Reviews Roxanne Mountford. The Gendered Pulpit: Preaching in American Protes­ tant Spaces. Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms Series. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. xii + 194 pages. The Gendered Pulpit makes a significant contribution to rhetorical studies, investigating the heretofore largely overlooked issue of how gender affects rhetorical performance in sacred spaces. Roxanne Mountford employs multi­ ple lenses—including rhetorical theory, feminist historiography, church and homiletic tradition, personal experience, and ethnography—and produces a sweeping, comprehensive, and compelling analysis of her subject. The first two chapters identify masculinist biases embedded within the spatial and sermonic conventions of the Protestant church. In chapter one, Mountford introduces an original and sure to be influential conception of "rhetorical space/' which includes not only the architectural setting and physical props incorporated into an oratorical performance but also entirely non-material elements: "rhetorical spaces carry the residue of history within them . . . [and so are] a physical representation of relationships and ideas" (17). Thus, culture, tradition, and ideology inhabit rhetorical space and shape speakers' performances. Mountford illustrates this point via the pulpit, an object/space imbued with "masculine" connotations that pose challenges to women preachers. First, the pulpit is designed for male rather than female bodies. One woman minister studied by Mountford must stand on a foot­ stool in the pulpit because of her small stature; even so, she is so dwarfed by the furniture that only her neck and head are visible to the congregation. Second, the pulpit enforces a distanced, hierarchical relationship between the preacher and the audience, spatially encoding the speaker as the authority and the listeners as silent, passive recipients of "his" wisdom. Mountford argues that this type of relationship is unappealing to women preachers, who tend to prefer a "populist" stance and seek more intimate connection with the congregation. Third, because of its strong masculine associations, the pulpit automatically casts women ministers as misfits in that sacred space. To overcome the gendered obstacles posed by the pulpit, women often opt to deliver sermons in alternative spaces, for example, leaving the pulpit and speaking from the church floor or preaching outside of the church entirely. Rhetorica, Vol. XXIII, Issue 4, pp. 401-404, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2005 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 www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 402 RHETORICA Women also confront problematic gender assumptions within preaching textbooks. Nineteenth-century manuals, for example, encouraged ministers to develop an authoritative, heroic, manly character that would empower them to save the world one person at a time, an irrelevant and inappropriate ethos for women. Twentieth-century manuals, while not as overtly mascu­ line, failed to address gender directly and instead promoted "a generic ideol­ ogy of gender" that left traditional masculinist biases intact (63). Women's strategies for overcoming the gender biases inherent to sacred spaces and traditions are examined concretely in the book's remaining chapters. Chapters three, four, and five examine the intersections of rhetorical performance, space, and the body through the practices of three contem­ porary and very different Protestant preachers, all of whom are the first women to lead their respective churches: Patricia O'Connor, pastor of a large and affluent suburban Lutheran church; Barbara Hill (Rev. Barb), minister to a struggling church located in a strip mall and serving a low-income, African-American community; and Janet Moore, leader of an urban and deeply divided Methodist church composed of conservative, aging, white, working-class core members and liberal, young, prosperous, gay and lesbian professionals. Although possessing varied gifts and serving dissimilar con­ gregations, the three women pursue a similar goal in their ministries, which Moore describes as creating "a community of Christians dedicated to peace, social justice, and diversity" (137). This "populist" purpose, so at odds with that promoted in conventional preaching manuals and traditions, inspires the women to develop new rhetorical strategies. One of the most significant is their use of sacred space to create a sense of community. As noted, tradition places the authoritative, male preacher in the pulpit and promotes...

