Reviews Luis Alberto Marchili, Cómo legislar con sabiduría y elocuencia. El Arte de legislar reconstruido a partir de la tradición retórica, Buenos Aires: Editorial Dunken, 2009. 498 pp. ISBN: 978-9870240471 El lector me permitirá introducir estas páginas con un pequeño relato. Sé bien que ello es un modo poco común de hacerlo; el registro habitual de este tipo de colaboraciones suele admitir escasas variaciones, que insistentemente reitera. Me confío a la tolerancia del lector para sobrellevar la extravagancia. Pertenece al poeta-filósofo Gibrán Khalil Gibrán (Bisharri. Líbano, 1883- New York. USA, 1931), y dice así: "Años atrás existía un poderoso rey muy sabio que deseaba redactar un conjunto de leyes para sus súbditos. Convocó a mil sabios pertenecientes a mil tribus diferentes y los hizo venir a su castillo para redactar las leyes. Y ellos cumplieron con su trabajo. Pero cuando las mil leyes escritas sobre pergamino fueron entregadas al rey, y luego de éste haberlas leído, su alma lloró amargamente, pues ignoraba que hubiera mil formas de crimen en su reino. Entonces llamó al escriba, y con una sonrisa en los labios, él mismo dictó sus leyes. Y éstas no fueron más que siete. Y los mil hombres sabios se retiraron enojados y regresaron a sus tribus con las leyes que habían redactado. Y cada tribu obedeció las leyes de sus hombres sabios. Por ello es que poseen mil leyes aún en nuestros días. Es un gran país, pero tiene mil cárceles y las prisiones están llenas de mujeres y hombres, infractores de mil leyes. Es realmente un gran país, pero ese pueblo desciende de mil legisladores y de un solo rey sabio."1 En su lectura jurídica, el texto, que tiene el encanto de la fábula, compone un desbordante panorama de evocaciones, imaginarias o históricas. Permite (o propone), en efecto, reconstruir algunas estampas conceptualmente li­ gadas al mito y a la tradición cultural del Derecho. Así, por ejemplo, nos traslada a un espacio pretérito y remoto, hundido en las profundidades del tiempo, de analogías casi babélicas, umbral de la diseminación legislativa. Y con ello, asimismo, a una era precedente, de imposible retorno, anterior !G. Khalil Gibrán, "Las leyes," en G. Khalil Gibrán, El vagabundo. Ninfas del valle, pról. y trad, de M. Armiño (Madrid: EDAF, 1995), 55. Rhetorica, Vol. XXX, Issue 3, pp. 306-340, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopv or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions w ebsite at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DO1: 10.1525/RH.2012.30.3.30u. Reviews 307 a la que fue cuna del desacuerdo y la fallida síntesis. Lamento de Arcadia idealizada, nostálgica Edad de Oro, donde una vez estuvo el originario estado de inocente felicidad apenas regido por leyes naturales. Atrás para siempre, alejada, irrecuperable, brotaría en esperanzado anhelo, en intensa aspiración, el desiderátum de lugares desplazados, imaginarias utopías, fecundadas de erasmista locura, como la de Tomás Moro (1516), donde hubiere "pocas leves," pero "eficaces" (Lib. I). Y también la amable exaltación rousseauniana de un Estado que tuviere necesidad de "pocas leyes" (El contrato social, lib. IV, cap. 1); "pocas leyes claras y simples," incorporadas en tres códigos, "uno político, otro civil y otro penal. Los tres claros, breves y precisos cuanto sea posible" (Considerations sur le gouveruement de Pologne, 1772).2Y con intención mayor, los avisos de Filangieri en 1774: "O la ley habla claro, y entonces el magistrado no puede alterarla; o la ley es tan oscura que la ambigüedad del sentido daría lugar al arbitrio, y entonces, al tenerse que recurrir a la autoridad suprema, el magistrado no puede hacer otra cosa que deducir la sentencia de la interpretación expresa que de ella dará el soberano."3 El repertorio de referencias...

312 RHETORICA relato del libanés. Lafabula docet podrá obtenerla mi lector sin necesidad de mucho batallar mental. José Calvo González Malaga Lois Peters Agnew, Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philosophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics (Columbia, SC, University of South Carolina Press, 2008. 211 pp. The thesis of Lois Peters Agnew's Outward, Visible Propriety: Stoic Philos­ ophy and Eighteenth-Century British Rhetorics is a bold one: "This book argues that the history of British rhetoric cannot be understood without attending to Stoic strains in influential language theories of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (p. 1). Since Stoicism hardly appears in scholarly works on eighteenth-century British rhetoric, we must conclude that these histories are wanting. The narrative that Agnew in part contests has two parts and is as follows: First, the empirical epistemologies of Locke, Hume, Hartley, and Reid offered a new account of cognition and emotional response that had implications for rhetorical theory. Campbell and Priestly, recognizing the importance of these ideas, incorporated them into their theories. In their new epistemologicalpsychological accounts, rhetoric moved away from in its civic function as the means for reaching decisions in social, political settings and toward an inter­ est in the way an individual formed ideas, became emotionally engaged, and then acted. Rhetorical theory became concerned with providing a description of the way an individual processes sense impressions at the expense of the Classical concern with public deliberation. Second, the rhetorics of Smith, Karnes and Blair replaced an emphasis on helping students create speeches with developing students' receptive capacities—with developing students' taste—and establishing standards of judgment for all the types of discourse that constitute belles lettres. Taking these changes together, some scholars have depicted eighteenth-century rhetoric as abandoning rhetoric's tradi­ tional political mission and transforming rhetoric into a technical, psycho­ logical, and instrumental science in the service of bourgeois individualism and self-improvement. Agnew does not contest specifically that the overtly political is no longer thematized in eighteenth century rhetoric; nor does she deny that eighteenth century rhetoric is different. She does deny, however, that a social mission vanishes in the theories she analyzes. She insists that eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists were themselves anxious about movements tow ard indi­ vidualism, secularism, and scientism and developed their theories of rhetoric not to accommodate these movements but to ameliorate their effects. Her ar­ gument is that the concepts central to eighteenth-centurv rhetoric-—common Reviews 313 sense, taste, and propriety—constitute a technical vocabulary that, if cor­ rectly read in the context of Stoic concepts familiar to the eighteenth-century theorists, are the basis for a social theory of rhetoric. Agnew's "Introduction" and first chapter, "Stoic Ethics and Rhetoric," offer a short summary of Stoicism that attempts to complicate some of the stereotypes that readers may hold of it. While Agnew acknowledges that Stoicism has a long, complex history, she is not much concerned with nu­ ance or the ensuing historical complications. Rather, she mines the tradition for Stoic themes that serve her purposes—a somewhat circular way of pro­ ceeding but forgivable since the eighteenth-century rhetorical theorists who are her concern would themselves be interested in Stoicism as appropriators . She is interested in dispelling or complicating stereotypes of the Stoic wise man who stands above the social norms, proudly beyond influence by others, and practices at best a disciplined sympathy, cultivating an austere self-command that hardly seems social. And of course the Stoics had notori­ ously little use for rhetoric. But as Agnew points out, the wise man has a civic obligation, and she highlights themes of civic duty and responsibility, in Roman Stoicism especially. With regard to rhetoric, Cicero, who faulted the Stoic attitude toward rhetoric while advocating Stoicism, judged the impoverished Stoic theory of language and rhetoric a remediable deficiency. In Chapter 2, Agnew traces the concept of commonsense in Shaftesbury, Hutchenson, and Reid to Stoic antecedents. The three eighteenth-century theorists had, among themselves, distinctly different understandings of the meaning of commonsense, which Agnew acknowledges while maintaining that their different articulations are similarly motivated to find in human innate cognitive and moral capacities an argument against skepticism and the basis for...

