the centerpiece essay to the collection entitled Speech Genres & Other Late Essays, Mikhail Bakhtin takes upon himself the task of distinguishing between linguistics and metalinguistics. To illuminate this distinction, he argues that linguistics is best exemplified by the sentence, and that metalin­ guistics is best exemplified by the utterance. Bakhtin then proceeds to cata­ logue the differences between these two units of analysis, and it is clear that his interests lie with the latter. In charting out these differences, Bakhtin makes a claim that is particularly germane to the work reviewed here— namely, that while the sentence is endlessly repeatable (because as decontextualized linguistic matter," it neither answers nor addresses anyone), Reviews 435 the utterance, being thoroughly situated in dialogic contexts, can never be repeated. It is in this sense that Don Bialostosky's Mikhail Bakhtin: Rhetoric, Poet­ ics, Dialogics, Rhetoricalitp ought to be regarded—that is, as a gathering of utterances, published at various junctures over the course of a distinguished career by one of the pre-eminent Bakhtin scholars in literary and rhetorical studies. As utterances, these essays are addressed to varied and specific audiences, in diverse scholarly contexts, in response to what others have said and in anticipation of what still others may yet say. If Bakhtin is right, even though all of these utterances (save one) have been previously publis­ hed, each may be considered simultaneously old and new. It is not possible, then, to read or hear these essays in the same way they were received at the time of their original publication, but it is possible to hear them as newly uttered, as saying something different in the context in which they are now reread, or heard again. I want to complicate things a bit more. Instead of looking upon this collection as a gathering of juxtaposed utterances, what if it were to be regarded an utterance in its own right? In fact, the author anticipates this possibility, and indeed, desires that his collection be read this way. At the close of his introduction, Bialostosky says of his earlier essays that they "stand here as a whole utterance re-articulated by my arrangement and re-affirmation of them." It is up to readers, those co-constitutive "outsi­ ders," to bring to them what they will (15). As...

Reviews 209 Jamie Dow, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric (Oxford University Press) Oxford & New York, 2015. 248 pp. ISBN9780198716266 Aristotle s Rhetoric has long posed problems of fit, which makes its uptake particularly revealing of the preoccupations that define a historical moment. Where should the Rhetoric be situated in the Corpus Aristotelicuml Is it primarily a practical work in the handbook tradition, or is it supposed to offer a full-blown theory of rhetoric? Should it be approached as a kind of philosophy, or something else entirely, especially since it devotes so much attention to style and passion? Is it even a coherent text to begin with? In his ambitious book, Passions & Persuasion in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Jamie Dow begins with these basic questions in mind, and he defends a set of interlocking answers that point to the Rhetoric as a serious, philosophical work along the following lines. Aristotle's Rhetoric is primarily a work on argumentation as understood by medieval Arab commentators along with some of our contemporaries including Bumyeat and Allen; it offers a full­ blown theory of rhetoric opposed to the handbook tradition of Gorgias and Thrasymachus; it is coherent in general and in detail, and it legitimates on philosophical grounds the use of passion in rhetoric. Thus, Dow's project also speaks to our historical moment—broadly postwar—when passions in political life became suspect for good reasons. Few will agree with all of the key claims as laid out by Dow or with each of the demonstrations offered. But it is an outstanding virtue of the book that Dow defends each claim with such care that even objections can be sharpened productively. In what follows, I outline the main arguments and what appears to be at stake. The first page offers the basic argument and a sense of the imperatives that make Dow's book bracing. "The principal claim defended in this book is that, for Aristotle in the Rhetoric, arousing the passions of others can amount to giving them proper grounds for conviction, and hence a skill in doing so is properly part of an expertise in rhetoric. This claim rests on two principal foundations. First, it involves defending the attribution to Aristotle of a norma­ tive view of rhetoric, centered around its role in the state, in which rhetoric is a skill producing proper grounds for conviction. If the arousal of the passions is part of rhetoric, thus understood, Aristotle must hold, second, a particular view of the passions: he must think they are representational states, in which the subject takes things to be the way they are represented" (p. 1). First Foundation I: this normative view, according to Dow, contrasts sharply with the merely practical understanding of rhetoric held by his pre­ decessors in the handbook tradition, and it diverges from the Platonic expectation that the orator needs to know the truth about the subject matter. Instead, according to Dow, Aristotle's orator should skillfully grasp plausi­ ble starting points for the listener's deliberations in the form of reputable opinions" (endoxa) related to the subject at hand (pp- 34—5). So how exactly is the rhetor obligated, and why isn't this obligation arbitrary? Here Dow is careful not to invoke some higher ethical principle. The obligation of the 210 RHETORICA rhetor remains immanent to the skill itself, as it becomes manifest in the context of the state organized along participatory lines. That is to say, rhetoric is by virtue of the world in which it appears as such—originally in the lawcourts and in the political assembly (p. 9). Understood at the most basic level, a rhetor should exercise skill precisely where the subject at hand speaks to the commonplaces and reputable opinions anchored in the state thus consti­ tuted. This is an important point that Dow wishes to extend beyond Aristotle per se: rhetorical skill has wide value and it must be measured as such (p. 76). Hence Dow gives us an ethos-proof like this: "they believe the things Pericles has said, because they believe Pericles—he himself is what is pistos" (p. 98). And then more formally this example of a pathos-proof: "1.1 register evidence...

Reviews Cristina Pepe, The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity. International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. xviii + 618 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-24984-4 When I review a book that is of high quality, I like to read it twice before submitting the review. That does not excuse the inordinate length of time it has taken me to review Cristina Pepe's Genres of Rhetorical Speeches, for which I apologise to the author, but it immediately indicates my admiration for the book. I shall outline its contents, before making a few observations, all of which are offered in a constructive spirit. The book consists (suitably, given its theme) of three parts, followed by an extensive list of Testimonia, an Appendix, Bibliography, Index of Greek and Latin Terms, Index Locorum, and a General Index. Part One covers the fifth and fourth centuries, opening with an overview of the contexts of speechmaking in Greece and, of course, in particular Athens. Separate chapters address the practice of the Sophists (with an inevitable focus on Gorgias and the Helen, supplemented by observations on the ori­ gins of the praise speech); Thucydides (deliberative oratory, with an anal­ ysis of the Mytilenean Debate in Book 3); Plato (analyses of the Gorgias, Phaedrus and Sophist, and of Plato's conception of advice and praise); Isocrates (in particular how he defines his logoi); Demosthenes (his distinc­ tion between deliberative and judicial); and, in greater detail, the Rhetoric to Alexander (with a discussion of genres and species, and of the connected and complex ascription of the treatise to Anaximenes, without committing herself either way). Part Two is of roughly the same length as Part One, but focuses on one author only: Aristotle. Rhetorical development, including in the Rhetorica ad Alexandrian, all led to the Rhetoric, which for Pepe was Greek rhetoric's 'crowning theoretical achievement' (p. 123; I note that this repeats the earlier judgment of Laurent Pernot in the English translation of his Rhetoric in Antiquity, 'the crowning achievement of rhetorical theory in Classical Greece', p. 41), though the dates of composition of the Rhetoric to Alexander and the Rhetoric were not necessarily linear. Most will not quib­ ble with Pepe's concentration on the Rhetoric, even if we need to bear in mind Pernot's assessment that 'this treatise full of novel views was rela­ tively little read in antiquity' (Rhetoric in Antiquity p. 44). Pepe examines Rhetorica, Vol. XXXV, Issue 1, pp. 110-120. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541.© 2017 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: / /www.ucpress. edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.L110. Reviews 111 the system of genres in the Rhetoric in minute and instructive detail, pay­ ing a great deal of attention to epideictic, which Rhetoric scholars agree Aristotle introduced 'as a genre in its own right' (p. 144), but also indicat­ ing the 'aspects of originality with respect to tradition' of his treatment of the deliberative genre (p. 159). Very helpful chapters on the different topics that are used in the three genres (Chapter Twelve), and on the style and arrangement of the genres (Chapter Thirteen), precede a final chapter in this Part on the relatively little-studied treatise, the Divisiones Aristoteleae. Part Three takes us through the Hellenistic period and into Rome (the title Rhetorical Genres in the Hellenistic and Imperial Ages' perhaps does not do full justice to the material on the Roman Republican period). This might be thought the least satisfying of the three parts, not because of any lack of knowledge, hut simply because it covers, inevitably in less detail, such a wide range of material, in Greek and Tatin, from Hellenistic theory to the proyyninasmata and declamation (Chapter Twenty). There is thus no individual chapter on Cicero or Quintilian, rather an approach that looks at topics from a combined Greek and Roman angle, such as the vocabulary used for each of the three genres...