Reviews 403 faith not only to sustain the congregation but also to encourage it to confront social injustice and work for racial uplift. Collectively, these women's spatial and rhetorical strategies point to an alternative method for crafting effective ethos and promoting Christian community. The epilogue addresses whether or not the "populist" preaching prac­ tices employed by O'Connor, Hill, and Moore are "feminine" ones. While acknowledging that a number of male church leaders (including Henry Ward Beecher, post-Vatican II priests, and African American preachers) have used similar methods, Mountford argues that women's abandonment of the pul­ pit, disclosure of the personal, and efforts to level hierarchy represent a significant "ritual transgression of sacred space" and tradition (156). In other words, women preachers choose alternative discursive methods and de­ livery styles in order to create ethos in a place and position traditionally antithetical to them. The Gendered Pulpit represents an important step toward understanding how gender affects discourse and rhetorical performance. Mountford con­ cludes by inviting other feminist rhetoricians into the new theoretical home afforded by a refigured fifth canon of delivery, and she encourages them to build upon her foundation and undertake further studies of women min­ isters in sacred spaces. Mountford's fine work makes a convincing case for the fifth canon as a promising site for investigating gender and rhetoric and, ultimately, for making the entire discipline inclusive and comprehensive. Lindal Buchanan Kettering University Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer, eds., Rhetor­ ical Education in America. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. 245 pp. This volume reconsiders contemporary rhetorical education from the perspective of the history of rhetoric. The editors provide a helpful intro­ duction (Glenn) and afterword (Lyday and Sharer). Many of the essays were plenary presentations at a Penn State Rhetoric Conference organized by the editors. The volume's most successful essays link a study of how rhetoric was historically taught with how it might be taught today. In "Lest We Go the Way of the Classics: Toward a Rhetorical Future for English Departments," Thomas P. Miller reviews the history of composition teaching as a history of crises of literacy, and suggests that we now need a curriculum that will move us from the traditional interpretive stance of the critical observer to the rhetorical stance of the practical agent involved in negotiation. Shirley Wilson Logan, in "'To Get an Education and Teach My People': Rhetoric for Social Change," examines the self-help schooling of nineteenth-century African 404 RHETORICA Americans for clues to help today's disenfranchised communities. Logan calls for "consilience," that is, a linking of knowledge across disciplines, and a rhetorical education that concentrates as much on critiquing and evalu­ ating contemporary discourses as on producing writing. With meticulous scholarship, in "Parlor Rhetoric and the Performance of Gender in Postbellum America," Nan Johnson reveals the conservative réinscription of gender roles in the potentially liberating growth of manuals for parlor rhetoric after the Civil War. Gregory Clark reminds us of the range of American rhetorics in his examination of the national park as a public experience establishing a shared sense of national collectivity, a training ground for citizens who need to respond to public conflict with transcendence. Essays by William Denman and by Sherry Booth and Susan Frisbie are not as strong. Denman argues that rhetoric lost its civic purpose during the nineteenth-century expansion that attempted to keep out the vulgar and the foreign by policing the borders of oral and written communication, but he ignores the growth in specialized textbooks and conduct-book rhetoric that offered rhetorical education to working class and female students. Booth and Frisbie argue that metaphor should be central to rhetorical education and analyze their qualified success in teaching metaphor to their students, but they mistakenly suggest that Aristotle did not find metaphor important to rhetoric and their claim that Renaissance rhetoric emphasized style not content has been significantly revised in recent scholarship. Other essays offer perceptive variations on the collection's theme of the history of rhetoric as a guide to future teaching. Susan Kates links James Raines's revision of the history of English to include respect for Appalachian English...

Abstract The Lady's Rhetorick is a well-developed rhetorical handbook for women that appears in print at a surprising time and place in British rhetorical history, when there were few precedents for rhetorical treatises addressed to women. This rare and relatively unknown handbook includes a feminist argument for the inclusion of women within the realm of rhetoric, through addressing its instruction to women, defining rhetoric in gender-inclusive ways, and including examples of women's rhetorical practice. It adapts Classical and French rhetorical traditions through strategies that are potentially effective with its female, English audience. Thus its publication was a bold and strategic contribution to women's and men's rhetorical culture within the context of contemporary gender ideology and educational change. The handbook's uniqueness and rarity should be viewed by scholars as the tip of an iceberg, signaling that a significant amount of women's informal rhetorical practice and education could have been acknowledged in its own time as “rhetorical.”

The Lady’s Rhetorick is a well-developed rhetorical handbook for women that appears in print at a surprising time and place in British rhetorical history, when there were few precedents for rhetorical treatises addressed to women. This rare and relatively unknown handbook includes a feminist argument for the inclusion of women within the realm of rhetoric, through addressing its instruction to women, defining rhetoric in gender-inclusive ways, and including examples of women’s rhetorical practice. It adapts Classical and French rhetorical traditions through strategies that are potentially effective with its female, English audience. Thus its publication was a bold and strategic contribution to women’s and men’s rhetorical culture within the context of contemporary gender ideology and educational change. The handbook’s uniqueness and rarity should be viewed by scholars as the tip of an iceberg, signaling that a significant amount of women’s informal rhetorical practice and education could have been acknowledged in its own time as “rhetorical.”