Reviews 319 trovano collocazione come fr. 89 in riferimento a Democrito, in virtü del noto aneddoto che circolava in antico secondo cui Democrito aveva pretérito lasciare a pascólo le proprie terre. Troppo poco, sostiene in maniera impeccabile Grilli, per un'attribuzione che l'esiguitá del materiale non puó in alcun modo sostenere. Mi sembra di aver dato qualche breve, ma significativo saggio del modo di procederé di Grilli, aperto per necessitá a piu direttrici di senso e impegnato , pour cause, a lavorare su piu fronti, in considerazione dell'amplissima fortuna di cui il trattato godette in ogni tempo, ma soprattutto in autori come Lattanzio o Agostino, presso i quali le meditazioni ciceroniane apparivano a tal punto contraddistinte da luciditá argomentativa da offrire un esempio particolarmente apprezzabile e un modello; ma proprio questa considera­ zione, che é nei fatti una valutazione attenta della ricezione del trattato e della considerevole fortuna di cui esso godette in ámbito cristiano, impone alio studioso le ragioni della prudenza, in special modo quando si tratta di operare tra ció che puó risultare quanto meno con ragionevole certezza imputabile a Cicerone e quello che, ispirato al?Arpíñate e al trattato, va invece letto come frutto della rielaborazione altrui. Di questi rischi Grilli avverte la pericolositá soprattutto per opere come il terzo libro delle Divinae institutiones di Lattanzio o i libri 13-14 del de Trinitate di Agostino, opere che risentono di certissimi influssi de\YHortensias, ma proprio per questo 'pericolose' per i rischi di indebite attribuzioni al trattato di riflessioni in ogni modo ad esso riconducibili. E proprio per tali ragioni, di tali finissime riflessioni di Grilli, maturate in un lungo arco cronológico e concretizzatesi in questa preziosissima opera, la comunitá scientifica non puó che dirsi grata all'Autore, cui é mancato il piacere di veder pubblicata l'opera nella veste definitiva, e a chi, meritoriamente, ne ha ultimato gli sforzi. Alfredo Casamento Palermo Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 450 pages. Joel Altman's The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood is, like his earlier The Tudor Play of Mind, a big book. It offers extensive, detailed commentary on one of Shakespeare s major tragedies as well as briefer examinations of other plays. It situates those readings, as well as the stage practices, the acting, and Shakespeare s own sense of himself and his craft, in their historical context, specifically relating them all to what Altman calls the "rhetorical anthropology" that he sees as defining the Renaissance. It also traces that rhetorical anthropology back to 320 RHETORICA its sources in antiquity. Finally, Altman's study offers a detailed analysis of a concept that is central to rhetoric—probability—and shows us its importance not just for that discipline, but for dialectic and philosophy as well as for concepts of self and society. As in his previous book, Altman starts from the assumption that for the Renaissance rhetoric was the "Queen of the Sciences." But whereas in The Tu­ dor Play ofMind, he was interested in how the teaching of students to debate questions from different points of view (the argumentum in utramqne partem) shaped the development of the English Renaissance drama, here he sees rhetoric as determining the basic ways that people viewed both themselves and their culture. According to the pre-Socratic philosophers, who invented rhetoric, we live in a world of appearances, where matter is in flux and the senses unstable, the world of rhetoric that deals not with absolute truths, but with probabilities. This view, which was inherited by Renaissance humanists, is what Altman calls "rhetorical anthropology" It assumes that individuals operate in the transient historical world where cognition is always radically contingent; that people cannot truly know others; and that what they experi­ ence as their selves are the changeable products of rhetorical interactions. Orators can be persuasive in this world, not because their words reference realities, but because they create emotionally compelling heterocosms out of language for their audience. Altman distinguishes two kinds of rhetorical identities that get produced. Adapting Raymond Williams' terms for ideolo­ gies, he calls one "emergent," the identity that gets produced...

This essay examines actresses on the London stage between 1660 and 1890, focusing on the investigative topoi of pregnancy and rhetorical access and charting the starts and stops that characterize women’s entry into public forums. The performance schedules of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London actresses reveal that both married and unmarried women routinely performed while “big with child.” With the ascent of new constructs of sex and gender, however, women’s recourse to and options on stage narrowed considerably. Victorian actresses developed new career patterns and rhetorical strategies to accommodate pregnancy’s increasing relegation to the private sphere, their delivery thus reflecting and responding to a changed social context.

328 RHETORICA di Omero per gli Antichi quale modello di una técnica oratoria, quale inventor dell'arte oratoria nel suo complesso (Introd., p. 16). Interessante é a questo riguardo 1'analisi pseudodionisiana (P. ¿a/, a, 68,17-26) della replica iliadica di Achille a Fenice, come primo esempio nella letteratura greca di spiegazione di una técnica oratoria di un maestro, Fenice, per bocea di un allievo, Achille; «delegando un proprio personaggio a commentare il discorso di un altro», puntualizza D.A. (Introd., p. 44), «il Poeta riflette su se stesso e si fa modello non soltanto per i poeti -di una técnica compositiva- ma anche per oratori e retori - di una técnica oratoria» , come testimonia Puso del verbo didáaxeiv (P ¿ay. a, 68, 21), con cui si intende l'insegnamento al retore di una tevcnh oratoria e non la semplice spiegazione al lettore delle intenzioni di Fenice. Αννα Caramico Université di Salerno T. Zinsmaier, [Quintilian], Die Hdnde der blinden Mutter (Grôfiere Deklamationen , 6), Cassino: Edizioni Université di Cassino, 2009, 281 pp. ISBN: 9788883170775. La pubblicazione delFedizione critica delle 19 Declamationes Maiores dello Pseudo-Quintiliano ad opera di L. Hakanson (Declamationes XIX maiores Quintiliano falso ascriptae, Stutgardiae 1982) è stata seguita dalla traduzione di L. A. Sussman (The Major Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian. A Transla­ tion, Frankfurt a. M. 1987) e da una serie di studi specifici che sottolineano il rinnovato interesse per la retorica in generale e per questo argomento in particolare. Nonostante l'indubbio valore di questi volumi, è comunque noto che, da una parte, essi non soddisfano le richieste di esegesi (sono troppo scarne le note di commento alia traduzione di Sussman) e che, dall'altra, una profonda e corretta esegesi del testo, che affronti e chiarisca aspetti formali e contenutistici, è presupposto indispensabile per una corretta constitute textus. D. A. Russell sottolinea (Class. Quart. XXXV 1985, pp. 43—45) proprio all'inizio della sua recensione all'edizione di Hakanson che «no latin text is more continuously testing, not to say tormenting, to the reader than the Major Declamations» . Un progetto di ricerca dell'université di Cassino, cui afferisce la pubblicazione del volume qui recensito, mira a colmare questa lacuna attraverso la pubblicazione, sotto la direzione di Antonio Stramaglia, delle declamazioni accompagnate da traduzione e commento (Rhetorica ha dedicato al progetto il fascicolo 27/3, 2009). Nella serie sono state finora pubblicate le seguenti declamazioni: A. Stramaglia, I Gemelli Malati: un Caso di Vivisezione (Declamazioni maggiori, 8\ 1999; Id., La cittd die si cibb dei suoi cadaveri (Declamazioni maggiori, 22), 2002; Catherine Schneider, Le soldat de Marius (Grandes déclamations, 3), 2004 e G. Krapinger,;Die Bienen des armen Mannes (Grôssere Deklamationen, 23), 2005; Id., Der Gladiator (Grôssere Dekla- Reviews 329 mationen, 9), 2007 e Giovanna Longo (ed.), La pozione dell'odio (Declamazioni maggiori, 14-15), 2008. II volume di Zinsmaier (d'ora innanzi Z.) riempie un altro tassello di questo mosaico e fornisce un'ampia e approfondita analisi della declamazione : esso costituisce una rielaborazione approfondita e aggiornata della tesi di dottorato pubblicata precedentemente dall'autore (Der vori Bordgewormationen . Einleitung, Übersetzung, Kommentar. Frankfurt a. M. 1993). Tenendo presente il radicale cambiamento di prospettiva che negli ultimi vent'anni ha interessato lo studio della declamazione latina, Z. (i cui studi precedenti rivelano il suo interesse e la padronanza dell'argomento) discute non solo di questioni letterarie, ma anche del molo che le declamazioni svolgono nella ricostruzione del quadro culturale e sociale del tempo. II volume è articolato in tre parti. Nell'ampia introduzione (pp. 15-106) l'autore svolge un'analisi dettagliata della trama della declamazione e un approfondimento giuridico, mentre limita l'analisi stilistico-retorica solo ad alcuni aspetti: Z. non ritiene né opportuno né possibile analizzare tutti gli aspetti retorici della declamazione, ma fornisce indicazioni specifiche relative alla dispositio, alla organizzazione interna del materiale e ad alcuni aspetti formali il cui ruolo risulta particolarmente enfático (sententiae, descriptio, locus communis, exemplum, color, cfr. pp. 60-106:). L'introduzione è seguita (pp. 108153 ) dal testo con traduzione in tedesco e da un ampio e attento commento (p.155-250). Chiudono il volume la bibliografía, suddivisa in due specifiche sezioni tematiche (la prima dedicata alio Pseudo-Quintiliano...