112 RHETORICA 55-70); and it is misleading to state (p. 244) that the Roman Senate was made up of 'the heads of the leading patrician families and ex-magistrates' (patrician exclusivity only applies to the regal and early Republican period, while serving magistrates were also members). I attribute the erroneous dat­ ing of PHib 26 'to the 3rd century AD' to a simple typographical error, as the following '(ca 285-250 BC)' shows. The English translator, along with the readers noted in the Acknowledgements, is to be congratulated on produc­ ing a flowing text, though occasional extraneous use of the definite article remains (e.g. the title of 11.5 does not need 'The' at the start, nor does 'stasis theory' on p. 347 require a preceding article) and there are some other infe­ licities ('Trials were indicted by a magistrate', p. 246; 'How do the Greeks call this?', p. 486; use of 'we' instead of 'I', as 'We prefer', p. 396). Finally, some might wonder about the absence of a discussion of the situation pre­ fifth century. This is a remarkable first book. I would expect a scholar whose PhD was supervised by Luigi Spina to be of the first rank, and Cristina Pepe cer­ tainly is that. The book is the fifth in the ISHR series of International Studies in the History of Rhetoric edited by Laurent Pernot and Craig Kallendorf. Since this review is by the current (as I write) President of ISHR for ISHR's journal Rhetorica, there might seem to be a risk of nepotism. I would counter that no reviewer could do full justice to a book of this size and cov­ erage, with its meticulous philological and rhetorical scholarship. In my opinion it is eminently worthy both of the series and of the Society, and it will, I am sure, remain a key textbook in the study of classical rhetorical genres for many years to come. Mike Edwards, University of Roehampton, London Jacques-Emmanuel Bernard, La sociabilité épistolaire chez Cicéron, Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013. 641 pp. ISBN 978-2-7453-2591-4 Bien qu'immense, la bibliographie cicéronienne a donné lieu à peu de monographies portant spécifiquement sur les lettres de Cicéron (p. 14). Certains se sont intéressés à la correspondance comme source d'informa­ tion sur l'histoire et la civilisation romaines (Deniaux, 1993; Ioannatou, 2006) ou sur la personnalité de Cicéron et son environnement sociocultu­ rel (Boissier, 1865; Carcopino, 1947), d'autres comme support pour l'étude de la langue, de la grammaire et du style cicéroniens (Bomecque, 1898; Monsuez, 1949) (p. 14-7), ou pour s'interroger sur le statut littéraire de la lettre, ses spécificités structurelles et ses aspects textuels et rhétoriques (Wistrand, 1979; Hutchinson, 1998) (p. 18). D'autres enfin ont pris en considération les règles sociales qui déterminent les relations entre Cicéron et d'autres hom­ mes politiques romains, relations sur lesquelles se fonde sa correspondance (Hall, 2009; White, 2010) (p. 19—20). C'est dans ce cadre bibliographique que Reviews 113 Jacques-Emmanuel Bernard situe son objectif: prendre la pratique épistolaire comme objet d'étude en soi en étudiant de manière plus systématique la correspondance cicéronienne comme un tout, pour montrer comment elle s organise à la fois comme pratique sociale et pratique discursive. D'où le titre même du livre: Lu sociabilité épistolaire chez Cicéron (p. 20). Pour ce faire, il se sert des concepts et de la terminologie de la rhétorique antique (p. 23), en s'intéressant particulièrement à la doctrine du décorum (« convenable »), afin d'analyser selon quels principes élémentaires Cicéron dans ses lettres adapte son langage aux données sociales qui déterminent sa relation avec chaque cor­ respondant (p. 25; voir p. 25-7). La rhétorique est donc au cœur de l'étude de J.-E. Bernard, qui s'oppose ainsi à une partie très importante des études cicéroniennes - pour lesquelles les lettres sont le lieu de l'intimité et de la spontanéité -, et met en lumière les contraintes sociales et les...

368 RHETORIC A La bibliografía (pp. 315-340) conclude questo lavoro che si qualifica per la capacité di mettere a fuoco le problematiche delle due declamazioni, nella loro dialettica tra retorica e diritto, e per la possibile apertura di nuove ipotesi di lettura che permettano di ampliare la portata delle modalité retoriche attestate in testi del genere. Sergio Audano, Centro di Studi sulla Fortuna dell'Antico "Emanuele Narducci" - Sestri Levante Tarez Samra Graban, Women's Irony: Rewriting Feminist Rhetorical Histories. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 258 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3418-6 Graban contributes to the field of feminist rhetorical studies by devel­ oping irony as a critical paradigm to read archives, revisit histories, and reconsider the role of the feminist historian. In her analysis chapters, Graban examines three famous archives of rhetorical agitators: Anne Askew (Renaissance rhetoric), Anne Hutchinson (colonial American rhetoric), and Helen Gougar (American suffragist rhetoric). In her introduction, Graban presents irony as a critical paradigm by differentiating it from previous work that associates it with intention, humor, lying, and evasion. Next, she develops a theory to explore women's ironic, political discourse, which she does by tracing the incompatibilities inside archival documents to facilitate discursive activism and critical disrup­ tion (p 2). She outlines the scholarly contours of irony as a critical paradigm described as a "reading practice . . . [which allows readers to] question our sense of normative categories" (p. 174). In this chapter, Graban also presents a methodology for employing irony as a critical paradigm. This methodol­ ogy involves three steps: 1) asking "what consciousness is being raised?," 2) considering "how irony works to reveal other logics," and 3) accounting for the extralinguistic locations of rhetors, audiences, and topoi (pp. 171-72). Graban highlights ironic instances and their potential using three specific methodological advances: interstitial witnessing (chapter one), panhistorical agency (chapter two), and a typology of discursive attitudes (chapter three and four). In the first chapter, Graban posits interstitial witnessing as a method for analyzing ironic discourse because it involves "looking between" or "finding gaps in historical processes" (p. 42). Graban strategically employs interstitial witnessing to locate historical "residue," textual and metadiscursive evidence, to argue that Anne Askew's irony functions as agential. Askew was one of four female martyrs burned by King Henry the VIII and her Examinations chronicle her trial and persecution for heresy. Here, Graban describes Askew's Examinations and her refusal to cooperate during her trial as Reviews 369 undermining public examinations and thereby, ironically, "elid[ing] expec­ ted outcomes" (p. 25). Askew's performance blurs the genre of "questioning a witness by evading questions and her structure of the Examinations blends genres, specifically dialogues, polemics, and pamphlets. Graban advances Askew s discourse as ironic, because it plays off of incompatible genre expec­ tations, and agential as it is defined by "the function, uses, purposes, and practices in which they [the discourses] occur and from which they result" (p. 50). In her second chapter, Graban re-reads interpretations of Anne Hutchinson's archive, specifically her responses during her trial that led to her expulsion from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Here, Graban develops another concept, drawing from Debra Hawhee's "pan-historiography."1 Graban maintains that this chronologically and kairotically expansive approach, the pan-historical approach, as she calls it, allows for critics to under­ stand rhetorical theory7 as synchronic and diachronic because it involves selecting archives from different times based on their content and therefore sets a precedent to move outside of periodization, or portraying certain figu­ res as "representative entities of particular stances, positions," or identities (p. 9). Also Hutchinson's performance elides gender expectations, as she is a woman expected to keep her experiences silent and private, yet she is per­ mitted to participate in intellectual debate, thereby performing as masculine in public. This performance blends spheres as public language articulates pri­ vate experience and through this blending, Hutchinson's trial performance expands women's civic and ecclesiastical duties. In her third and fourth chapters, Graban advances through two centuries to analyze the extensive archive of Helen Gougar, American Suffragist from the state of Indiana. Instead of examining how irony works...

This article explores the rhetoric of medieval rabbi and philosopher Saadya Gaon, arguing that Saadya typifies what LuMing Mao calls the “interconnectivity” of rhetorical cultures (Mao 46). Suggesting that Saadya makes use of argumentative techniques from Greek-inspired, rationalist Islamic theologians, I show how his rhetoric challenges dominant works of rhetorical historiography by participating in three interconnected cultures: Greek, Jewish, and Islamic. Taking into account recent scholarship on Jewish rhetoric, I argue that Saadya’s amalgamation of Jewish rhetorical genres alongside Greco-Islamic genres demonstrates how Jewish and Islamic rhetoric were closely connected in the Middle Ages. Specifically, the article analyzes the rhetorical significance of Saadya’s most famous treatise on Jewish philosophy, The Book of Doctrines and Beliefs, which I argue utilizes Greco-Islamic rhetorical strategies in a polemical defense of rabbinical authority. As a tenth-century writer who worked across multiple rhetorical traditions and genres, Saadya challenges the monocultural, Latin-language histories of medieval rhetoric, demonstrating the importance of investigating Arabic-language and Jewish rhetorics of the Middle Ages.

This paper focuses on the use of the “exemplum” of Alexander in seven Imperial speeches by Libanius (4th c. AD). These are studied and analysed under both a macro- and a micro-perspective: in the first case, the analysis highlights the individual historical examples, their rhetorical function and their literary form. These aspects are subsequently discussed with respect to the specific literary genre, the position of exempla within the speech structure, as well as their aims and impact. Of special interest are the different ways in which Libanius uses the sometimes positive and sometimes negative image of Alexander in order to reinforce his argumentation and to guide his rhetorical strategy in specific pathways.