312 RHETORICA for Hume than for his moderate opponents. In his response, consistent with Common Sense philosophy, Campbell argues that the contest is not between two types of experience because our belief in testimony is prior to experience: we naturally accept witnesses' accounts in the absence of evidence that they are deceived or deceiving. As a philosophical point, Campbell's argument deserves the respect it has received. The problem is that Campbell does not consistently advance this view. As Suderman points out, Campbell dismissed Roman Catholic accounts of contemporary miracles—a blatant example, but hardly the only one, of Campbell's sacrificing philosophical consistency to defend his religious positions. I would argue for something closer to the reverse of Suderman's thesis. Campbell was an accomplished scholar, but he took as his mission defending and spreading the Word. As a thinker, he is most interesting when he feels most free of his mission. This explains why his relatively secular Philosophy of Rhetoric—a coherent synthesis of classical rhetoric with eighteenth-century empiricism—is his best and most important work, the one on which is reputation quite properly rests. My dissent does not, however, lessen my respect and gratitude for Sud­ erman's book. Suderman's exhaustive archival research and his intelligent reading of Campbell's works make Orthodoxy and Enlightenment a must read for scholars interested in Campbell. Arthur E. Walzer University ofMinnesota Janet Carey Eldred and Peter Mortensen, Imagining Rhetoric: Com­ posing Women of the Early United States. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. xi + 279 pages. Imagining Rhetoric is a welcome addition to the scholarship on Amer­ ican rhetorics. Truly a first, this book provides the only full-length study of early American women's rhetorical education and composition practices. In attempting to "glimpse how composition came to be situated in the lives of the women in the new nation," Eldred and Mortensen achieve two im­ portant tasks: they draw upon a wide range of sources, some rhetorical and pedagogical, others fictional and personal; and they resist a seamless or heroic interpretation of women's use of neoclassical civic rhetoric, al­ lowing instead for the discontinuities and disappointments that accompany liberatory struggles and revisionist historiography. This study focuses on six women, some well known, others more ob­ scure, but all grappled to make liberatory civic rhetoric their own: Han­ nah Webster Foster, Judith Sargent Murray, Mrs. A. J. Graves, Louisa Car­ oline Tuthill, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, and Charlotte Forten. Eldred and Mortensen recover an array of these women's "schooling fictions" from the Reviews 313 1790s to the 1860s, including female textbooks, anthologies, theoretical texts, practical writing guides, and syllabi, as well as novels, novellas, diaries, political essays, and reflective narratives. The authors demonstrate that ex­ panding the scope of sources of women's rhetoric is crucial to revising history, and in this particular case they effectively challenge the standard thesis of neoclassical rhetoric's decline. Just as "schooling fictions" imagine the roles of writing in women's post-Revolutionarv lives, Imagining Rhetoric compels readers to contemplate the possibilities of historiography. The introduction outlines the primary argument that liberatory strains of neoclassical civic rhetoric were "indispensable" to these women's visions of female education. The first chapter also raises the book's central question: were these women's uses of this rhetoric liberatory? The following chapters do not answer this question directly but illustrate the complexity of the issue and maintain a productive tension between possible responses. Chapter two discusses how female textbooks and didactic novels, both appearing after the Revolution, conceive of women's education quite differently. Whereas Donald Fraser's schoolbook, The Mental Flower-Garden, dresses up a restric­ tive and superficial education for women in liberatory garb, Foster's The Boarding School imagines an ideal education that teaches women to use liber­ atory rhetoric themselves to shape the new nation. Yet for Murray, the subject of the next chapter, a vision like Foster's is complicated by fears of sophistry, nonstandard English, and poor teachers. To temper the seductive aspects of misguided liberatory rhetoric, Murray develops a classically oriented "com­ monplace rhetoric," a system of instruction based on literary borrowings, which Eldred and Mortensen...