334 RHETORICA 254) he is not wrong strictly speaking, although the observation is too broad to be useful; "radicalized," decorum can look like almost anything including Sunday brunch or the DMV Driver's Handbook. Ultimately these issues are minor when we consider the substantial payoff. David Marshall has written a deeply responsible book that moves with grace, chronologically through Vico's entire oeuvre—including some notable rediscoveries in the archives and beyond—at the same time that it honors the weirdness that makes Vico indispensable. Daniel M. Gross University of California, Irvine Thomas Conley, Toward a Rhetoric ofInsult, Chicago: Chicago Univer­ sity Press, 2009. 132 pp. As he states in the preface to his Toward a Rhetoric of Insult, Thomas Conley's explicit aim is to "stimulate some constructive conversation" (p. viii). Insults have admittedly been a serious political issue in the 2000s. Conley mentions in passing both the Danish cartoons depicting Mohammed (p. 8) and the speech by Pope Benedict XVI about Manuel II Palaeologus (pp. 121-122), and quotes one Iranian imam as saying: "I am for freedom of speech, but not the freedom to insult" (p. 1), which puts the problem of political correctness in a nutshell. The style employed in this book is both expansive and discursive. Conley's range of examples and sources is wide: from antiquity (Aristo­ phanes, Cicero, Martial) to the early-modern period (the sixteenth-century Lutheran Flugschriften, Julius Caesar Scaliger's attack on Erasmus, Shake­ speare's comedies); from the political cartoons and the anti-Semitism of the twentieth century (the leading nazi-ideologist Julius Streicher's Kampf dem Weltfeind and the anti-Semitic insults disseminated by The Dearborn In­ dependent, a Michigan newspaper published by Henry Ford) to TV series and movies created by the comedy group Monty Python. Presentations are generous, and the reader is invited to explore the many facets of the topic. Although Conley's expressed intent is not to theorize insult (p. vii), he nevertheless offers some useful semi-theoretical concepts, defining, for example, what he terms the "scenario" and the "intensity" of insults (p. 3-7). Referring to Saara Lilja's work on insults in Roman comedy (from 1965), Conley underlines the importance of studying "who says what about whom and why" (pp. 13-14). These are more or less rhetorical issues, dealing with and specifying the rhetorical situation. Conley emphasizes that the rhetoric of insults does not concern only elocutio (diction, style), but also pronuntiatio (delivery) like the tone of voice, body language, and timing (p. 7). One of the main arguments in Conley's book is that there are also 'positive' or 'nonserious' insults, which have cohesive effects such as fh/tin^ Reviews 335 (the Scottish tradition of of insult poetry), craik (the banter between friends in the Irish pubs), the dozens (a form of verbal duelling used in AfricanAmerican culture), and battle rap or beefing. Indeed, it is quite delightful to read, e.g., about Yiddish insults (p. 11-12), which seem to be both self-ironical and have a kind, sympathetic nature. According to Conley, some insults can even be analysed like jokes with a punch line, as he does when discussing Martial's epigrams (pp. 43-47). Conley calls into question strict manuals or rules of good conduct; he has some apprehensions about the situation when the maxim 'if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all' is in operation (p. 120). In his view, this kind of atmosphere and passing laws against insults censures not only freedom of expression but can also threaten the social relationships based on the many kinds of 'positive' insults (p. 116). However, Conley's own tentative definition does not fit well in the benign situations of 'positive' insults. He defines insult as a "severely nega­ tive opinion of a person or group to subvert their positive self-regard and esteem" (p. 2). Furthermore, Conley's examples of, e.g., the aesthetically valuable insults—such as found in the writings of the English critic William Connor (p. 118)—seems to be examples of irony, not of insults. The definition of insult is the subject of the first section of the book...

Jonathan Swift was contemptuous of the figure of the orator in his satirical writings, and yet he proved to be one of the most influential figures behind the eighteenth-century ‘elocutionary movement’ in Great Britain. His most distinctive remarks on the subject of practical rhetoric concern the art of pulpit eloquence. The simple style that Swift consistently recommends is both a rebuke to and a weapon against the false eloquence of a particular ethical class: the impertinently proud. The force behind this weapon is Swift’s analysis of the moral assumptions of his opponents, and particularly their faith in the rhetorical efficacy of ‘conviction’, against which Swift proposes his own defense of ‘hypocrisy’. The moral and theological principles that inform Swift’s rhetoric have contextual roots in contemporary commentary on sacred eloquence, and particularly in the efforts of late-seventeenth-century French writers, including Caussin, Lamy and Fénelon, to formulate a rhetorical ethics that does not betray the preacher (elevated above and unanswered by his audience as he must be) into the temptations of pride.

Reviews 331 Il commenta, prevalentemente letterario-linguistico, fornisce molti loci pnrnlleli e informazioni linguistiche di varia natura: particolarità della lingua e della sintassi della declamazioni in confronto con il latino di età classica, discussione dei passi problematic! dal punto di vista filológico. I passi in cui Z. opera scelte diverse rispetto all'edizione di riferimento vengono elencati già in nota a p. 106 e alcuni di essi vengono poi discussi nel commento: come in tutti i volumi della collana, infatti, anche questo è privo di apparato critico. Va tuttavia notata l'assenza di informazioni relative alla tradizione del testo, che sarebbero state di aiuto nei casi in cui vengono affrontati problemi di tale natura (cfr. p. 162, per esempio, sulle varianti debilitate e debilitas, 112 H., in alternativa alie quali Z. preferisce ad debilitatem). Z. fornisce un esame attento e sottile degli aspetti formali e retorici della declamazione, indaga e testimonia la presenza in essa di materiale letterario precedente o contemporáneo e la sua permanenza nella letteratura successiva. II suo contributo è altresi prezioso per il confronto tra la realtà culturale contemporánea e quella tratteggiata nella declamazione, con cui egli dimostra in modo esemplare come le declamazioni possano contribuiré a ricostruire il dibattito del tempo sui valori e sulle rególe comportamentali. María Luisa De Seta Lattarico, Italy David L. Marshall, Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press), Cambridge & New York, 2010. 302 pp. It has always seemed fitting that Giambattista Vico's last rediscovery came at the end of the psychedelic era in 1969 (Giambattista Vico: An Inter­ national Symposium, eds. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White), when category mistakes could appear at the heart of cultural and political revo­ lution. Unlike Foucault's orderly thinkers of the Enlightenment, Vico and his tables of knowledge always appeared intriguingly disheveled and full of holes that led, if one was fortunate, to new dimensions of time and human character. But like other casualties of the psychedelic era, Vico has often seemed in danger of perishing in the epiphany, falling victim to accusations of idiosyncrasy or even incoherence. Thanks to David Marshall, however, we now know that the story of Vico's rediscovery does not end this way. In his landmark book Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe, Marshall demonstrates that Vico is once again a pivotal figure in a modern age broadly conceived, where sober sciences newly engage the irra­ tionalisms of emotion, language, and human history. We can now celebrate the first major, English-language monograph on Vico in over a decade at the same time that we enjoy expert guidance through a range of concerns that traverse Vico's work; Marshall's book serves as an excellent primer on the 332 RHETORICA interlocking fields of modern epistemology after Descartes, the prehistory of Peircean pragmatism, early modern European intellectual history across four literatures (English, German, French, and Italian), and the history of rhetoric and communication, which serves as a key to the rest. Marshall launches the story in original fashion when he begins with Vico's De coniuratione principum neapolitanorum, a history of the 1701 Neapoli­ tan Conspiracy of Macchia that was unpublished and unacknowledged by Vico, although it was probably in circulation, as Marshall discovered through manuscript research at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, within months of the event itself (p. 33 n. 3). This document turns out to be crucial be­ cause in it one sees the driving question that would give shape to Vico's entire scholarly initiated at the University of Naples in 1699 as professor of rhetoric and continuing through the posthumously published 1744 edi­ tion of the Scienza Nuova, for which Vico is justifiably famous. Frustrated, Marshall speculates, by the limited utility of rhetorical historiography tra­ ditionally conceived, Vico asks in light of the Conspiracy "What would it take to reconfigure rhetorical inquiry for Neapolitan conditions?" (p. 32) given that Naples lack the conditions for immediate politics imagined by the rhetoricians of classical antiquity. And from this seemingly simple ques­ tion emerges a transformative moment for Vico in the history of rhetoric. Marshall summarizes that "Vico's oeuvre takes on a new unity...

This paper applies cognitive linguistic frame analysis to three long speeches from fourth-century Athens. It examines how Aeschines constructs and successfully deploys the socio-political concept or frame of the good citizen against Timarchus in 346/5 B.C. and then in a more elaborate form against Demosthenes in 330 B.C. and how Demosthenes wins the case by redefining the frame through metaphor-based reframing of the good, steadfast citizen. This framing analysis reveals Aeschines' overall rhetorical strategy and facilitates rhetorical assessment of the two crown speeches through a comprehensive, socio-politically integrated perspective.