Book Review| February 01 2017 Review: The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity Cristina Pepe, The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity. International Studies in the History of Rhetoric 5. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. xviii + 618 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-24984-4 Mike Edwards Mike Edwards Mike Edwards Department of Humanities University of Roehampton Erasmus House Roehampton Ln, London SW15 5PU United Kingdom Mike.Edwards@roehampton.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2017) 35 (1): 110–112. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.1.110 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Mike Edwards; Review: The Genres of Rhetorical Speeches in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Rhetorica 1 February 2017; 35 (1): 110–112. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2017.35.1.110 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2017 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

458 RHETORICA per “ UKOxpini^"; p. 212 "Luzzato" per "Luzzatto ; p. 217 (Van Elst - Wouters 2005) e p. 218 (Wouters 2007) "xAigk;" per “ xAia^". Giuseppe Arico, Milano Katherine Acheson. Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature, London: Ashgate, 2013. 174+x pp. ISBN: 9780754662839 (hardback) At first glance, the word "rhetoric" in the title of Katherine Acheson's Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature is a red herring; the book seldom mentions rhetoric explicitly, and does relatively little work with Renaissance or contemporary rhetorical theory. Instead, it focuses on the ways in which various modes of visual representation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century enabled or facilitated certain types of "brainwork," or "habituated thought, perception trained by exposure, active engagement, repetition, and extension," and how these types of brainwork condition the literature of the period (2). It is in this engagement with brainwork, however, that Visual Rhetoric takes up questions that are inherently rhetori­ cal in nature. Acheson's work can be understood as an investigation into the relationship between conventions of visual representation (visual rhetorics) and frameworks for the communication of human experience (cognitive rhetorics) in 16th and 17th century literature. Acheson's method and central thesis are thoroughly historicist. Each chapter begins with an extensive discussion of a particular mode of visual representation current in the English Renaissance - beginning with military and horticultural diagrams, and moving through dichotomous tables, fron­ tispieces and illustrations in manuals on drawing and writing, and ending by considering various modes of visually and textually representing ani­ mals. The historicizing work is supplemented and strengthened by the inclusion of reproduced examples of each mode being discussed. Acheson's dedication to providing thick historical context is consistent and productive, and this consistency allows the work to display a considerable sensitivity to variations within and differences across modes of visual representation. The first chapter is a particularly strong example of a productive and novel historicism. It considers shifting subject positions in Andrew Marvell's Upon Appleton House as they relate to the subject positions created and pos­ ited by military and horticultural diagrams common in the renaissance, modes of visual encoding which render intelligible the perspective of the speaker in Marvell's famous poem. The analysis in this chapter allows the peculiar mixture of perspectives demonstrated in Marvell's work and ana­ lyzed in the diagrams to serve as an excellent textual lens that not only eluci­ dates a famously complex poem but does so in a way that gears in nicely with existing scholarship. The second chapter discusses dichotomous tables, especially those published as genealogical guides to bibles and the wavs in which they Reviews 459 "powerfully instantiate central concepts of Protestant theology" (60), namely those having to do with the necessary and predetermined relation­ ship between God, Adam, and Christ. The chapter discusses three ways in which the cognitive rhetoric of the dichotomous table structures and is interrogated by Milton's Paradise Lost. And while the reading in this chapter is more expansive than in the first, it is also less complete - although an incomplete reading of Paradise Lost is a mark of honest intellectual engage­ ment rather than a deficiencv of method. The third chapter discusses the visual components of manuals on drawing alongside the representation of artists and writing in manuals on writing, arguing that the visual rhetoric of drawing manuals connects art with artifice, equipment, and scientific modes of knowing. In doing so, those diagrams on art exclude writing from participating in the realm of the scientific and artificial. Acheson goes on to argue that exactly this exclu­ sion is turned to writing's benefit in order to strengthen the traditional ekphrastic conclusion - that poetry is superior to painting - in Marvell's "Last Instructions," emphasizing the ways in which Marvell has adapted a traditional genre to deal with contemporary issues surrounding the rela­ tionship between painting and art. The final chapter discusses multiple modes of representing animals in late seventeenth century literature - from the natural historical and anatom­ ical to the fabular - and how animals are included, evaluated, and problematized by Aphra Behn's Oroonoko. Similarly to the previous chapter, the visual rhetoric of the diagrams becomes an opportunity to discuss...

Reviews 325 form, or form ox er content? Malm's work is not really situated in relation to extant criticism on Aristotle and his reception, despite the eighteen pages on which the eminent Classics scholar Stephen Halliwell is cited. In the end, I have no clear sense of either Halliwell's arguments or how Malm's account of mimesis may or may not relate to them. Other scholars are cited with still greater opacity: for example, in a not uninteresting excursion on the sublime and its relation to visualization (phantasia), we are told, "The evolution of aes­ thetics can be tied to the ev olution of a new kind of social subject, as Peter de Bolla has demonstrated" (p. 139). No explanation follows. To my' mind, the best chapter of The Soul of Poetry Redefined is its tenth and last, "Emotions and the system of genres" (pp. 171-85). Here Malm advances, however tentatively, a real argument with explanatory force. Addressing the question of whv Aristotle stresses content over style and dra­ matic poetry over lyric, Malm writes that in the Poetics, "The pleasure of poetry. . .comes mainiv from understanding, and from pity and fear which are means of understanding. In this way, Aristotle distances poetry consider­ able' from the Platonic critique of linguistic voluptuousness and decadence. . . . Defining the soul of poetrv as lexis, mimesis-representation would have been to subject it to Plato's critique of rhetoric and representation. The soul of poetrv being muthos, content and structure, poetry becomes less reproachable" (p. 175). For Aristotle, emotions are "instrumental," intended to influence an audience, and thus fundamentally rhetorical (p. 176). It is only in the Renais­ sance—Malm adduces Antonio Minturno's L'Arte Poetica (1564)—that lyric, as the representation of a character's emotions, is theorized as a third genre alongside epic and drama. "The definition of a lyric genre," Malm argues, "could onlv take place by redefining emotions from instruments into objects" (p. 178)—a process Malm associates with painting and its theorization as the objectiv e representation of emotion (pp. 178-83). These arguments, sketched at the end of Malm's study, might profitably be pursued in future research. Whatev er the shortcomings of its content might be, The Soul of Poetry Redefined is, as a physical object, resplendent. In cover design, front papers (of a deep scarlet), page layout, and type face, the book is a delight to behold; its paper quality is a delight for the fingers. The Museum Tusculanum Press of the University of Copenhagen is to be commended for reminding us in the age of the internet that academic books can still be things of beauty. Adam Potkay, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg William Fitzgerald, Spiritual Modalities: Prayer as Rhetoric and Perfor­ mance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012. x+158 pp. ISBN 9780271056227 Spiritual Modalities is an extremely useful book. It not only explores in depth the rhetorical power of prayer; it also provides abundant hermeneutic resources for the further study of this ancient yet still contemporary speech 326 RHETORIC A act genre. Creatively employing Kenneth Burke's dramatism as an interpre­ tive lens, William Fitzgerald has written a detailed post-secular analysis that reveals prayer as an embodied performance, a cognitive scene of address, a material act of invocation, and a social attitude of reverence. Historians of rhetoric might question Fitzgerald's claim that his book is "the first system­ atic study of prayer in relation to rhetoric" (3) and place it instead within the loose tradition of rhetorics of prayer (sometimes anachronistically called artes orandi) that stretches back to William of Auvergne's Rhetorica divina and Erasmus's Modus orandi Deum. Nonetheless, Spiritual Modalities is cer­ tainly a significant contribution to the ongoing religious turn in rhetorical studies and the human sciences more generally. One of the most impressive things about Spiritual Modalities is that Fitzgerald achieves many critical and theoretical goals simultaneously and thus his book can be used in different ways by different readers. For example, he analyzes prayer as a specific rhetorical genre and also employs it as a general meta-rhetorical framework. Rhetorical critics of prayer will value the rich illustrations...