Reviews 199 nitá della sua opera per attribuirla ad Aristotele, affidandogliela come ad un padre adottivo. Ed in realtá, come ben osserva il Velardi, la Rhetorica ad Alexandrum deve non soltanto la sua fama, ma molto probabilmente la sua stessa sopravvivenza fino ai nostri giorni, al fatto di essere stata ritenuta opera aristotélica. Il volume é corredato da una serie di indici: Indice dei luoghi citati, Indice delle cose e della parole notevoli, Indice dei nomi. Ferruccio Conti Bizzarro Universita Federico ÍI, Napoli Nan Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), pp. 220. Nan Johnson's first book, Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America (1991), has been called "the most comprehensive assessment yet published of the rhetorics that shaped the teaching of English composition and pub­ lic speaking in the nineteenth century" (Miller 1993). It is an admirably well-researched account of how American college and university students were taught the rhetorical skills necessary for careers in the courtroom, leg­ islature, and religious professions, and has proved an invaluable resource for both historians and teachers of rhetoric and composition. However, in Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric in North America, Johnson is silent about women's relationship to this dominant male tradition of rhetorical instruction. It is this relationship which her second book, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910, takes as its focus. Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 1866-1910 is one of three inaugural titles in a new series, Studies in Rhetorics and Feminisms, edited by Cheryl Glenn and Shirley Wilson Logan for Southern Illinois University Press. In part, the book is a project of historical recovery, reconstituting a separate tradition of rhetorical training for women in postbellum American society. In this respect, it fits into a body of feminist scholarship on the history of rhetoric that begins with Doris Yoakum's 1943 article "Women's Introduction to the American Platform" and includes Lillian O'Connor's Pioneer Women Orators: Rhetoric in the Antebellum Reform Movement (1954), Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's two-volume Women Public Speakers in the United States: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (1993, 1994), Andrea Lunsford's Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (1995), Shirley Wilson Logan's "We Are Coming: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women" (1999), and Jacqueline Jones Royster's Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change among African American Women (2000). However, while Johnson praises these texts for carrying out the vital and ongoing work of situating prominent and forgotten women speakers in rhetorical history, 200 RHETORICA she differentiates her own historiographical method from such remapping projects (7). Johnson's purpose is not to redraw the rhetorical map by restoring forgotten contributions to the rhetorical tradition, but to ask why it is that women's contribution had been—until the advent of these projects—so com­ pletely excluded from the twentieth-century canon (10). To answer this ques­ tion, Johnson examines a wide range of nonacademic rhetorical materials, including elocution manuals, conduct books, and letter writing guides, that comprised a late nineteenth-century pedagogy of "parlor rhetoric" (2). Draw­ ing upon terms and concepts established by feminist historians to describe the gendered ideology of nineteenth-century American culture—the "cult of domesticity," the "cult of true womanhood," "Republican motherhood"— Johnson argues that the parlor rhetoric movement, while purporting to offer rhetorical training for both sexes, prescribed separate and unequal roles for both men and women (4). Men were to exercise oratorical power in the political domain, while women were to use their rhetorical skills to exert influence in the domestic sphere. This popular pedagogy defined a very tra­ ditional role for women and effectively guarded "access to public rhetorical space in American life" (16). The history of the erasure of women from the rhetorical canon, Johnson suggests, began in the nineteenth century, since the parlor rhetoric movement's relegation of women to a subordinate rhetorical role legitimized their erasure from twentieth-century histories of rhetoric (10). Johnson's argument seeks to answer why it was that, in spite of their struggle for a greater public role, white middle-class women at the end of the nineteenth century were...

130 RHETORICA tion. Fascicule I incorrectly refers to Peter of Blois's dictaminal treatise as an abridgement of work by Bernard of Meting (p. xxxv). An appendix contains the edition of an allegorical letter from Simon O.'s Summa dictandi which concerns the authorship of Regina sedens Rhetorica . A useful Glossary of Medieval Words and Unusual Spellings with ref­ erences to standard Medieval Latin dictionaries is followed by a list of cited manuscripts, editions of primary texts, cited secondary sources, and a full and accurate index. A copy of this book should be found in the library of every student of the ars dictaminis. Emil J. Polak Queensborough Community College, The City University ofNew York Kathleen Welch, Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999) xvii + 255 pp. The dust jacket of Electric Rhetoric sports a blurb from Andrea Lunsford which praises an author who "re-theorizes (and re-races, re-genders, and re­ performs) pre-Aristotelian rhetoric and then uses it to explore posthumanist literacy and rhetoric in a range of electronic spaces. In its insistent rejection of what Welch calls the 'worst' of Enlightenment, Modernist, and Postmod­ ernist values—and in its bold program for change—this book is going to make a lot of people nervous. A must read!" I open with Lunsford's remarks because they are as illuminating for what they say as for what they do not say. Welch's book is not a "program" but a polemic for change which, by the author's own avowal, seeks to "redirect inquiry" and raise more questions than it answers (p. 9). Welch does so handily in six chapters housed in two parts, "Classical Greek Literacy and the Spoken Word" and "Logos Perform­ ers, Screen Sophism, and the Rhetorical Turn", followed by an "Appendix: Excerpt from the Origin Myth ofAcoma and Other Records". In Chapter 1, "Introduction: Screen Literacy in Rhetoric and Composi­ tion Studies", she opens with the captivating image of the television screen which, for better