Reviews 325 much wider rhetorical practice or whether the Sophists offered any notable contribution to these fields. T.'s book is a worthy summary of Sophistic argumentation based on a painstaking analysis of a wide selection of available texts and lucid compar­ isons with modern parallels. Unfortunately, it does not consistently address the thorny (and possibly unresolvable) methodological question of what strategies and why we could call genuinely Sophistic, so he occasionaly seems to read Aristotelian or Platonic concepts back into sophistic texts. Sometimes the line of argument is not easy to follow due to the dense pre­ sentation of facts and the book also suffers from some irritating mistakes both in the English and the Greek spelling (e.g. pp. 35, 48 or 169). However, as a rich and perceptive reappraisal of primary evidence, the study will likely to provoke strong response and stimulate further studies on the Sophists not only in classical and modern rhetoric, but in philosophy as well. Gabor Tahin Burnham, England Pseudo-Dionigi di Alicarnasso, I discorsi figurati I e II (Ars Rhet. VIII e IX Us.-RadJ. Introduzione, Traduzione e Commento a cura di Stefano Dentice di Accadia, Pisa-Roma: Fabrizio Serra Editore (AION. Quaderni 14, 2010), 184 pp., ISBN 978-88-6227-220-9 Accompagnata da un'ampia Introduzione (pp. 11-50) e dal Commento (pp. 129-178), Stefano Dentice di Accadia (D.A.) propone nella collana AION. Quaderni (n. 14) la prima traduzione intégrale in italiano dei Discorsifigurati I e II (Ars Rhet. VIII e IX Us.-Rad. ) di ps.-Dionigi di Alicarnasso, basata sul testo edito, agli inizi del secolo scorso, da Usener e Radermacher (da cui D.A. si discosta in alcuni luoghi, come H vede dalla Tavola delle divergenze a p. 51), con un'ulteriore lettura del Parisinus Graecus 1741 e del suo apógrafo, il Guelferbytanus 14. L'idea di tradurre i due scritti nasce nell'àmbito degli studi di ricostruzione dell'esegesi omerica antica; l'impostazione del lavoro tende infatti a privilegiare l'aspetto della critica letteraria omerica rispetto a quello retorico. I due trattati, che analizzano una particolare técnica oratoria conosciu*a nell'antichità col nome di λόγοι ¿σχηματισμένοι, ossia un discorso in cui il pensiero non viene espresso in maniera diretta, ma in forma mascherata (come si legge nella definizione di Zoilo riportata da Febammone III, 44, 1-3 Spengel), rappresentano un unicum nella letteratura antica perché sono i soli scritti monografici nei quali la teoría è spiegata attraverso 1 analisi di esempi letterari tratti da autori greci (Omero, di cui si analizzano molti passi deïVIliade, Demostene, Euripide e Tucidide). I due trattati a e b costituiscono i capitoli VIII e IX di una Τέχνη ρητορική erróneamente attribuita a Dionigi di Alicarnasso, sulla cui paternité e datazione c'è ancora grande incertezza (si 326 RHETORICA tende a ritenere i due trattati composti tra la fine del I sec. e la prima meta del III sec. d.C., cf. Introd., p. 14 n. 19), un'opera che consiste in una raccolta di testi di retorica e di critica letteraria scollegati per lo piü tra loro, frutto di una collezione arbitraria di diversa provenienza. Potrebbe trattarsi, considerato 10 stile frettoloso e spesso inelegante delle due monografie, di testi scolastici, verosímilmente appunti dettati a vari allievi in momenti diversi (ipotesi contestata da M. Heath, Pseudo-Dionysios Art ofRhetoric 8-11: Figured Speech, Declamation and Criticism, «AJP» 124/1 [2003], pp. 81-105). D.A. non esclude che i due trattati possano essere opera del medesimo autore, né che si possano individuare mani diverse da un'opera all'altra o anche all'interno di uno stesso trattato (Introd., p. 15). L'lntroduzione si compone di un parágrafo (1) relativo alia storia della teoría antica del discorso e della causa figurati, di un parágrafo (2) dedicato all'importanza dei due trattati nel panorama del genere letterario in cui sono inquadrati, con l'illustrazione dei tre σχήματα (il parlare con tatto e decoro [μετ’ εύπρεπείας], il parlare 'per obliquo' [κατά πλάγιον], il parlare 'per contrario' [κατά τό εναντίον]) e un utile e dettagliato sunto (pp. 16-21), e di un parágrafo (3) che traccia uno status tpiaestionis degli studi sull'argomento. Nel penúltimo par...

Book Review| May 01 2012 Review: Appelés à la liberté (Rhétorique sémitique), by R. Meynet R. Meynet, Appelés à la liberté (Rhétorique sémitique), Paris: Lethielleux, 2008, pp. 236. ISBN: 978-2-283-61255-2. Rhetorica (2012) 30 (2): 202–204. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.2.202 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Appelés à la liberté (Rhétorique sémitique), by R. Meynet. Rhetorica 1 May 2012; 30 (2): 202–204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.2.202 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. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay argues that Plato's use of narrative conceals within Socrates' explicit rejection of rhetoric an implicit authorial endorsement, manifested in the dialectical and rhetorical failures surrounding Socrates' deliberations over logos. I suggest that Aristotle's Rhetoric is consonant with Plato's view in its general affirmation of rhetoric's power, utility, and necessity as well as in its specific recommendations regarding logos. I employ Martin Heidegger's explication of logos in Aristotle to illuminate how the term conforms to Plato's implicit position regarding logos and rhetoric. This interpretation entails an expanded meaning of logos as it is found in Rhetoric, assigning it a more primary, pre-logical, oral content.

Other| May 01 2012 Addresses of Contributors to this issue Rhetorica (2012) 30 (2): 218–219. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.2.218 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Addresses of Contributors to this issue. Rhetorica 1 May 2012; 30 (2): 218–219. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.2.218 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| May 01 2012 Review: Discorsi alla prova. Atti del Quinto Colloquio italo-francese “Discorsi pronunciati, discorsi ascoltati: contesti di eloquenza tra Grecia, Roma ed Europa” (Napoli - S. Maria di Castellabate 21 – 23 settembre 2006), by Giancarlo Abbamonte, Lorenzo Miletti and Luigi Spina (a cura di) Giancarlo Abbamonte, Lorenzo Miletti, Luigi Spina (a cura di), Discorsi alla prova. Atti del Quinto Colloquio italo-francese “Discorsi pronunciati, discorsi ascoltati: contesti di eloquenza tra Grecia, Roma ed Europa” (Napoli - S. Maria di Castellabate 21 – 23 settembre 2006), Napoli: Giannini, 2009. 639 pp. ISBN: 978-88-743-14-331 (http://www.fedoa.unina.it/2998/). Rhetorica (2012) 30 (2): 207–213. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.2.207 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 Review: Discorsi alla prova. Atti del Quinto Colloquio italo-francese “Discorsi pronunciati, discorsi ascoltati: contesti di eloquenza tra Grecia, Roma ed Europa” (Napoli - S. Maria di Castellabate 21 – 23 settembre 2006), by Giancarlo Abbamonte, Lorenzo Miletti and Luigi Spina (a cura di). Rhetorica 1 May 2012; 30 (2): 207–213. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.2.207 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. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article seeks to explain Edmund Burke's notorious verbal vehemence as the consequence of a deliberate rhetorical strategy. I argue that over the course of a thirty-year parliamentary career, Burke relied on sharply formulated historical contrasts in order to express his opposition to the policies of successive ministries and warn of threats to the nation's defining achievements. Through the use of four distinct syntactical patterns, Burke cultivated a style of hyperbole which exaggerated both the failings of the present and the virtues of the national past, focusing on two periods in particular: the High Middle Ages and the early eighteenth-century era of Whig Oligarchy.

This paper discusses the function of speeches given by Cicero to the popular assembly (contio) as reports about recent political events or decrees. Several of the few extant examples are part of oratorical corpora consisting of speeches from politically difficult periods, namely from Cicero's consular year (63 BCE; Catilinarians) and from his fight against Mark Antony (44–43 BCE; Philippics). Cicero is shown to have applied his oratorical abilities in all these cases to exploit the contio speeches so as to present narrative accounts of political developments in his interpretation and thus to influence public opinion in the short term during the political process and particularly, within an edited corpus, in the long term.

Book Review| May 01 2012 Review: The Imperfect Friend. Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts, by Olmsted, Wendy Olmsted, Wendy. The Imperfect Friend. Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. xi + 293 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9136-9. Rhetorica (2012) 30 (2): 204–207. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.2.204 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 Review: The Imperfect Friend. Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts, by Olmsted, Wendy. Rhetorica 1 May 2012; 30 (2): 204–207. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.2.204 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. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Plato's chief argument against rhetoric is epistemological. Plato claims that rhetoric accomplishes what it does on the basis of experience, not knowledge. In this article I examine Plato's criticisms of rhetoric in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. I argue that Plato is right to identify rhetoric's empirical basis, but that having this epistemic basis does not constitute an argument against rhetoric. On the contrary, Plato's criticism of rhetoric serves to give us an epistemological explanation of rhetoric's success.