328 RHETORICA that Fitzgerald is correct in predicting that future rhetorical study does indeed have a prayer. Steven Mailloux Loyola Marymount University Kathy Eden, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. x, 149 pp. ISBN: 9780226184623 William P. Weaver, Untutored Lines: The Making of the English Epyllion (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Renaissance Culture), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. x, 219 pp. ISBN: 9780748644650 Daniel Derrin, Rhetoric and the Familiar in Francis Bacon and John Donne, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, with The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2013. xii, 197 pp. ISBN: 9781611476033. Catherine Nicholson, Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. iv, 218 pp. ISBN: 9780812245585 Roland Greene, Five Words: Critical Semantics in the Age of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013. x, 210 pp. ISBN: 9780226000633. Of the five monographs on Renaissance literature reviewed here, the three by Kathy Eden, William P. Weaver, and Daniel Derrin offer learned applications of the history of rhetoric to significant authors and genres of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while the two by Catherine Nicholson and Roland Greene touch on rhetoric in examining early modem complexities of language as indicators of cultural tensions and changes. Eden's The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy makes a significant contri­ bution to the long-standing but frequently contested scholarly project of defin­ ing the Renaissance by the development of individualism. She reexamines the influence of classical authors on Petrarch, Erasmus, and Montaigne to trace their lineage in the rediscovery of what she calls throughout "a rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy," that is, a style of intimate writing and reading, activities that Eden, following Hans-Georg Gadamer, sees as inseparable. Focusing on familiar letters, Eden asserts that Petrarch's "letter reading is rooted in the intimacy associated with friendship" (p. 67). Guided by the Senecan model, he transforms Cicero's "rhetoric of intimacy" into "a hermeJ neutics of intimacy" by using the familiar letter to overcome not only physical distance (its chief function according to many ancient letter writers), but also temporal distance, in an effort "to understand his favorite ancient authors, whom he figures in epistolary terms as absent friends" (p. 69). Thus Petrarch, not Montaigne, was "individuality's founding father" (p. 120). The emphasis Reviews 329 Montaigne gives to writing, to friendship, and to frank self-revelation to his reader demonstrates that letter writing is foundational to his devel­ opment of the essay. His famous self-expression is grounded in friendly conversation, almost epistolary senno, between writer and reader. More­ over Montaigne foregrounds style in a legal and proprietary sense that Eden has traced from classical through humanist discussions of familiar­ ity, based in Roman and Greek concepts of the family and of property. Chapter 1 has surveyed the ancient "rhetoric of intimacy" from Aristotle to Demetrius and Quintilian. Erasmus's thoroughly rhetorical textbook on letter writing, De conscribendis epistolis, would seeni to fit awkwardly between Petrarch and Montaigne in Eden's genealogy of a rhetoric and hermeneutics of intimacy, as she acknow­ ledges, but she finds intimate writing in his correspondence, discussions of epistolary exercises in his pedagogical works De ratione studii and De copia, and praise of intimacv in the section on handwriting in De recta pronuntiatione. In its companion dialogue on stvle, Ciceronianus, Bulephorus emphasizes intimate reading as well as writing, both exemplified by the letter. As editor, Erasmus approaches Jerome's works as an intimate reader and describes style as ethos in his preface. Jerome's own editing of Scripture depends on a careful studv of stvle for evidence of forgerv and other corruption. As New Testament editor, Erasmus urges readers to experience Christ by approaching the Gospels as thev would a letter from a friend, while in his Paraphrase on Romans he attempts to capture St. Paul's ethos and use of multiple masks to reach diverse audiences. Eden's rich analysis of Erasmus's interest in intimate writing and reading in a wide range of works pioneers an exciting new scholarly direction in Erasmus studies that goes beyond the epistolary rhetoric he teaches to boys as an exercise...

Reviews Mats Malm, The Soul of Poetry Redefined: Vacillations of Mimesis from Aristotle to Romanticism, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2012. 238 pp. ISBN 9788763537421 The Soul ofPoetry Redefined is a book that may be of interest to students of poetry and rhetoric, especially those invested in Aristotle's Poetics. Its central claim is that Aristotle is ambiguous in his conceptualization of mimesis, the "soul [psuche] of tragedy" (Poetics, quoted p. 12), if not of poetry in general. Malm presents the ambiguity in this way: When someone—be it Aristotle or any interpreter of his—says that poetry is mimesis or imitation of characters, actions, passions, etc., what is meant by "imitation"? Is it that actions and passions are composed, in the sense of construing [i.e., constructing?] a story, similar to how the historian arranges his account but with the freedom of invention, or that they are represented through words, just like the painter represents things and persons through colours? (Pp. 12-13) In Malm's account, this tension between content and form—muthos and lexis— gives rise to various adaptations of the Poetics over time, from Averroès in the twelfth century to Charles Batteux and Johann Adolph Schlegel in the eighteenth. From Averroès onward, Malm finds mimesis-as-representation stres­ sed over mimesis-as-plot-composition. The soul of poetry thus becomes visual imagery (p. 19) and metaphor (p. 45). Exceptional, in Malm's account, are Corneille and Racine: "The French classicists focus not on mimesisrepresentation but on mimesis-composition, so the 'verisimilar' here comes close to that of Aristotle" (p. 103). Yet this strikes me as unsurprising, given that Corneille and Racine were writing and theorizing on tragedy, just as Aristotle was, while Averroès and those who he influenced through Latin translation in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance addressed literature, and the arts, more generally. There are several basic problems with Malm's study of mimesis and its reception. First, with respect to Aristotle's Poetics, it is not clear to me that "mimesis-representation" and "mimesis-composition" are conceptually separable: I would think, rather, that composition involves representation, and vice versa. Second, I am not sure what's at stake in Malm's study. Could anyone disagree that some poetic theorists have stressed content over Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIV, Issue 3, pp. 324-335. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. © 2016 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rh.20l6.34.3.324. Reviews 325 form, or form ox er content? Malm's work is not really situated in relation to extant criticism on Aristotle and his reception, despite the eighteen pages on which the eminent Classics scholar Stephen Halliwell is cited. In the end, I have no clear sense of either Halliwell's arguments or how Malm's account of mimesis may or may not relate to them. Other scholars are cited with still greater opacity: for example, in a not uninteresting excursion on the sublime and its relation to visualization (phantasia), we are told, "The evolution of aes­ thetics can be tied to the ev olution of a new kind of social subject, as Peter de Bolla has demonstrated" (p. 139). No explanation follows. To my' mind, the best chapter of The Soul of Poetry Redefined is its tenth and last, "Emotions and the system of genres" (pp. 171-85). Here Malm advances, however tentatively, a real argument with explanatory force. Addressing the question of whv Aristotle stresses content over style and dra­ matic poetry over lyric, Malm writes that in the Poetics, "The pleasure of poetry. . .comes mainiv from understanding, and from pity and fear which are means of understanding. In this way, Aristotle distances poetry consider­ able' from the Platonic critique of linguistic voluptuousness and decadence. . . . Defining the soul of poetrv as lexis, mimesis-representation would have been to subject it to Plato's critique of rhetoric and representation. The soul of poetrv being muthos, content and structure, poetry...

Reviews Kathleen S. Lamp. A City of Marble. The Rhetoric of Augustan Rome. South Carolina, 2013. 208 pp. ISBN 9781611172775 What is the relationship between rhetoric, both spoken and visual, and ci\'ic participation in Augustan Rome? A City of Marble. The Rhetoric of Augustan Rome, attempts to address this question, beginning in the intro­ duction by examining Augustus' Famous assertion that he "entered Rome a city of brick and left it a citv of marble". The study goes on to examine how visual displays function themselves as a form of persuasion that, in Augustus' case, helped him to win and maintain power. Her argument is that Augustan culture was heavilv influenced bv rhetorical theory, which in turn "guided ci\ ic participation and rhetorical practice" (p. 5), and fur­ ther, that the synthesis of rhetoric to image and politics in so sweeping a manner was a central aspect of Augustus' accomplishment. The first chapter surveys Rome's "rhetorical situation" upon Augustus' assumption of sole command. One of the conundrums Augustus faced was how to maintain the goodwill of those he governed. Lamp asserts (p. 13) that Augustus' attempts to gain acceptance were rhetorical from the standpoint that "thev represented a tvpe of persuasive communication between the peo­ ple and the government about the workings of the state". A significant part of his rhetorical strategy7 was his reliance on various mythological traditions such as those of Aeneas, Romulus, and of the monarchy and its demise. Chapter two ("Seeing Rhetorical Theory") argues that the ancient theory of rhetoric broadened under the empire to include other literary genres beyond oratorv, including non-traditional forms of media not usually associated with rhetoric, including coins, monuments, and city planning. The chapter inclu­ des a good discussion of the relationship between the visual and memory in rhetorical theorists, focusing on Quintilian and Cicero who clearly associ­ ated the two, and who, in addition, addressed the role of monuments and urban spaces in creating collective public memory. The next chapter ("The Augustan Political Myth") builds on the first two, and starts with a close examination of the Ara Pads as a piece of Augustan rhetoric, examining how it constructed myth and memory in Augustan Rome. She argues that the altar used conventions of rhetoric that were roughly analogous to those expounded in the rhetorical theories of Cicero and Quintilian with a view to addressing its audience. Chapter four Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIII, Issue 4, pp. 431-442. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. C 2016 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/joumals.php7p—reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rh.2015.33.4.431. 432 RHETORICA ("Let Us Now Praise Great Men") similarly examines the Forum of Augustus and its rhetorical function; the chapter begins with a discussion of Isocrates theory of rhetoric that argued against the use of visual media or static representative forms of rhetoric, such as statuary. Of course, this is precisely what Augustus' forum was - a monument that employed a permanent, visual record intended to educate the audience in a particular set of values with a view to imitation, something that had a long-standing tradition in Rome, particularly with the use of funerary images. The chapter concludes with an interesting discussion of how the rhetoric of the forum itself parallels its function as an administrative and judicial center where oratory would be practiced. Lamp then turns in chapter five ("Coins, Material Rhetoric, and Circu­ lation") to the dissemination of the Augustan political myth. She traces, via the numismatic record, the creation of that myth, but further argues that it evolved over time, noting that the coins issued at the end of his reign indi­ cate a popular acceptance of that myth. She focuses on three aspects of Augustus' program prior to 13 BC: pietas, succession, and the trifecta of peace, victory, and prosperity. In the numismatic record after 9 BC we find emblems designed to emphasize Augustus' pietas and his role as poutifex maximus, while she notes that prior to...