or for worse, is ubiquitous in "locations of power as well as of powerlessness". In addition to contrasting it effectively with the com­ puter screen which "mostly appears in locations of power" (p. 4), Professor Welch vows to rouse humanities scholars from what she condemns through­ out as their utter refusal to acknowledge and rethink the massive cultural changes which attend the universal sign system of video. Of no surprise to those familiar with her prior excellent contributions to the history and theory of rhetoric and composition, she believes that that mission can best be accomplished by returning to (and revamping considerably) Isocratic rhetoric. Simply put, Electric Rhetoric proposes a holistic approach to three fundamental principles: (1) that literacy conditions "how people articulate Reviews 131 within and around their ideas, their cultures, and themselves, including their subject positions"; (2) that "any current definition of literacy must account for changes in consciousness or mentalité"; and (3) that literacy "depends on social constructions (including [sic] gender and racial constructions) that give value to some writing and speaking activities and that devalue others" (pp. 7-8). Chapter 2, "An Isocratic Literacy Theory: An Alternative Rhetoric of Oral/Aural Articulation", provides the forum for Welch's endeavor to re­ cover Isocrates. Praising his recognition of the dependence between articu­ lation and thought and his emphasis on aptitude vs. native ability (p. 51), she simultaneously vilifies his rhetoric, which "reveals for us strikingly one of the hideous aspects of classical rhetoric: it appears to erase women or to victimize us. This erasure works hand in hand with Isocrates's agenda of imperialism, an intolerance, a dehumanizing of Others, for which he must be held accountable" (p. 49). Our job, then, as readers of Electric Rhetoric, is to hold the past accountable. The main thrust of Chapter 3, "Disciplining Isocrates", is to dismantle "the Great Man theory of history writing, with some token women thrown in the same underlying theoretical structure" (pp. 82-83). It contains some fascinating readings of the Antidosis, notably the dancing bear episode and its link to learning ability. What is not clear, however, is why "Isocrates's biggest problem lies in his and...

Review Article| August 01 2000 Short Reviews: The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, by Edward Schiappa, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England, by Anne W. Astell, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, by Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe and Rhetorical Figures in Science, by Jeanne Fahnestock Edward Schiappa,The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), x + 230 pp.Anne W. Astell,Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1999), xii + 218 pp.Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe eds. The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999), vii + 279 pp.Jeanne Fahnestock,Rhetorical Figures in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiv + 234 pp. Janet M. Atwill, Janet M. Atwill The University of Tennessee Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Sybil M. Jack, Sybil M. Jack University of Sydney Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Wendy Dasler Johnson, Wendy Dasler Johnson Washington State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jean Dietz Moss Jean Dietz Moss The Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2000) 18 (3): 343–354. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.3.343 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Janet M. Atwill, Sybil M. Jack, Wendy Dasler Johnson, Jean Dietz Moss; Short Reviews: The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, by Edward Schiappa, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England, by Anne W. Astell, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, by Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe and Rhetorical Figures in Science, by Jeanne Fahnestock. Rhetorica 1 August 2000; 18 (3): 343–354. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.3.343 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. Copyright 2000, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 349 different levels of spiritual understanding may be debatable. Given the likelihood that an open text can serve to stimulate reflection on all these levels, too precise an attempt at political closure may be counterproductive. Sybil M. Jack University of Sydney Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe eds, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999), vii + 279 pp. This new collection brings back the excitement of the 1997 Saskatchewan conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, where its essays were delivered. There scholars of women's issues from such countries as Canada, France, the Netherlands, Romania, Australia, England, and the U.S. sized up others' perspectives, questioned assumptions, and pushed for clarity, but came away assured of women's place in a field that has notoriously excluded them. Restive fractiousness was not much evident in discussions about women, like the productive dissension arising for instance at the first Rhetorics and Feminisms conference later that summer, when differentials of power, economic means, and race tensions came to the fore. Differences like these are mostly missing, too, from this volume; nevertheless, Mason Sutherland and Sutcliffe's volume encourages and supports an array of scholarship about women that today still lacks ready access to print. Mason Sutherland's own essay opens the collection, a place due it as a plenary address for the gathering of international scholars, and also as "overview of the field" from the editors' stance. "Women in the History of Rhetoric: the Past and the Future" asserts that far from a margin, women have been "a matrix" for rhetoric. "[O]ur part in it has been to feed it, to support it, to enable it", says Mason Sutherland. Referring to all women's work as "maternal" has lately rankled many, but situating it as "anterior" to the rhetorical tradition can strike a resonant note (p. 10). Yet the author worries that a "world view of our own time can come between us and a clear understanding of" past women (p. 350 RHETORICA 27), and she pleads for a complexly ambivalent, but "sympathetic listening to ...voices of the past" such as Mary Astell’s (p. 14). Mason Sutherland presents Astell (1666-1731) as a rationalist and high church monarchist