Reviews 207 thereby unmasking emotional frameworks that deprive others of the means to restore honor to social relations (p. 108). For many early modern authors, expression and regulation of emotion is closely tied to ethical behavior and the pursuit of justice. If readers are left wanting something from this book, it will most likely be further engagement with contemporary work on rhetoric and emotion. This is less a critique of the existing text and more a testament to the poten­ tial of further work in this area. Olmsted's close focus on the early modern period leaves ample room for studying the differences among emotional frameworks in other historical periods and provides the theoretical ground­ ing and the intellectual space in which to raise interesting and important questions about emotion and rhetoric. Scholars with interdisciplinary inter­ ests may find that Olmsted's insights into the gentle strand of persuasion have much to offer, for instance, to the contemporary study of diplomacy, the art of teaching, counseling, and to other contexts where coercion or force are considered unfit strategies for persuasion. As teachers, citizens, and friends, we are all involved in the schooling of emotion, helping others negotiate the competing emotional frameworks that determine the limits of persuasion and the shifting boundaries of the self. Just as Milton's advocacy of uncen­ sored publication supported an arena of competing truths, early modern counsel among friends supported an arena of competing emotional frame­ works. Olmsted's close attention to the early modern organization of these frameworks is both a caution and a model for how we enact persuasive, if imperfect, pedagogies of emotion. Eric D. Mason Nova Southeastern University Giancarlo Abbamonte, Lorenzo Miletti, Luigi Spina (a cura di), Dzscorsi alia prova. Atti del Quinto Colloquio italo-francese "Discorsi pronun­ cian, discorsi ascoltati: contesti di eloquenza tra Grecia, Roma ed Europa (Napoli - S. Maria di Castellabate 21 - 23 setiembre 2006), Napoli: Giannini ,2009.639 pp. ISBN 978-88-743-14-331 (http://www.fedoa.umna. it/2998/). Questo poderoso volume é il frutto di un colloquio organizzato dalle Universitá di Napoli (Federico II) e di Strasburgo, all interno dell ampio progetto, animato da un gruppo di ricerca misto italo-francese, Alie radici dell'Europa: la cultura d'assemblea e i suoi spazi (religione, retorica, teatro, politica ). Tra modelli antichi e ricezione moderna, che ha giá fornito numerosi contributi di alto valore, segnalati da L. Pernot nell'lntroduzione (p. 10). II vo­ lume fa il punto sul rapporto tra la produzione del discorso e la sua ricezione e tra contesto della performance, uditorio e oratore. 208 RHETORICA Per esigenze di brevità, segnalerô gli aspetti a mio parère più significativi e innovativi: i contributi di maggior peso saranno raggruppati temá­ ticamente, a prescindere dalla loro successione. Dopo la fine e puntúale analisi di A. De Vivo, Oratoria da camera. Il processo intra cubiculum di Valerio Asiático (Tac. Ann. XI1-3) (pp. 15-25), capace sia di illuminare le modalité di conduzione dei processi in età giulio-claudia sia di mettere in rilievo l'abilità tacitiana nel descrivere una situazione grottesca , il primo contributo di rilievo è di G. Abbamonte, Allocuzioni alie truppe: document!, origine e struttura retorica (pp. 29-46), che apre un trittico dedicato a Le allocuzioni alie truppe nella storiografia antica, - seguono: L. Miletti (Con­ test! dei discorsi alie truppe nella storiografia greca: Erodoto, Tucidide, Senofonte, pp. 47-61) e C. Buongiovanni (Il generale e il suo 'pubblico': le allocuzioni alie truppe in Sallustio, Tácito e Ammiano Marcellino, pp. 63-86). Abbamonte sottolinea come sia importante anche oggi affrontare questo argomento, perché si tratta di un genere ben lungi dall'essere estinto - purtroppo - e che, anzi, costituisce un capitolo di "storia della cultura ancora da scrivere" (p. 46). Le modalité del movere sono l'oggetto del contributo di L. Miletti, che esamina il discorso diretto di Hdt. 9,17,4, le informazioni offerte da Thuc. 4,91 e 7,69-70 e alcuni passi delle Elleniche e della Ciropedia di Senofonte. Entrando nell'annoso dibattito sulla veridicité dei discorsi nelle opere storiografiche (e soprattutto in Tucidide), Miletti si esprime per una loro rivalutazione contro Teccessivo scetticismo dimostrato per esempio da M...

This essay argues that Plato’s use of narrative conceals within Socrates’ explicit rejection of rhetoric an implicit authorial endorsement, manifested in the dialectical and rhetorical failures surrounding Socrates’ deliberations over logos. I suggest that Aristotle’s Rhetoric is consonant with Plato’s view in its general affirmation of rhetoric’s power, utility, and necessity as well as in its specific recommendations regarding logos. I employ Martin Heidegger’s explication of logos in Aristotle to illuminate how the term conforms to Plato’s implicit position regarding logos and rhetoric. This interpretation entails an expanded meaning of logos as it is found in Rhetoric, assigning it a more primary, pre-logical, oral content.

Reviews Ryan Stark, Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century Eng­ land. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2009, pp. vii-234. ISBN: 978-0-8132-1578-5 Ryan Stark has written what is in many ways a charming book, right down to its physical presentation whose quaint details give it the look and feel of an earlier age—the age evoked by Stark's title. That title, however, is a bit misleading since his proper subject is the enduring controversy over seventeenth-century prose style, namely, the causes of its arguable shift from Jacobean and Caroline exuberance to Restoration "plainness." Stark himself takes leave to doubt that any formal shift actually took place because the prose literature of the later seventeenth century, including that of experimental science, demonstrably retains the figured language of its predecessors—although, significantly, not to the same florid degree. In this opinion, he departs from critics like R. E Jones, Robert Adolph, and now apparently Ian Robinson, who would yet persuade us that this literature does not and should not employ figuration, owing to the alleged influence of the "new" science. Needless to say, the attempt to abolish metaphor is at least as old as Aristotle, not to mention a linguistic impossibility since we rely on tropological usage when we want to express new ideas and practices like those science itself is perpetually producing—a point Stark makes. Nonetheless, this particular bout of expressive austerity has as its locus classicus in Bishop Sprat's curiously authoritative misreading of Bacon in his History of the Royal Society, whom he represents as strenuously averse to figurative speech against every indication to the contrary, beginning with the "sensible and plausible elocution" that Bacon recommends in The Advancement ofLearning for the transmission of human knowledge. If in Stark's formulation one pole of the stylistic controversy is again represented by experimental science, the novelty of his argument comes from experimentalism's presumptive opponent—magic or occult knowledge— with which Stark contends the practitioners of the new science saw their own empirical and mechanical innovations in immediate and urgent competition. Such competition in his view generated the later seventeenth-century's focus on prose decorum and specifically what Stark calls occultism s charmed rhetoric," "enchanted tropes" and "numinous language," to which he argues Rhetonca, Vol. XXX, Issue 2, pp. 199-219, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . U2012 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.2012.30.2.199. 200 RHETORICA the virtuosi of the Royal Society and their supporters in the larger culture of the Restoration took concerted exception. Accordingly, the book begins by invoking Donne's First Anniversary where "new philosophy" forever "calls all in doubt," and proceeds to describe yet again how Francis Bacon allegedly dismantled the pre-modern world of platonizing similitude, familiar to us from Foucault and before him, Huizinga. Stark then extends Bacon's enterprise of disenchantment to the chemist Daniel Sennert and Joseph Glanvill, interspersed with a generically invidious comparison of Browne's notionally "occult" rhetoric in the Religio Medici with Hobbes' account of "scientific" usage in Leviathan, from which Stark concludes that the evidence for a stylistic shift is ideological as against formal. That is, the issue of prose decorum stands for other epistemological and partisan commitments in the seventeenth century, as indeed it always has, which Stark rather loosely associates with the Restoration's abiding suspicions of republicans, dissenters and the papacy. Although Stark does not spell out the precise semantics of either party, he attributes to the experimentalists an insistence on the evident, ordinary and apparently conventional sense of speech, construed as undertaking the "rhetorical cure" of occultism's glamorous delusions, which aspired to reveal the secrets of things hidden from the Fall, if not from the beginning of the world. By setting such strict bounds to the signification of speech, it is Stark's thesis that seventeenth-century science sought not only the disenchantment of Nature but...

Plato’s chief argument against rhetoric is epistemological. Plato claims that rhetoric accomplishes what it does on the basis of experience, not knowledge. In this article I examine Plato’s criticisms of rhetoric in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus. I argue that Plato is right to identify rhetoric’s empirical basis, but that having this epistemic basis does not constitute an argument against rhetoric. On the contrary, Plato’s criticism of rhetoric serves to give us an epistemological explanation of rhetoric’s success.

This paper discusses the function of speeches given by Cicero to the popular assembly (contio) as reports about recent political events or decrees. Several of the few extant examples are part of oratorical corpora consisting of speeches from politically difficult periods, namely from Cicero’s consular year (63 BCE; Catilinarians) and from his fight against Mark Antony (44–43 BCE; Philippics). Cicero is shown to have applied his oratorical abilities in all these cases to exploit the contio speeches so as to present narrative accounts of political developments in his interpretation and thus to influence public opinion in the short term during the political process and particularly, within an edited corpus, in the long term.