212 RHETORICA imento alia lacuna presente nel testo origínale che viene pero colmata in traduzione senza indicazioni sull'integrazione operata. Infine, YEpitaffio: un testo su cui poco é stato detto dagli antichi e dai moderni e che l'A. tenta di indagare approntando un'originale partitura del testo, servendosi del con­ fronto con gli altri testi gorgiani e con gli altri pochi esempi di logoi epitaphioi dell'antichitá. Interessante é l'interpretazione in chiave retorica del concetto di kairos che viene destituito di qualsiasi significato filosófico. II discorso fú­ nebre acquista poi un forte significato etico che rivela, secondo l'A., un forte interesse di Gorgia per la morale, interesse non certo codificatosi in una presentazione teórica ben definita, ma sicuramente tradotto in numerosi spunti sparsi anche negli altri due discorsi analizzati. Quella di Gorgia sarebbe una morale della cittá, l'etica del suo tempo, quella che riconosce giusto 'ció che é comunemente giusto' e sbagliato 'ció che é comunemente sbagliato' (p. 249). II volume si chiude con le riflessioni conclusive che, pur rischiando di leggere in maniera forse troppo sistemática il movimento sofistico, all'interno del quale Gorgia, retore e filosofo, figurerebbe anche come un esperto di 'diritto' (p. 252) e la filosofía espressa nei suoi discorsi si presenterebbe come una gnoseologia capace di guidare il sofista anche in senso etico (ibidem), disegnano con coerenza l'orientamento teorético con cui Gorgia merita di essere interrogato. Dopo la bibliografía e prima dell'indice dei nomi, correda il volume una serie di riproduzioni fotografiche dei frontespizi di alcune edizioni dell'opera gorgiana possedute dall'Autrice. Piera De Piano Universitá degli studi di Salerno Fabrice, Robert, Les œuvres perdues d'Ælius Aristide: fragments et témoignages. Édition, traduction et commentaire, Paris, De Boccard (coll. De l'Archéologie à l'Histoire), 2012, 743 pp. ISBN 978-2-70180332 -6 Cet ouvrage est issu d'une thèse soutenue à l'Université Marc BlochStrasbourg II en 2008 sous la direction de Laurent Pernot, et constitue une importante annexe au projet dirigé par ce dernier et consistant à éditer dans la collection Budé l'ensemble des quelque 501 discours conservés d'Ælius Aris- Æe dénombrement interfère avec les questions d'authenticité. E Robert, sur la quatrième de couverture, évoque 53 discours conservés dans les manuscrits médiévaux. P. 10, il fait état de 50 discours complets auxquels s'ajoutent deux discours mutilés et un apocryphe (or. 35). D'après la n. 9, il s'avère qu'en réalité deux autres discours (or. 25 et 30) ont vu leur authenticité discutée et que le n° 25 (Discours rbodien ) est toujours suspect aux yeux de certains. Deux déclamations ont été retirées du corpus chez tous les éditeurs postérieurs a Dindorf, les « déclamations leptiniennes, dont la numérotation et le mode de transmission ne sont pas indiqués. L'attribution à Reviews 213 tide (iie s. ap. J.-C.), le plus fameux représentant de la Seconde Sophistique. Fabrice Robert y réunit toute la documentation disponible sur les ceuvres disparues du sophiste et connues seulement de manière indirecte, que ce soit par des mentions d Ælius Aristide lui-même dans d'autres oeuvres ou par des citations ou des mentions faites dans des textes postérieurs. Les éditions de ce genre posent, on le sait, de nombreux problèmes de méthode. Il s agit d isoler, d identifier les vestiges, de distinguer fragments et témoignages - ce qui n'est pas toujours commode -, d'assigner ces morceaux plus ou moins consistants à telle ou telle œuvre, à tel ou tel genre, de procéder à leur classement, afin de resituer autant que possible le fragment dans son contexte, et de donner une place réfléchie aux œuvres dans le recueil, sans même parler de l'exigeant travail de commentaire, dont dépend la compréhension et l'appréciation des vestiges eux-mêmes et des raisons aussi bien de leur survie et de leur usage que de la perte de leur contexte. Fabrice Robert a pris la pleine mesure de la complexité de sa tâche. Les 190 fragments...

200 RHETORICA in un determinato ámbito della precettistica retorica, collegando le finalitá e i procedimenti espressivi che le sono propri e non altri (pp- 212—213 n. 814). Alessandro Garcea Paris Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Pall ofa Women's Tradition, 1600-1900. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. xi-xv +205 pp., ISBN: 978-0-8093-8630-7 In her introduction, Jane Donawerth identifies the research gap that her new book seeks to address. Over the past thirty years, historians have inves­ tigated women's involvement in rhetorical theory in terms of its absence— "why there wasn't any" (p. 2). Furthermore, much of the conversation has tended to underscore rhetorical practices and not rhetorical theories. Don­ awerth asserts that scholars need to ask new questions: "How did women theorize communication, and if they did not do it in rhetoric and composition textbooks, where did they do it" (p. 2). Women theorized rhetoric based on their gendered experiences and on the genres that they were reading. Thus, women's rhetorical theory has centered on conversation—not oratory—as the basis for all discourse. In significant ways, Donawerth's book extends and complements her 2002 anthology, Rhetorical Theory by Women before 1900, which made avail­ able to scholars, teachers, and students extensive primary texts of women's rhetorical theory. Her new book builds on this collection by including an analysis of conversation as an important tradition in women's rhetorical the­ ory. In addition, she incorporates new women, particularly those defending women's right to preach, and she provides more analysis of the historical context and its influence in shaping this aspect of women's rhetoric. To construct her argument, Donawerth examines women's rhetorical theory from a variety of sources, including humanist works defending women's education, conduct books, defenses of women's preaching, and elocution manuals. In so doing, she introduces readers to the works of various women theorists during this three-hundred-year span. However, she contends that in the 1850s, when women started writing composition and rhetoric textbooks for male as well as female students, these "theo­ ries of conversation-based discourse gradually disappeared, or rather, were absorbed into composition pedagogy" (p. 2). To theorize rhetoric in this way, in her introduction Donawerth clarifies that she defines rhetorical theory as "writing about the nature and means of communication" (p. 7). She also situates her argument, outlines her historical method, and explains how she defines other terms relevant to her study. With its detailed framing of Donawerth's argument, the introduction should be helpful to those just beginning to navigate the field and to engage in these Reviews 201 discussion. Donawerth s book and several mentioned in her introduction are from the Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms series, which demonstrates the significant scholarly contribution this series has made. Given the constraints of this review, I will focus on the first and fourth chapters since they feature a sampling of the diverse texts examined, and the fourth chapter aligns with some of my research interests. Chapter 1 provides a start for the book's focus by analyzing women's theorizing of conversation in humanist dialogues and defenses of women's education during the seven­ teenth century. It does so by examining the writing of Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Bathsua Makin, and Mary Astell. During this period, humanist and classical rhetorical education were available only for men; however, there were some "exceptional women" who managed to receive such training (p. 19). With this education, these women fashioned theories of communication, and they published in humanist genres, including "dia­ logues, epistles, print orations, and encyclopedias" (p. 19). Donawerth argues that these four women theorists "radically revised classical rhetoric by cen­ tering their theories on conversation rather than public speech" (p. 39). In so doing, they challenged some of the limits conventionally associated with gendered discourse of this period. in chapter four, Donawerth contends that sentimental culture, associ­ ated with "the public display of emotion" and with women, found its perfect outlet in elocution (p. 105). The chapter investigates the ways nineteenthcenturv elocution manuals incorporated into this tradition of conversation "a theoretical consideration of women's bodies...

In Golden Age Spain, religious art functioned within the boundaries of a time-honoured corpus of ecclesiastical and rhetorical theory on the image, which attempted to prevent immoderate iconic veneration aided by metaphors taken from the well-known world of portraiture, themost imitative of pictorial genres. Counter-Reformation theologians and preachers also sought to reduce the artwork's impact on irrational sensibility by urging artists to avoid the undesirable effects of awkward or lascivious images. This article will explore howthe laws of decorumequipped Post-Tridentine Spanish imagery with aesthetic values meant to reconcile delectare with docere and movere, and how this finally resulted in a dispute between high culture and popular taste, between an art favored by royal collectors (painting) and another much more generalized as a result of ecclesiastical patronage (sculpture).

In Golden Age Spain, religious art functioned within the boundaries of a time-honoured corpus of ecclesiastical and rhetorical theory on the image, which attempted to prevent immoderate iconic veneration aided by metaphors taken from the well-known world of portraiture, the most imitative of pictorial genres. Counter-Reformation theologians and preachers also sought to reduce the artwork’s impact on irrational sensibility by urging artists to avoid the undesirable effects of awkward or lascivious images. This article will explore how the laws of decorum equipped Post-Tridentine Spanish imagery with aesthetic values meant to reconcile delectare with docere and movere, and how this finally resulted in a dispute between high culture and popular taste, between an art favored by royal collectors (painting) and another much more generalized as a result of ecclesiastical patronage (sculpture).