who nevertheless vigorously defended women's education and capacity for public service. The goal of Mason Sutherland's address and of the co-edited collection, then, is "to promote good in our present without doing the past the injustice of misunderstanding and misrepresenting it" (p. 29). The book's sixteen essays (one in both French and English) are arranged as they address ways women were (or are) excluded from, alongside, participating in, emerging into, and engaging the rhetorical tradition, five locations the editors also suggest for future studies of women in rhetoric. The first section, on exclusion, offers C. Jan Swearingen's essay, "Plato's Women: Alternative Embodiments of Rhetoric", which questions the ethics of dismissing such figures as Aspasia and Diotima by claiming that evidence for them is literary and thus suspect. "Directing the announcement selectively at studies of women in antiquity", Swearingen concludes, "is an act of pseudo­ objectivity that should not go unremarked" (p. 44). A wonderfully weird counterpoint is Jody Enders's text, "Cutting Off the Memory of Women", testifying against medieval torture that was designed explicitly to undercut and erase what were codified by the fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum as the notoriously unruly memories of women. These essays represent both thoughtful and provocative scholarship, and yet I wonder, looking back at the conference program, why for example Mary Garrett’s "Women and the Chinese Rhetorical Tradition" is not here. The collection focuses, as scholarship about women has, on studies that recover in rhetorical terms the work of particular women: Catherine of Sienna, Hester Ann Rogers, Lady Mary Wroth, Flora MacDonald Denison, and Gertrude Buck to name some honored here. I must confine myself here to a very few essays from this useful volume that even more broadly open up studies about women in rhetoric. One of them, from the "alongside" section, is Helene Cazes's "Verbum inuisiblile palpabitur: The Sibyls in the Second Half of...

Reviews 111 Shirley Wilson Logan, "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 255 pp. Shirley Wilson Logan introduces "We Are Coming": The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women by stating, "This book examines the public persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women intellectuals" (p. xi). She continues in the Preface to talk more specifically about the nature of the historical era of the analysis, constraints on the availability of texts, the nature of both public discourse and persuasive discourse, and the rhetorical theories and strategies that shape her analysis. Near the end of the Preface she says, "My hope is that these discussions might also add to a clearer understanding of nineteenth-century culture and of the ways in which the persuasive discourse of nineteenth-century black women adapted itself to its multiple audiences and multilayered exigences" (p. xvi). By this process, Logan makes the reader immediately aware of the extent to which the participation of African American women in public discourse during the nineteenth century signals complexity, rather than simplicity, and a need for contemporary researchers to account for patterns in rhetorical practices at the same time that we resist reducing those patterns to simplistic and monolithic notions of a "Black women's rhetoric". First of all, in focusing attention on specific rhetors, Logan re­ inscribes the historical record with the names of women who actively charted new pathways for rhetorical engagement during an era of remarkable social, political, and economic change. She brings texture to what we have come to know about the rhetorical performances of Maria Miller Stewart, Frances Watkins Harper, Ida Wells Barnett, Fannie Barrier Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Victoria Earle Matthews, Mary Shadd Cary, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, and others who in recent years have been brought to the attention particularly of teachers and scholars in women's studies, ethnic studies, and literary studies. To this list, however, she adds the names of women whose accomplishments are much less familiar: Rosetta Douglass-Sprague, Alice Woodby McKane, Lucy 112 RHETORICA Wilmot Smith, Mary Cook, Edmonia Highgate, Georgia Swift King and others. She reminds us that to date we have only scratched the surface of the history of African American women's intellectual work as she places the subjects of her study more visibly onto the rhetorical landscape. Using five themes that are symbolized by quotations from the texts of die rhetors, Logan explains in systematic ways how the rhetorical actions of this group were shaped and performed amid various systems and forces of the social environment. She raises for critical viewing points of inquiry that help us to envision these women both individually and collectively, interrogating, for example: the importance of allusions to an African past in the gamering of rhetorical power; their commitment to forging alliances across various communities of interest; the directing of their energies toward critical issues within the African American community; the use of specific strategies in the art of persuasion; their creation of their own arenas for rhetorical engagement; and the ways and means of rhetorical action in the particular arena of the Black Clubwomen's Movement, that is, their shaping of the discourse of racial uplift. Logan suggests that individually these women illustrate a breadth of rhetorical responses to a continuity of exigencies and that collectively they were quite astute at finding ways to invoke lively connections between themselves and their audiences; to invent themselves anew within their performative arenas; and to respond provocatively to the exigencies of multiply constrained rhetorical situations. The effect of Logan's approach is to underscore a critical point that she makes in her statement of purpose, that is, her assertion that these women are intellectuals. In attending to individual practices, common exigencies, and thematic points of inquiry, Logan makes visible that the case to be made ultimately with this analysis is not simply that African American women engaged persuasively in rhetorical practices in public arenas during this era, but that their doing so demonstrates the liveliness of their intellectual engagement and their ethical commitments. Logan's choice in making this case is to lead us analytically through a textual display, making conditions...