214 RHETORICA Dietmar Till, Das doppelte Erhabene: Eine Argumentationsfigur von der Antike bis zum Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts (Studien zur Deutschen Literatur 175), Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006. 416 S. ISBN 978-3484 -18175-5 In bewuBter Anlehnung an den von Carsten Zelle (Die doppelte Àsthetik der Moderne. Revisionen des Schônen von Boileau bis Nietzsche (Stutt­ gart/Weimar: Metzler, 1995)) geprâgten Topos einer "Doppelten Àsthetik" geht Dietmar Till in seiner Studie dem "doppelten Erhabenen" nach. Was ist damit gemeint? Entgegen der weit verbreiteten, zum Beispiel von Christian Begemann ("Erhabene Natur. Zur Übertragung des Begriffs des Erhabenen auf Gegenstànde der auBeren Natur in den deutschen Kunsttheorien des 18. Jahrhunderts," Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 58 (1984): 74-110) vertretenen Meinung, daB sich der Be­ griff des Erhabenen im 18. Jh. aus der Rhetoriktradition loste und in den neu entstehenden, nun auch auf Naturphânomene angewandten àsthetischen Diskurs einfloB, vertritt Till die These, daB es schon "um 1700 nicht einen einzigen Begriff des 'Erhabenen' gab, sondern zwei: namlich einerseits das Erhabene als erhabener/hoher Stil (genus sublime) im Kontext der rhetorischen Lehre von den drei genera dicendi, andererseits das Erhabene (ύψος [hÿpsos], lat. sublimitas) bei Longin, das gânzlich auBerhalb des systematischen Zusammenhangs der rhetorischen Dreistillehre (genera dicendi) angesiedelt ist." (S. 17) Durch die Longin zugeschriebene antike Schrift Peri hÿpsus, die den Grundstein für die gesamte moderne Beschâftigung mit dem Begriff des Erhabenen legte, und deren Rezeption entstand mithin ein "doppeltes Erhabenes", das sich mit sich selbst in einem "fortwâhrenden Widerstreit" befand (S. 20) und die rhetorische Dreistillehre gleichsam von innen heraus sprengte, insofern die in Peri hÿpsus und seiner Rezeption propagierte Erhabenheit mit rhetorischen Mitteln nur noch bedingt herstellbar war (vgl. z.B.S. 206). Erst durch deren "Privilegierung" kam es in der Folge zu einer "Abwertung des rhetorischen Konzepts eines hohen Stils" und damit zu einer "Kritik an der Rhetorik überhaupt." (S. 20) Diese Figur des "doppelten Erhabenen" verfolgt Till in lockerer chronologischer Reihenfolge mit groBer Akribie und ungeheurem FleiB bis in die letzten Veràstelungen der Texte vor allem in der Zeit von Mitte des 17. bis Mitte des 18. Jhs. Es ist überwâltigend, welche Materialmenge Till aufbietet und welches Themenspektrum er abdeckt. Nach einem kurzen Einblick in die "Forschungsdiskussion" (Kap. I, S. 13-20) und einem groben Überblick über "Longin und de[n] frühneuzeitliche[n] Rhetorik-Diskurs" (Kap. II, S. 21-41) stellt der Autor im Kapitel "Theoriegeschichtliche Grundlagen" (III.l, S. 48-99) die klassische rhetorische Lehre vor, um deutlich machen zu kônnen, worin sich die "'andere' Tradition der Rhetorik" (S. 68), um die es ihm geht, davon absetzt. Diese "zweite Rhetorik" (S. 68) stellt Till vor allem in ihrer Auspràgung bei Longin, aber auch bei Hermogenes (vgl. Kap. 111.2, S. 99-133) in ihrem jeweiligen Kontext dar, um wiederum verdeutlichen zu kônnen, inwiefern die neuzeitliche Diskussion daran anknüpft. Auch Reviews 215 den theologischen Implikationen, die die Rede vom Erhabenen hàufig aufweist , ist ein eigenes Kapitel gewidmet ('"Theorhetor': Das Erhabene und die Simplizitàt der Bibel", Rap. III.3, S. 133-180). Till verfolgt die Debatte um den Stellenwert des als Beispiel für Erhabenheit geltenden "Fiat lux" in Frankreich und in Deutschland, die auf Boileaus Longin-Übersetzung von 1674 folgte und verwandte Züge mit der "Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes aufwies (vgl. Kap. III.5 und III.6, S. 193-233). Er widmet sich der Longin/Boileau-Rezeption zur Zeit der Aufklàrung in Deutschland, der Schweiz (vgl. Kap. IV, S. 234-316) und England (vgl. Kap. V, S. 317-346) und verfolgt die Begriffsentwicklung bis in die Zeit der Spàtaufklàrung (vgl. Kap. VI, S. 347-362). Neben den bekannten, in der Forschung hàufig zitierten Schriften von Boileau, Huet, Bouhours oder Bodmer und Breitinger begeht Till auch weniger ausgetretene Pfade, indem er etwa ungewôhnliche Seitenblicke auf die pietistische Tradition wirft (vgl. S. 309-316), oder gànzlich abgelegene Aufsàtze wie Karl Simon Morgensterns "Ueber Edle Simplicitàt der Schreibart" berücksichtigt (vgl. S. 361). Es scheint kaum einen Autor in dieser betràchtlichen Zeitspanne zu geben, den Till nicht zur Kenntnis...

This article seeks to explain Edmund Burke’s notorious verbal vehemence as the consequence of a deliberate rhetorical strategy. I argue that over the course of a thirty-year parliamentary career, Burke relied on sharply formulated historical contrasts in order to express his opposition to the policies of successive ministries and warn of threats to the nation’s defining achievements. Through the use of four distinct syntactical patterns, Burke cultivated a style of hyperbole which exaggerated both the failings of the present and the virtues of the national past, focusing on two periods in particular: the High Middle Ages and the early eighteenth-century era of Whig Oligarchy.

202 RHETORICA ilated the texts of the Aristotelian Organon to its own metaphysical purposes, practicing what amounts to an analytic logic long before Frege and Russell. It is this method to which Bacon refers by The Advancement's memorable image of the spider's silk, and by his own polemical emphasis on the observation of things over the manipulation of "mere" words, which is how he regarded the scientific role assigned syllogistic by Aristotle and his followers. As the incumbent authority in early modern England, the neo-aristotelian philoso­ phy of the schools was experimentalism's true competitor. In the meantime, the story of the stylistic controversy, both ancient and modern, still waits to be told. Victoria Silver University of California, Irvine R. Meynet, Appelés à la liberté (Rhétorique sémitique), Paris : Lethielleux 2008, pp. 236. ISBN 978-2-283-61255-2 Si tratta deU'ultima opera del gesuita Roland Meynet, già allievo di Paul Beauchamp, già docente di teología ed esegesi bíblica all'Università Gregoriana di Roma. In precedenza egli ha svolto la propria attività an­ che presso l'Università San Giuseppe (Beirut) ed è stato professore invitato all'Università di Torino e al Centre Sèvres di Parigi. Una traduzione italiana dell'opera qui recensita è apparsa nel maggio 2010 per le Edizioni Dehoniane di Bologna, nella collana "Retorica bíblica" in cui già figurano le principali opere del medesimo autore: La Pasqua del Signore (2002), Morto e risorto secondo le Scritture (2003), II Vangelo secondo Lúea. Analisi retorica (2003), Leggere la Bibbia. Un'introduzione all'esegesi (2004), Una nuova introduzione ai Vangeli sinottici (20062), Trattato di retorica bíblica (2008); Retorica bíblica e semítica 1 (2009), curato insieme a J. Oniszczuk. Tale collana corrisponde sostanzialmente - ma non per il presente volume - ad altra dallo stesso nome edita dalle parigine Editions du Cerf. La produzione di Mey­ net, ben nota dunque anche al pubblico italiano, si colloca all'incrocio tra teología bíblica e scienze del linguaggio, che l'Autore fréquenta non solo in riferimento al corpus degli scritti vetero- e neotestamentari, ma anche alia lingua e alia letteratura araba di cui è egualmente profondo conoscitore. I contributi raccolti nel presente volume sono collegati tra loro da un filo conduttore temático - quello délia liberté - assolutamente centrale nella letteratura bíblica. L'argomento viene sviluppato in tre sezioni: "II dono délia liberté" (su Esodo 14-15), "La legge délia liberté" (su Esodo 20, 2-17 e Deuteronomio 5, 6-21), "Gli inni alla liberté" (sui Salmi 113-118 e 136). Non sfugge a chi abbia una pur mínima consuetudine con l'esegesi e hermenéutica bíblica il fatto che tale modo di affrontare la vasta materia - avvicinando tra loro generi letterari differenti quali la narrazione storiografica, la legislazione e la preghiera innica - va intenzionalmente oltre l'approccio "storico-critico" Reviews 203 oggi prevalente. Si intende con tale formula quell'insieme di metodologie aventi come oggetto le coordínate testuali e fattuali di uno scritto e, nella fattispecie, di un libro bíblico: la costituzione critica del testo; la datazione dell'opera o di una sua sezione letterariamente omogenea; la personalità dell'autore; il genere letterario in cui l'opéra si iscrive; il carattere -unitario o risultante dalla rielaborazione di fonti preesistenti - délia sua redazione; la storicità del contenuto. La "retorica bíblica", alla cui elaborazione teórica e applicazione Meynet ha consacrato la sua lunga attività di studioso, appartiene per contro a quelle metodologie a carattere "sincrónico" che intendono costituire un contrappeso alla prevalenza quasi esclusiva di cui l'indagine a carattere storicocritico ha a lungo goduto in ámbito scientifico. Senza ignorare le conclusioni meglio assodate délia critica storico-letteraria, si punta allora piuttosto alla comprensione di unité letterarie significative - cruciali - del testo bíblico, esaminandole in base alla loro lógica interna e ai significati dischiusi dalle peculiarità délia loro struttura. Il punto di partenza di taie procedimento è quindi non tanto la storia, ricostruita criticamente - e in qualche misura pur sempre ipoteticamente - del singólo libro, quanto l'intero corpus canó­ nico délia Bibbia ebraica e cristiana. Due entità che, com...