456 RHETORICA passant par Horace. Quant à Martial, s'il recourt, comme d'autres, à l'ironie, à l'ambivalence ou à une forme d'hyperbole qui dépasse le vraisemblable, c'est aussi par l'agencement même de ses poèmes que, dans le cadre d'une une lecture suivie, il permet de repérer la critique. Avec la partie sur l'Antiquité tardive, on est en plein dans la rhétorique. En effet les poèmes étudiés sont majoritairement des panégyriques ou des invectives, et les poètes en suivent scrupuleusement les codes. Tel est le cas de Claudien (Br. Bureau) et de Sidoine Apollinaire (R. Alexandre). Mais les choses, là encore, peuvent être retournées. L'irrévérence elle-même, ou plutôt l'invective, peut se retourner en éloge, comme dans le Contre Eutrope qui est en creux un éloge de Stilicon. Dans le panégyrique pour le sixième consulat d'Honorius l'irrévérence consiste simplement à exprimer des idées politiques et on obtient une sorte de miroir des princes, un portrait idéal de lui-même offert à Honorius pour qu'il s'y conforme. R. Alexandre présente une étude très intéressante du point de vue rhétorique sur trois panégyriques d'empereurs, montrant comment les circonstances extrêmes induisent une forme de réserve qui peut paraître irrévérencieuse. Sidoine gauchit les éléments traditionnels du panégyrique, retourne les exempta, mais surtout recourt à la prosopopée pour faire dire par d'autres ce qui est difficile à entendre. Le développement sur le discours figuré à propos du panégyrique de Majorien est, là encore, très bien venu. Des genres « mineurs » sont aussi pratiqués, où l'irrévérence se montre plus naturelle. Il s'agit d'une épigramme et une deprecatio de Claudien, dirigées contre un certain Hadrien (Fl. Garambois-Vasquez) et d'une épigramme d'Ausone que M. Squillante analyse comme «désémantisée» , le poète transformant l'irrévérence en pur jeu poétique. Une bibliographie, un index locorum et un index hominum complètent utilement cet excellent volume, qui touche à un enjeu central dans la rhéto­ rique: comment dire sans dire? Sylvie Franchet d'Espèrey Université de Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) Françoise Laurent, Pour Dieu et pour le roi. Rhétorique et idéologie dans l'Histoire des ducs de Normandie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure (Essais sur le Moyen Âge 47), Paris: Honoré Champion éditeur, 2010. 388 pp ISBN 978-2-74532-041-4 En 1999, Jean-Marie Moeglin rappelait dans un article de synthèse 1 histoire des rapports entre 1 «historiographie moderne et contemporaine en Reviews 457 France et en Allemagne» et «les chroniqueurs du Moyen Âge1 ». Dans cette histoire longue, il repérait l'émergence, très tardive en France, de 1 idée selon laquelle << l'analyse du 'travail de l'historien' a une valeur propre» (p. 327): de cette «vision neuve du texte historiographique» (p. 332), témoigna en particulier la parution (en 1980) du livre de Bernard Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dons l'Occident médiéval. D'autres travaux, et pas seulement en France, lui succédèrent, tous consacrés à la poétique spécifique mise en œuvre par l'historien médiéval, à sa pratique, à son statut et à celui de son texte. Ces tra­ vaux, attentifs à la logique propre de ces textes et de leurs conditions de production, ont pris pour objets tant la production latine que les productions en langue vernaculaire, qui la transposent et rivalisent avec elle ou entre elles. L'ouvrage de Françoise Laurent s'inscrit dans ces perspectives2 en s'intéressant hardiment, comme l'annoncent le titre et l'introduction, aux «choix idéologiques et rhétoriques» (p. 12) de l'«écrivain» Benoît de Sainte-Maure, qui à l'initiative d'Henri II Plantagenêt succède à Wace dans les années 1170 et écrit sa propre version de l'histoire des ducs de Normandie. Afin de replacer le texte dans son «contexte historico-littéraire» (p. 12), l'Auteur privilégie donc l'analyse conjointe de la « rhétorique » et de «l'idéologie», dimensions de l'œuvre dont la définition reste certes problématique. La dimension « rhétorique » semble bien référer ici à un ensemble de règles, dessinant une norme de l'art d'écrire nécessaire à une réception contrôlée de l'œuvre selon le triple enjeu cicéronien (placere, docere, movere), que Françoise Laurent rappelle à chacune des articulations de son livre. Cette construction rhétorique maîtrisée est « offerte » à Henri II, dont Benoît n écrit pas la « vie » mais vers qui, pourtant, «convergent tous les événements historiques et toutes les aspirations de l'écrivain» (p. 134): les règles d'écriture que Benoît mobilise brillamment dans la nouvelle langue gouvernent une démonstration concertée de la «perfectibilité» du lignage (p. 167), tendu vers la «vie» du duc-roi Henri, «gemme pretiose» couron­ nant les autres «ovres» (vv. 10098-10104). Dans la première partie de l'ouvrage, intitulée «Les enjeux de l'Histoire des ducs de Norman­ die» (pp. 19-136), et dans le dernier sous-paragraphe de l'ouvrage (à la fin de la troisième partie), intitulé «Les redites de l'histoire» (pp. 337-341), ces règles que l'Auteur repère de manière très détaillée ] Saint-Denis et la royauté. Etudes offertes à Bernard Guenée, éd. F. Autrand, C. Gauvard, J.-M. Moeglin (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999), pp. 301-338. 2Citons, sur le même thème, le livre de Laurence Mathey-Maille. Écriture du passé. Histoires des ducs de Normandie (Paris: Honoré Champion éditeur, 2007) 458 RHETORICA dans les lieux (rubriques de manuscrits; prologues et épilogues;«frontières du récit», entre excursus initial et «fin suspendue») où se manifeste l'« intention auctoriale» (p. 22) de Benoît sont celles d'historiographes chrétiens, d'Eusèbe de Césarée à Aimoin de Fleury. Dans la deuxième et dans la troisième parties, intitulées respective­ ment «Portraits et panégyriques des ducs normands » (pp. 137-230) et«Les voix de l'histoire» (pp. 233-342), les règles mises en œuvre avec brio par Benoît dans l'éloge et le discours représenté sont celles de la rhétorique classique antique, telles du moins que les comprennent et les utilisent les historiens grecs ou latins. Dans le cas des composantes du discours (rapporté ou direct), par exemple, l'Auteur rappelle que les historiens latins privilégiaient largement la narration (brève) et l'argumentation: Benoît, qui exploite abondamment les techniques du discours, suit leur exemple (pp. 291-295). Mais dans l'écriture de Benoît, transparaît aussi une «rhétorique scolaire»: l'acte com­ plexe de compilation (que l'on reprocha longtemps aux historiens médiévaux) ou encore les procédés d'amplifientio et de variatio en sont, comme le montrent les Arts poétiques des xiie et xiiie siècles, des traits stylistiques fondamentaux. Ce sont toutes ces règles, travaillées dans le creuset d'une nouvelle langue, que Françoise Laurent repère par le moyen de nombreuses études d'extraits. Ce travail, dont nous ne pouvons ici rendre compte de toute la richesse, propose au fond deux processus parallèles de contex­ tualisation de l'œuvre de Benoît, propre à restaurer sa spécificité en prouvant son insertion dans deux traditions précises. D'une part, il montre la captation (p. 108) par la langue vernaculaire des caractères les plus prestigieux de la « littérarité » latine, selon l'expression de Mi­ chel Banniard: ce «beau langage», que véhicule la rhétorique grécolatine (p. 345) et que Benoît explore et exhibe, donne à son entre­ prise historiographique une garantie d'autorité éthique et esthétique. Le passage (ou translatio, p. 345) à la langue vernaculaire rendait nécessaire cette captation dans une société où c'est au latin, celui des ecclésiastiques maîtres de l'Église et de ses rituels, que revient le pouvoir de convaincre et de persuader, de «faire-croire» et de sauver. D'autre part, le travail de Françoise Laurent expose la façon dont ce «beau langage» est soumis aux exigences d'une rhétorique chrétienne et de ses composantes: ce «haut langage» est soucieux toujours de marquer un écart avec un «beau langage» antique et païen. Le repérage des traits caractéristiques de Vhistoria ecelesiastica dans le texte de Benoît (pp. 26-43 et pp. 58-66), genre codifié par Eusèbe de Césarée à la suite et sur le modèle des Écritures, est sur ce plan précis un apport essentiel de l'étude: Benoît s'approprie concrètement un modèle bien repérable d'écriture de l'histoire des Reviews 459 hommes, consacré selon Karl Ferdinand Werner ou Martin Heinzelmann à la démonstration de l'économie du Salut dans les événements de l'histoire des hommes. Il intègre ainsi le «récit des origines» au début de son texte en langue vernaculaire (p. 63), comme Orose ou Raoul Glaber avant lui. En ce sens, Yestoire de Benoît est l'occasion d'une nouvelle captation de marques garanties d'autorité: celles de l'histoire écrite de manière autorisée et autoritaire par les hommes de Dieu, mais plus précisément en cette période de «réforme» , par les hommes de l'Église institutionnelle. Françoise Laurent propose d'ailleurs, à la suite d'Emmanuèle Baumgartner, d'adopter pour le texte de Benoît le titre d'Histoire des dues de Normandie, délaissant ainsi le terme contestable de «chronique» . Ce travail ample et riche ne manque pas d'ouvrir des problém­ atiques nouvelles. Si l'on prend pour repère les deux traditions repérées par Françoise Laurent dans ['Histoire, il est peut-être per­ mis de penser que ['Histoire de Benoît est aussi bien traversée de forces centrifuges créatrices d'un certain «écart». Ainsi, par rap­ port à la rhétorique gréco-latine que manipule si brillamment Benoît, Françoise Laurent montre la manière dont, comme indissolublement, ce langage «emprunté» véhicule dans les «lieux» de l'éloge et dans les arguments des discours une «peinture de l'homme» qui «offre un principe fondamental d'explication de l'histoire» (p. 319) et un«déterminisme humain» (p. 330). Dès lors, dans les portraits et les discours, Benoît semble contester la problématique même de Yhistoria ecclesiastica et sa causalité, fondée au contraire sur la «recherche constante d'une interprétation supra terrestre» (p. 341). De même, le livre de Françoise Laurent met en lumière le rapport essentiel et complexe entre l'historiographe et son roi, dont l'opposition fron­ tale à l'Église réformatrice est bien connue. Or, là encore, c'est une problématique essentielle de Yhistoria ecclesiastica qui est en ques­ tion: celle de la soumission du personnage royal et de ses actes à la volonté de Dieu et à l'interprétation, traditionnellement auxiliarisante , de son historiographe ecclésiastique, qui fait de la fonction guerrière des princes la «part cadette» de l'histoire3 . Au fond, dans YHistoire des ducs de Normandie, Benoît accaparerait les marques de Yhistoria ecclesiastica mais il remplacerait le personnel ecclésiastique, seul véritable acteur des historiae latines, par son roi et sa lignée nor­ mande, n'hésitant pas à qualifier Richard Ier de «sainz» et dotant certains ducs-rois de compétences théologiques. Sans doute sous le 3G. Duby, Les trois ordres ou l'imaginaire du féodalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), p. 343, 460 RHETORICA regard approbateur du Plantagenêt: Wace, rejeté, ne qualifie jamais ainsi Richard Ier... C'est donc, dans YHistoire des ducs de Normandie, s le roi qui fait l'histoire avec Dieu et qui dirige l'Eglise, qu'il recons­ truit et à laquelle il explique le fonctionnement social, comme l'a bien montré Georges Duby. Dans un contexte marqué par un conflit âpre avec le sacerdotium, Benoît serait en lutte contre une conception grégorienne, auxiliarisée, de la royauté, mais il utiliserait pour cela les mêmes armes qu'elle: on peut penser peut-être à la lecture du travail de Françoise Laurent que la rhétorique chrétienne et classique de l'histoire est la plus prestigieuse et la plus efficace. Et que le fait d'y replacer Dieu à côté du roi, sans médiation cléricale, est un acte intéressant de subversion de l'histoire des genres. S'il s'agit bien du même Benoît, il n'en serait pas à son premier coup d'essai: Fran­ cine Mora n'a-t-elle pas découvert le dossier d'une sévère «réaction cléricale» aux audaces du Roman de Troie4? Dès lors, les choix bien différents de Wace posent question: ne serait-il pas le seul des deux historiens à être resté fidèle à toutes les règles du jeu, rhétoriques et idéologiques, de Yhistoria ecclesiastica ? Le travail de Françoise Laurent invite ainsi à redécouvrir un texte important et à lui poser des questions renouvelées. Ce n'est pas là le moindre des mérites d'un ouvrage de recherche... Eléonore Andrieu, Université Bordeaux III, Michel-de-Montaigne 4«UYlias de Joseph d'Exeter: une réaction cléricale au Roman de Troie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure, » Progrès, réaction, décadence dans l'Occident médiéval, éd. E. Baumçartner, L. Harf-Lancner, (Genève: Droz, 2003), pp. 199-213. ...