RHETORICA 108 General Prologue and three serious tales. Much of the comedic and fantastic is left unexplored; indeed, he writes, "I hope others will extend the discussion...I have only initiated" (p. 212). Although Russell, at times, claims rather brashly to know what Chaucer thought or didn't think, what he read or didn't read without much qualification, the edginess of his prose provokes response. His work confidently negotiates contemporary Chaucerian scholarship, solidly convincing readers that the trivium can serve as an important lens through which we can read medieval literary texts. ANNE LASKAYA University of Oregon Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), x + 221 pp. In Shakespeare and Social Dialogue, Lynne Magnusson accepts poststructural questioning of the unity and autonomy of the literary text and the independence of its "author" and characters but argues that this critique of formalism has unnecessarily dismissed close reading of language. She seeks to restore it by applying concepts from discourse analysis to a comparison of Renaissance correspondence and Shakespeare's dialogue. Her assumption that letters and plays come close to recording actual conversation seems a little naive, and I am not always sure whether her goal is to recover Elizabethan speech or to illuminate Shakespeare, but she largely achieves both. In place of the Aristotelian categories applied to Elizabethan letters by Frank Whigham, she builds on theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Pierre Bourdieu, and especially the empirical research of cultural anthropologists Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson. Their model describes attempts to manage risk and save face in conversation through strategies of positive politeness (identifying participants) and negative politeness (dissociating them) that take into account their social Reviews 109 distance, their relative power, and the culture-specific ranking of impositions. As an historian of rhetoric skeptical of imposing our own theories on Renaissance texts, I am startled by how well this approach explains Elizabethan language. Magnusson's study has three parts. Part One demonstrates that gender as well as class influences social dialogue. In Henry VIII, Norfolk employs positive strategies to advise Buckingham; Katherine and Wolsey address King Henry with negative strategies of deference and indirection. The correspondence of Edmund Molyneux, Sidney family secretary, reveals the complexities of Elizabethan relationships. Philip and Robert Sidney command him, while he responds to Philip's criticisms primarily with negative strategies. Lady Mary Sidney tempers her authority over Edmund with positive strategies. Shakespeare's Sonnet 58 and others deferring to his patron are best understood in the context of these conventions. Part Two focuses on letter-writing manuals and administrative correspondence, applying its examples to Shakespeare's plays. Magnusson contrasts Desiderius Erasmus' reform of the horizontal, homosocial relations of scholars in De conscribendis epistolis with Angel Day's reproduction of Elizabethan social hierarchies in The English Secretary, which nevertheless facilitates upward mobility. William Fulwood's The Enimie of Idlenesse, a translation of a French treatise, could have unwittingly supplied hints for the linguistic pretensions of Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In the former play, the lords' linguistic excesses respond to imitation of their style by upstarts, while in the latter, Theseus appreciates his subjects' incompetence because bumbling shows deference. Elizabethan business depends on personal relationship: thus recommendations ignore job qualifications and requests for favors cement friendship. The Marchants Avizo of Bristol merchant John Browne advises the apprentice to seek aid from fellow merchants, adapting the courtly "pleasuring style" to the commerce. The Merchant of Venice shows the same patterns in the Christian community, but Shylock's speech challenges them, and in Timon of Athens they break down. In the personal letters by which Sir Henry Sidney, Sir William Cecil, and other courtiers administer 110 RHETORICA the Elizabethan regime, negative politeness to equals hints that the intended audience is the Queen, while expressions of "trouble­ taking" and regrets for "trouble-making" to superiors may excuse independent decisions. Positive strategies of identification present weighty requests as trivial. 1 Henry IV contrasts Hal's mastery of this social language and Hotspur's impatience with it. Part Three explores language as theme in three plays. Greenblatt's concept of self-fashioning cannot adequately explain...