204 RHETORICA trattandoli come fígli. Gli viene proposto, come figlio di Dio, di imitare la condotta di quest'ultimo. É «la legge della liberta» . Liberta per il servizio di Dio, sancito nell'alleanza, espresso nella vita e nel culto. Dall'esodo trae origine anche il rito pasquale. Nelle epoche successive, i figli di Israele avrebbero via via composto e cantato i sette salmi della «lode di Pasqua» (Sal 113-118) e della «grande lode» (Sal 136), poi ripresi nella celebrazione famillare della festa. Attraverso «gli inni alia liberta» la parola delLuomo e quella di Dio entraño in un reciproco scambio, costitutivo del rito. E' utilmente premesso al volume un essenziale Lexique des termes techniques (pp. 17-19), sulla terminología retorica piú frequentemente utilizzata dall'A. Sommario Prefazione. I. II dono della liberta. 1. II passaggio del mare (Es 14). 2. II Canto del mare (Es 15). II. La legge di liberta. 3. II Decálogo del libro delLEsodo (Es 20,2-17). 4. II Decálogo del libro del Deuteronomio (Dt 5,621 ). 5. Perché due Decaloghi? III. Inni alia liberta. 6. «Chi é come il Signore nostro Dio?» (Sal 113). 7. «Che hai tu, mare, per fuggire?» (Sal 114). 8. «Israele, confida nel Signore!» (Sal 115). 9. «lo credo» (Sal 116). 10. «Lodate il Signore, tutti i popoli!» (Sal 117). 11. «La destra del Signore é esaltata!» (Sal 118). 12.«Si, per sempre la sua fedeltá» (Sal 136). Francesco Pieri Facoltd Teológica dell'Emilia-Romagna, Bologna Olmsted, Wendy. The Imperfect Friend. Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. xi+293 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9136-9 Interdisciplinary interest in emotion as a critical category of thought has led to a range of scholarship discussing the ways in which affect permeates all discourse, shaping identity and behavior within private, professional, and public spheres. Wendy Olmsted's book, The Imperfect Friend, contributes to this conversation by exploring the rhetorical management of emotion evident in early modern texts. Focusing on the attempts of friends to persuade each other, Olmsted's exploration of the "gentle strand in the history of emotional persuasion" provides insight both into the organization of early modern affect as well as the role of emotion in rhetoric generally (p. 20). Like her other historical work, it is characterized by close attention to the textual basis for her claims about the practice of rhetoric and about early modern identity and culture. Olmsted traces a general distrust of strong emotion among early modern writers, as well as a distrust of the use of force or coercion to impose Reviews 205 agreement. Against the backdrop of these doubts and the powerful hope among Renaissance rhetoricians that public "eloquence could compel people to follow the laws" (p. 20), Olmsted identifies friendship as an alternative space where eloquence is used to gain assent and build emotional stability without the threat of coercion. Olmsted commits chapters to legal and religious discourse, poetry, justice, honor, and, finally, marriage. Tracing the rhetorical means of persuading emotion in these contexts reveals how, for instance, Protestant writers could envision "friendship ... as a model for ideal marriage" in order to promote marital harmony (p. 176). Olmsted finds social relationships represented in early modern literary texts and prose treatises as "nearly utopian site[s] where one friend appeals reasonably to the heart of the other" (p. 5). According to Olmsted, these texts display "historically and culturally specific topoi for producing [and regulating] emotion" (p. 6). Hospitality, for instance, emerges as one of the central topoi in Sidney's texts through which discourse on emotion is reproduced. Expecting an individual to be a good host no matter the context or guest, for instance, promoted the regulation of extremes of love, anger, and grief. Each era, Olmsted suggests, has its own cultural resources through which emotion is managed, resources that are an understudied aspect of rhetoric. As other scholars have concluded as well, emotion, far from being irrational, is open to persuasion. What Olmsted adds to our understanding of emotion is the way in which early modern culture made it possible for individuals to effect such persuasion through temperate means. Olmsted looks primarily...

Book Review| February 01 2012 Review: Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus, by Patricia Roberts-Miller Patricia Roberts-Miller, Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2009. x + 286 pp. Cloth $38.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1642-6. Paper $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-5653-8. Rhetorica (2012) 30 (1): 100–102. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.100 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus, by Patricia Roberts-Miller. Rhetorica 1 February 2012; 30 (1): 100–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.100 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2012 Review: Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language, by Debra Hawhee Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 215 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-809-9. Rhetorica (2012) 30 (1): 94–97. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.94 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language, by Debra Hawhee. Rhetorica 1 February 2012; 30 (1): 94–97. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.94 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2012 Review: Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare, by Peter Mack Peter Mack, Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. 210 pp. Rhetorica (2012) 30 (1): 97–100. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.97 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare, by Peter Mack. Rhetorica 1 February 2012; 30 (1): 97–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.97 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. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Pasquil the Playne, a dialogue written by the English Humanist Thomas Elyot (1490–1546), was inspired by Elyot's unsuccessful experience as a counselor to Henry VIII. Seizing on this biographical context, historians have read the dialogue as a product of Elyot's disillusionment, identifying Elyot with the blunt, truth-telling Pasquil. In contrast this paper reads Pasquil the Playne as a multi-voiced Lucianic dialogue, which gives expression to several perspectives on the rhetoric of counsel. This reading problematizes questions of appropriateness (prepon) and right timing (kairos) in giving advice to a prince. Moreover, Elyot exploits the open-ended spirit of the Lucianic dialogue to attempt to develop in the reader the prudential reasoning (phronesis) essential to wise counsel.

Other| February 01 2012 Addresses of Contributors to this issue Rhetorica (2012) 30 (1): 109–110. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.109 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Addresses of Contributors to this issue. Rhetorica 1 February 2012; 30 (1): 109–110. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.109 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. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2012 Review: Translating Nature into Art; Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric, by Jeanne Nuechterlein Jeanne Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art; Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011, 242 pp. ISBN:978-0-271-03692-2. Rhetorica (2012) 30 (1): 102–104. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.102 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 Review: Translating Nature into Art; Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric, by Jeanne Nuechterlein. Rhetorica 1 February 2012; 30 (1): 102–104. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.102 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. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2012 Review: Gli arcani dell'oratore: alcuni appunti sull'actio dei Romani, by Alberto Cavarzere Alberto Cavarzere, Gli arcani dell'oratore: alcuni appunti sull'actio dei Romani. Agones Studi, 2. Roma-Padova: Antenore, 2011, 241 pp. ISBN 9788884556554. Rhetorica (2012) 30 (1): 105–108. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.105 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Gli arcani dell'oratore: alcuni appunti sull'actio dei Romani, by Alberto Cavarzere. Rhetorica 1 February 2012; 30 (1): 105–108. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2012.30.1.105 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. © 2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The essay analyses several excerpts from Gabriele D'Annunzio's public speeches from the period of his reign in the town of Fiume as a self-appointed dictator. The concept of the “state of exception” as explored by Giorgio Agamben and Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the carnival are applied to a reading of D'Annunzio's exercises in political rhetoric.

Reviews Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges ofLanguage, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 215 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-809-9 "There are only bodies and languages." Alain Badiou's proposition at the beginning of Logics of Worlds neatly sums up the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke as elaborated by Debra Hawhee in Moving Bodies. Hawhee's book is an excellent study of Burke's career-long preoccupation with hu­ mans as "bodies that learn language." Hawhee selectively tracks this pre­ occupation from Burke's earliest fiction through his engagements with bod­ ily mysticism, drug research, endocrinology, constitutional medicine, and gesture-speech evolution to his final recapitulations organized around the opposition between nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action. Hawhee's multidimensional discussion presents a powerful case for Burkean explo­ rations of the rhetorical primacy of bodies and language, what Badiou more generally labels "democratic materialism." In her introduction Hawhee defines the transdisciplinary framework she uses to examine Burke's thinking. Distinguishing it from interdisci­ plinary study, Hawhee describes contemporary transdisciplinarity as an "effort to suspend—however temporarily—one's own disciplinary terms and values in favor of a broad, open, and multilevel inquiry," focusing on specific problems by drawing together radically different orientations (p. 3). Burke himself was a transdisciplinarian avant la lettre. His early critical method of "perspective by incongruity" brought together contrasting in­ terpretive frames to do productive explanatory work, and his svnecdochic clustering approach transformed associative constellations of terms into sug­ gestive meaningful wholes. Throughout Moving Bodies Hawhee provides a transdisciplinary kind of rhetorical history. She skillfully tracks Burke's in­ terpretive accomplishments in juxtaposing radically different discourses and tropically clustering terms associated with the body/language problematic. For example, in Chapter 1, "Bodies as Equipment for Moving," Hawhee pursues the "music-body-language cluster" through Burke's early fiction and music criticism to challenge past claims about his purported movement from aesthetics to rhetoric in the twenties. She persuasively argues instead that a distinctive rhetoric centered on bodily effects was there from the very Rhetorica, Vol. XXX, Issue 1, pp. 94-110, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2012 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.2012.30. IN4. Reviews 95 start. Hawhee explains how7 this Burkean rhetorical aesthetics arose from his fictional interest in characters' bodily rhythms and his critical interest in music s effects on audience bodies. Her account of Burkean talk about “bodies and their rhythmic/arrhythmic capacities" sets the stage for a rich rhetorical story about Burke's developing theories of language, rhetoric, and symbol-using generally. Haw7hee finds one passage in Counter-Statement to be especially significant, returning to it at least three times in Moving Bodies: The appeal of form as exemplified in rhythm enjoys a special advantage in that rhythm is more closely allied with 'bodily' processes." Rhetorical form appeals to somatic rhythms of “systole and diastole, alternation of the feet in walking, inhalation and exhalation, up and down, in and out, back and forth." In Chapter 2, "Burke's Mystical Method," Hawhee concentrates on Burke's engagement with bodily and intellectual strands of mysticism, es­ pecially in his tw7o books of the mid-thirties, Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History. During times of crisis and alienation, Burke sug­ gests, mystics emerge to perceive things differently. As he puts it in Perma­ nence and Change, mysticism is primarily “an attempt to define the ultimate motivation of human conduct by seeing around the corner of our accepted verbalizations." Significantly, a valuable resource of such mystical insight can be found in the human body. Writing to Allen Tate in 1933, Burke asserts that during historical periods when, as in the thirties, ethical systems fall into disrepute, mystics often seek in bodily processes an ''undeniable point of reference outside the system whereby sturdier and more accurate moral exhortations could be built up." For Burke, mystical bodies move thought tow7ard new7 perspectives and into unexpected meaningful associations. Hawhee...