Reviews 447 A New History ofthe Sermon: The Nineteenth Century. Edited by Robert H. Ellison. Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2010. xiv + 571. ISBN 978-9-00418572 -2 Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic seemed to have had an insa­ tiable appetite for words. This much mav he said of most eras, of course, but certain forces conspired during our period to raise and distribute this hunger in distinctive w avs. Advances in literacy and printing technology, ex­ panding boundaries of public life, and the professionalization of authorship contributed decisively to this phenomenon. The result was an efflorescence of public literature broadly conceived, oral and written, polite and polemical. Among the many genres in which such growth is evident was the sermon. Here was a rhetorical form notable for its appeal to audiences of quite nearly all classes, its sheer ubiquity, its expression in written and oral venues, (fre­ quently in both), and its willing embrace of occasional as well as spiritual matters. Of the latter tendency, it is well to be reminded how sharply the ser­ mon was defined not only by theological trends, but also by shifting cultural developments, foreign and domestic affairs, and newly emerging exigencies across the social landscape. Little surprise, then, that students of rhetorical history, theory, and criticism have found in the nineteenth-century sermon an uncommonly rich subject for exploration; greater surprise that so little has been done to bring together leading specialists in the field and to offer up in one volume their respective research, insights, and arguments. Robert H. Ellison's A New History of the Sermon: The Nineteenth Century rectifies this shortcoming, and then some. An edited work including sixteen original essays, it aims to "examine the theories, theological issues, and cultural developments that defined the 19th-centurv Anglo-American pulpit (4)." The reader will find herein neither grand theory of the sermon, for which we may be thankful, nor any superintending methodology driving the analyses (ditto). We are provided, rather, with a genuinely multi-disciplinary set of investigations from scholars across the humanities, hailing from England, The United States, Canada, and Scotland. This ecumenicism is more than geographical: the authors take up an impressive array of issues associated with the sermon (about which, more below), and are keenly alive to the many and diverse ways in which the sermon both shaped and was shaped by its cultural milieu. Although I cannot do justice here to the range of contexts addressed by the authors, something of the spectrum may be suggested by a brief survey. Theologically, we learn of the sermon's place in High Church efforts to rein in its centrifugal forces; Methodist attempts to wrest it free from such conservative strongholds; Catholic and, inevitably, anti-Catholic variations; Jewish work in salvaging a place of its own; and Mormon sermonic practices in the Great Basin. Social issues of the day given expression by the form are treated with respect to, among other pressures, slavery, evolution, dueling, civil rights, and women's leadership in the WCTU. It is worth observing, too, how several of the authors locate sermonic forms and influences in 448 RHETORICA various other genres, including didactic literature, the novel, and protest rhetoric. Again, we are reminded of the protean character of the form, of its adaptability to vernacular interests, abstract theorizing; and even popular entertainment. So much is not to suggest a free-for-all. On the contrary, the collection grounds itself upon a set of shared aspirations and commitments that give to the project a degree of coherence not often expected of edited volumes. Each of the authors holds in common the following: 1) the value of detailed and well-documented historical recovery; 2) the importance of observing the interplay of form and content in the creation of meaning; and 3) the view that sermons cannot plausibly be extracted from their context, but are explicable only with reference to the material and symbolic forces within which they operate. The volume is accordingly designed to give both these differences and commonalities their optimal reach: most essays run from 3050 pages; documentation and footnoting is extensive and purposeful; and a splendid compilation at volume's end belies my suspicion...

454 RHETORICA Le poète irrévérencieux. Modèles hellénistiques et réalités romaines, textes réunis par Bénédicte Delignon & Yves Roman, CEROR 32, CERGR, Lyon, 2009, 432 p. Le lien de ce livre avec la rhétorique est clair, puisqu'il traite des rapports entre la parole et le pouvoir. Mais sa spécificité est d'envisager la poésie, alors que dans le cadre d'une telle problématique, on considère généralement la prose, notamment l'historiographie. Les éditeurs ont voulu justement associer, dans cet ouvrage collectif, des «historiens» aux «littéraires» . Les historiens étaient ainsi appelés à prendre en compte les textes poétiques non pas comme des «sources» , mais comme des textes dont la matière même et le travail du style révèlent le projet de l'auteur. Mais le pouvoir reste un thème éminemment historique et les éditeurs se sont efforcés de maintenir la tension entre les deux axes en conservant au volume une véritable unité, consolidée par l'introduction de B. Delignon et la conclusion-bilan de Y. Roman, qui se répondent. Mais d'abord qu'est-ce qu'un poète «irrévérencieux» ? Le mot français d'irrévérence, est directement calqué sur le latin irreuerentia. Il aurait pu être défini d'emblée, mais finalement chacun des auteurs donne un peu sa vision de l'irrévérence. Le plus souvent on l'a associée à la libertas, traduction de parrhèsia. Mais, au-delà de la simple liberté de parole, il y a toute une gamme de valeurs : l'irrespect, l'insolence, la critique, jusqu'à l'invective, qui en serait une forme extrême. Tel ou tel parlera plus volontiers d'indépendance que d'irrévérence. Le terme convient de fait bien à la figure du poète, qui à Rome ne peut vivre que dans la dépendance de personnages importants. Au fond, le poète irrévérencieux est le contraire du poète courtisan. II y a des genres poétiques irrévérencieux par nature : les iambes, la satire, Tépigramme et même certaines élégies. Plusieurs chapitres concernent ainsi Horace, Juvénal, Martial, mais aussi Ausone. Mais ce que l'ouvrage met le plus en évidence, c'est la présence de l'irrévérence au sein même de la révérence, dans des textes à vocation apparemment épidictique: épopée, hymnes et même panégyriques. C'est là surtout que se pose la question rhétorique d'une parole déguisée, indirecte ou à double sens. Le livre se présente en quatre parties: (1) Contexte politique et idéologique sous le Haut empire: quelle place pour l'irrévérence ?, (2) modèles hellénistiques, (3), Formes et natures de l'irrévérence sous le Haut empire, (4) L'irrévérence poétique dans la latinité tardive. Au début du volume est posé le contexte d'écriture, dans ses aspects ju­ ridiques, politiques et sociologiques. On constate du reste que l'appréciation de la liberté laissée au poète n'est pas facile: pour A. Suspène, qui étudie no­ tamment les lois réprimant la liberté d'écriture, l'espace laissé à une possible irrévérence est très faible face au pouvoir impérial; Ph. Le Doze, de son côté, met l'accent sur le fait que les aristocrates romains ont besoin des poètes pour façonner leur image et que la relation n'est pas aussi inégalitaire qu'avec le prince. St. Benoist, étudiant le thème de Yabolitio memoriae, montre qu'on ne pouvait pas effacer totalement les écrits des poètes. Deux cas particuliers de Reviews 455 poètes qui ont payé cher leur irrévérence sont étudiés: celui de Cornélius Gallus (F. Rohr Vio) qui est très tôt devenu un thème de controverse dans les écoles de rhétorique, et celui d'Ovide (P. Cosme). La partie sur la poésie hellénistique est conçue par les éditeurs comme un...

Reviews Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne. Edited with an introduction by W. B. Gerard. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2010. 284 pp. + CD. ISBN 978-1611491210 $62.50 The charge against Laurence Sterne (1713-68) as a sermon writer was once that he was somehow insincere—lukewarm, sensual, distractible— and that, as a result of these alleged moral failings, his religious writing was suspect. The very great successes of Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental journey (1768) further downgraded The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760, 1766, 1769). W. B. Gerard's Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne continues the efforts of Melvyn New and others to repair the double neglect to which the sermons were subject. Dismissed by Victorians in light of Sterne's supposed character, diminished as sermons by changes in popular taste, and tolerated by disappointed Shandeans looking for greater specimens of literary genius, the sermons of "Yorick"—never out of print, but in some critical disfavor since the early nineteenth century—are now receiving renewed attention. The current interest in rhetoric, religion, and literature serves the sermons well, as scholars are now equipped to evaluate Sterne's sermons with an appreciation for their particular origins, audiences, and uses. The essays in Gerard's collection agree that the view of Sterne as a hypocritical sensualist, unserious about Christianity and somehow careless about his pastoral duties, is both historically suspect and not very relevant to the actual sermons. Gerard's introduction reviews the critical history of the sermons—their initial success, later reduction to "ancillary" status within Sterne's oeuvre, and more recent recovery as religious addresses worthy of attention on their own account, and not merely as moral essays by a genius (p. 24). The repair of Sterne's reputation as a sermon writer began with pioneering studies by Wilbur L. Cross, Lansing Van Der Heyden Hammond, Arthur H. Cash (whose historic essay on "The Sermon in Tristram Shandy" is included in the present volume), and James Downey, and was further enhanced by New's work in introducing and annotating the sermons for The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (p. 22). New argued that insufficient understanding of the nature of the Anglican sermon, with its late seventeenth-century influences and its special role in discouraging enthusiasm among ordinary parishioners, tended to distort reception, as did Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 3, pp. 331-349, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.3.331. 332 RHETORICA misplaced assumptions about the "comic" tendencies of Sterne's wit. Rather than looking for something uniquely Shandean, New suggested, readers should familarize themselves with the "the vast sea of sermon literature" and be attentive to Sterne's reworkings of tried-and-true messages.1 New s "Preface by Way of a Sermon," introducing the volume of notes, is a seminal essay for considering the sermons rhetorically, underscoring the need for deeper awareness of the contexts of Sterne's preaching, the demands of his pastoral duties, and the volumes of well-known sermons and homiletic writing that would have informed most preachers' compositions. Indeed, as most readers will rely at least in part on New's scholarship in tracking Sterne's influences, the two volumes of the Florida Edition are really the coordinate texts for this collection. The revolution of critical opinion has therefore brought us back to one of the original grounds for Sterne's popularity: his talents as a sentimen­ tal Christian moralist working in a popular genre of real importance to his contemporaries. The puerile criterion of "sincerity"—in which the lack of Methodist-style evangelical rhetoric is somehow held against a latitudinarian , antienthusiastic preacher—no longer obtains, and the romantic criterion of "originality" is reduced to its proper place, i.e., barely relevant in an age and to a form that sought to transmit approved, not innovative wisdom, as several of...

Reviews Carruthers, Mary, ed., Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in theArts oftheMiddleAges. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. Alastair Minnis). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 316 pp. ISBN 9780521515306. Carruthers' edited collection shows how rhetorical theory informs and is informed by the visual, mechanical, and performative arts of the Mid­ dle Ages, with origins in the classical rhetorical tradition. This collection is groundbreaking in several ways: 1) by demonstrating the interconnected­ ness of medieval genres of rhetoric, 2) by expanding the canon of rhetorical texts, from classical origins to later adaptations, and 3) by suggesting av­ enues for further research across disciplinary lines. Thus, it transforms our understanding of rhetoric and expands it to new areas, especially oral and written performance in the Middle Ages. This collection will also appeal to those interested in medieval cultural studies through the study of verbal, visual, and performative arts as rhetoric. Paul Binski's essay, "'Working by words alone': the architect, scholas­ ticism and rhetoric in thirteenth-century France," opens the collection by relating thirteenth-century scholastic and rhetorical discourse and architec­ ture as influential on High Gothic architecture. Not only were architectural terms imported into rhetorical treatises, but also the architect as auctor, cre­ ator, master of a craft, was elevated to a new plane of authority. Central to this authority is that of planning, envisioning in the mind, foreknowing the work to be constructed, a skill required of both rhetor and architect. In "Grammar and rhetoric in late medieval polyphony: modern meta­ phor or old simile," Margaret Bent takes cross-disciplinary applications of rhetoric into the realm of performance by exploring intersections among terms employed in medieval music and grammar and rhetoric. Shared terminology, such as definitions, metaphors, and similes parallel musical structures. Other correspondences between rhetoric and music include the parts of an oration in arrangement and punctuation in notation, rhetoric in and as performance art. "Nature's forge and mechanical production: writing, reading and per­ forming song" continues this theme. Elizabeth Eva Leach develops the metaphor of the forge through collaborative invention in song, challenging Rhetorica, Vol. XXXI, Issue 2, pp. 220-237, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.2.220. Reviews 221 a common assumption that pieces were written first by a solitary composer or lyricist and then rehearsed by singers. Instead, she argues for "viewing the musical trace as a series of more or less precise memorial notae from which singers invent a collaborative (simultaneous) performance" (72). Her findings corroborate research on early modern theatre, as she explains in the latter half of her essay, thus broadening and transcending genre lines through a concept of composing process with parallels in two performance arts. Lucy Freeman Sandler's essay, "Rhetorical strategies in the pictorial im­ agery of fourteenth-century manuscripts: the case of the Bohun psalters," in­ troduces rare evidence of a rhetorical appeal from artists to patrons, through illuminations of psalters commissioned by the Bohun earls of Essex in the fourteenth century. Two artists, both Augustinian friars, employ images that relate biblical scenes to social and political matters relevant to their pa­ trons, thereby providing moral and theological counsel in devotional prac­ tice. Thus, the rhetoric of the art mirrors that of the drama, in which reader becomes actor: "For the Bohuns, reading and recitation of the psalms or the Hours of the Virgin, a devotional exercise that was repeated over and over, was associated with study of the fundamental narratives of human and sacred history in the Old and New Testaments in pictorial form" (117). This parallel opens pathways for research on intersections among private devotion, art and drama. Similarly, in "Do actions speak louder than words? The scope and role of pronuntiatio in the Latin rhetorical tradition, with special reference to the Cistercians," Jan M. Ziolkowski takes up the theme of performance in the Latin rhetorical tradition through actio (gesture) and pronuntiatio (elocution...