100 RHETORICA his audiences. He was also more interested in practical politics than Mon­ taigne, as registered in his careful representations of the rivalries and tempo­ rary alliances in the Henry VI and Henry IV plays, and later in the not wholly risible representation of the plebeians in Coriolanus, which he sets against the hero's uncompromising denunciations of popular rule. Shakespeare's larger interest in representing the nation leads Mack to focus on Falstaff as common man-appetitive, exploitative, cowardly, defiant, and comradely according to circumstances—the human embodiment of copia. For his part, the later Montaigne more soberly celebrates the sensual as well as the moral and intellectual Socrates: "(B) The most beautiful lives to my taste are those which conform to the common measure, (C) human and ordinate, without miracles though and (B) without rapture" (De I'experience, quoted p. 135). he final chapter, "Ethical issues in Montaigne and Shakespeare" is best described as Peter Mack's commonplace book. Here he addresses such topics as Death, Revenge, Sex and Marriage, Fathers and Children, and compares Montaigne's ruminations on these matters to Shakespeare's. Even seasoned hands will be struck not only by the resemblance of the ideas voiced by the two writers but also by the similarly multiple perspectives each idea elicits, further proof that the grammar school habit of arguing in utramque partem was, as Jonson might say, "turned to blood." Despite some local disappointments, Mack's book achieves the end of all good scholarship and criticism: it makes us want to get back to Montaigne and Shakespeare with newly inquisitive eyes. Joel B. Altman University of California, Berkelei/ Patricia Roberts-Miller, Fanatical Schemes: Proslaven/ Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2009. x + 286 pp. Cloth $38.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1642-6. Paper $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-5653-8. Patricia Roberts-Miller's Fanatical Schemes is a capacious study of pro­ slavery thought in the south from 1835 through the coming of Civil War in 1861, though she sometimes glances backwards as far as the ancient world and forward to the Second World War and even occasionally the contempo­ rary United States. It also deals with psychological theory and fiction. Thus, this expansive book covers a lot of time and intellectual ground. There are many lines of argument running through this wide-ranging volume; the pri­ mary thrust is how proslavery rhetoric - often expressed in oratory, though often in print - shaped the course our nation traveled toward Civil War. "The tragedy of consensus" part of the subtitle is that proslavery rhetoric went too far and that led to the South's extremism and ultimate downfall. RobertsMiller presents one of the most comprehensive monographs in recent years Reviews 101 on the role of arguments and ideology in the coming war. Where historians have focused on the threat to the slave economy, the breakdown of the two party system, and the threat that slave labor posed to Northern free labor, Roberts-Miller argues that proslavery rhetoric explains (and even shaped) the movement towards war. (236) The book is set in motion by the abolitionist literature controversy of 1835, in which abolitionists used the US mails to distribute - or attempt to distribute - anti-slavery literature in the South. Vigilante groups and bon fires seem to have taken care of some, perhaps most, of the literature. However, many historians (and people at the time, too), blamed the abolitionists and that episode for starting the shift towards proslavery radicalism. RobertsMiller establishes three key points early on: proslavery rhetoric was welldeveloped before 1835; proslavery advocates silenced antislavery advocates by blaming them for inciting slave rebellion; and South Carolina was the center (or perhaps origin is a better phrase) of much of the proslavery advocacy. To stop criticism proslavery advocates thus harnessed fear that any criticism of slavery might lead to rebellion. That led to a cycle of silencing of dissenters, which made possible - perhaps even likely - more extreme rhetoric. Roberts-Miller develops this argument by first showing the ways that proslavery advocates stifled dissenting opinions - sometimes through threats of violence - which in turn led them to overestimate their support. (31) Then...

The essay analyses several excerpts from Gabriele D’Annunzio’s public speeches from the period of his reign in the town of Fiume as a self-appointed dictator. The concept of the “state of exception” as explored by Giorgio Agamben and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the carnival are applied to a reading of D'Annunzio’s exercises in political rhetoric.

Reviews 105 Alberto Cavarzere, Gh arcani delioratore: alcuni appunti sull'actio dei Romani. Agones Studi, 2. Roma-Padova: Antenore, 2011,241 pp ISBN 9788884556554. Dopo il foitunato manuale Oratoria a Roma. Storia di mi genero pragmático (Rema: Carecci, 2000), Cavarzere completa il personale excursus sulla retorica latina con un saggie sull'actio, in cui raccoglie e rielabora recenti contributi. II riferimente, nel presenta bene contenuti e finalité di ^ un libre che non vuele essere un'indagine sistemática di tutta la precettistica latina elaborata in materia di actio, ma intende offrire riflessioni, benché waste e approfondite, suggerite dalla lettura di Cicerone (de orat. 3, 213 ss.) e Quintiliano (inst. 11, 3).11 volume è articelato in tre sezioni ('parti') cerrispendenti ad altrettanti nuclei tematici ben definiti: la prima funge da intreduziene all'argemente, fernende al lettore tutte le coordinate necessarie per muoversi con sicurezza nella dettrina sulla 'recitazione'; la seconda e la terza parte vertono, invece, rispettivamente sull'analisi del discorso di Crasse nel terzo libro del De oratore, in cui l'oratore latino è portavoce delle riflessioni di Cicerone, e sullo studio del terzo capitolo dell'undicesimo libro deWlnstitutio oratoria di Quintiliano, in cui il retore da precetti puntuali per una corretta performance oratoria.il capitolo introduttivo (pp. 13-53) enuclea quelli che seno i principi fondamentali su cui poggia la dottrina antica relativa aWactio. Partendo dalla definizione di Cicerone, per cui est enim actio quasi corporis quaedam eioqnentia (orat. 55), l'autore ha modo di precisare: a) l'idea di actio (che comprende "tutti i comportamenti atti a permettere l'esternamento corporeo del discorso", quindi "le posizioni del corpo, i gesti, le espressioni del viso, le inflessioni della voce, la sequenza, il ritmo e la cadenza delle stesse parole"); b) la sua finalità patética (Vactio è animipermotio, arma capace di persuadere l'uditorio suscitando in esso vibranti emozioni); c) la dottrina dei segni: elaborata già da Aristotele, associa affezioni dell'anima da una parte, comportamenti e tratti della voce e/o del volto dall'altra, in un rapporto di corrispondenza causa-effetto; d) la distinzione dell'actio in due o tre elementi costitutivi: modulazione della voce e gestualità e, secondo alcuni retori, espressione del volto. Cavarzere sottolinea anche la natura problemática della dottrma sull' actio, percorsa da molti contrasti interni: il conflitto tra l'idea di oratoria intesa essenzialmente come persuasione logico-razionale, e la pratica di un discorso emozionale, corredato di recitazione e tróvate eclatanti, che domina sul pubblico conducendolo all'assenso; o il contrasto tra natura e ars, con la conseguente difficoltà di disciplinare mediante una rígida precettistica un fenómeno che sembra poggiare molto sul talento naturale dell'oratore; o ancora lopposizione, nota ad Aristotele (rhet. 3,12), tra il discorso scritto, ri­ goroso e preciso, perciô adatto alia lettura, e il discorso orale, ricco di elementi patetici e 'teatrali', perciô adatto alia recitazione. Inoltre, l'autore fornisce le informazioni piú importanti per capire la nascita e lo sviluppo della dottrina retorica deli'actio da Aristotele a Cicerone, passando per la necessaria intermediazione di Teofrasto. A tal proposito, Cavarzere ridimensiona l'influsso 106 RHETORICA che Topera di Teofrasto ha avuto sulTelaborazione della teoría dell actio in Cicerone, mettendo in discussione la presunta adesione dell oratore latino al sistema bipartito (vox e gestus) del peripatético. Con il secondo capitolo (pp. 57-81) si entra in medias res con la descrizione delle varie modalità di voce da assumere in funzione delle emozioni che si intendono esprimere, come illustrato da Cicerone in de orat. 3, 213-227. Alia dettagliata esposizione delle tipologie di voce, fa da premessa la discus­ sione di alcuni principi che interessano in generale Tanalisi di Cicerone: il riconosciuto potere performativo della parola; la condivisione delTimpianto aristotélico, almeno per quanto riguarda la finalité patética deïï'actio e la teoría dei segni che ne è premessa; Tesemplificazione, che avviene costantemente attraverso i riferimenti alia drammaturgia, dietro cui Cavarzere individua lucidamente Tesigenza di far appello alia memoria uditiva del lettore, perché possa meglio individuare le caratteristiche vocaliche richieste daïï'actio (memoria uditiva che matura non solo attraverso la frequentazione del teatro, ma soprattutto mediante la pratica scolastica della lettura ad alta...

This study features the interpretative framing and publication history of Frederick Douglass’s 2 January 1893 Haiti orations. Beginning with the initial accounts and discussions of the speeches carried in white and African American newspapers, then moving to their publication in pamphlet form, I explore the rhetorical consequences of authors’ and editors’ efforts to reproduce, interpret, praise, criticize, frame, and reframe Douglass’s words in the months following the delivery of the speeches. To conclude, I consider twentieth- and twenty-first-century efforts to edit and publish Douglass’s Haiti speeches.