Reviews 113 are able to do so with a useful vocabulary, specific examples, and an assessment of the landscape of rhetorical practice that sets a new pace. Her title, then, "We Are Coming", gains increasing significance. Indeed, African American women are coming onto the rhetorical scene, and this analysis contributes greatly to our ability to take into account in interesting ways what their presence means. JACQUELINE JONES ROYSTER The Ohio State University Lynette Hunter, Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing, and the Arts (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), vi + 239 pp. Critiques of Knowing is a disarmingly accurate title for Lynette Hunter's most recent book, a study of the relevance of rhetoric to critical theories of language in several fields. Standpoint theory, Hunter proposes, integrated with rhetorical understandings of ethos, topos, and audience, can both illuminate, and exemplify the need for a rhetorical critique of "critical and aesthetic discourses for talking about communication, textuality, and the arts" (p. 7). The discussion moves patiently and informatively through discourses about ideology and the nation state, agency, the subject, recent studies of artificial intelligence and computing, hypertext models of literary texts, "scientific" discourse studies and linguistic poetics, feminist critiques of science, and feminist aesthetics. Hunter weaves rhetoric into the methods and languages of these disciplines with subtlety and common sense; readers will find in each chapter an up to date review of current critical theory in the fields reviewed. Another major accomplishment of the study as a whole is a collateral appraisal of the languages and epistemologies, stated and unstated, that each field employs. The comparison is no easy task, particularly since the fields under scrutiny have been prominent advocates of critiquing knowledge, understood as comprehension of the "real" 114 RHETORICA by subjects capable of knowing, and of representing their knowledge in representational, informative texts. This relentless critique of knowledge and language in recent theory, Hunter asserts, has resulted in a barrage of pluralisms and relativisms, each with its own canonical ideology. Hunter teases out different versions of an "essentialist-relativist" standoff that has emerged again and again among recent ideological constructions of plurality (pp. 6-7). In characterizing many of these problems Hunter is not alone; she will find readers welcoming her positions. What makes her discussion original and especially valuable is the way in which she brings to this impasse several richly drawn definitions of rhetoric. Because of its historical and conceptual self awareness as "inexorably different to the real world" in any literal or scientific sense, rhetoric can help construct an analysis of stance which will position the discourses of the disciplines historically, politically, and socially (p. 6). The prospect that rhetoric may be able to integrate and amplify a number of critical discourses about language that are currently bogged down in confessing their own impossibility and meaninglessness is a welcome vision. Hunter's exposition of the ethical and epistemological adjustments rhetoric could provide to contemporary critical discourses is also an anatomy of the past and present wealth that resides in rhetorical studies that continue to be marginalized by so many fields. The chapters are arranged by discipline: contemporary studies of the ideologies of nation-states, studies of artificial intelligence and computing applications within the humanities, hypertext methodologies, feminist critiques of science, and feminist critiques of aesthetics. Hunter's analysis establishes an important parallelism: a lack of rhetorical self awareness has hampered the discussion of the subject and of agency, of intelligence and knowledge, of the ethics of critical discourses visa -vis their contexts and audiences. Hunter defines her overall goal as "a critique of critical and aesthetic discourses for talking about communication, textuality, and the arts" (p. 7). The essentialistrelativist standoff that Hunter seeks to redress has locked many branches of discourse studies, including linguistics, artificial intelligence, computing, rhetoric and poetics, into methodologies that, somewhat oddly, base social and political tolerance for all Reviews 115 discursive practices upon scientific models of neutral description and quantitative analysis. Somehow, according to many of these models, discourses are produced by "the culture" or by "language". Alternatively, we find accusations of "essentialism" or "enlightenment humanism" hurled at any and all references to the subject, to agency, to an ethnic...

Reviews 97 mystics and celebrated preachers in Spain during the sixteenth century. This is the first rhetorical treatise intended for missionaries converting people from the East and West Indies. Studies of other rhetorical guides are found in the chapters on Fray Diego Valadés (ch.3), Bartolomé de las Casas and José de Acosta (ch.4) and José de Arriaga (ch.6). The study of Bernardino de Sahagún's General History of New Spain is one of the most important chapters of this book. Sahagún's text inserts a considerable range of reflections of the spiritual conquest of New Spain, and also reveals to the western world a survey of all aspects of Mexican religion, society and natural philosophy. The Amerindian contribution to the rhetorical tradition in Latin America is found in the huehuehlahtolli. These were the speeches delivered by the learned men, "the speeches of the elders". Abbot also studies the use and influence of the European rhetorical tradition in the readings and interpretations by this historian of the huehuehlahtolli. Abbot provides a much needed comprehensive and detailed examination of the theories and practice of rhetoric during the sixteenth and seventeenth century in Spanish America. He is successful in two important tasks: finding the points of contact and rupture between the European rhetorical tradition and the new emerging ideas about writing, oratory, and theory in the New World, and linking rhetorical theory to experiential knowledge and cultural understanding provided in colonial texts. SANTA ARIAS Florida State University Robert Crawford ed., The Scottish Invention of English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 259 pp. This collection of articles presents a counter-narrative to previous histories of English Studies that have ignored the crucial role of Scotland in the institutionalization of English as a modem discipline. As the title suggests, the twelve articles in the volume use a variety of approaches to develop the thesis that "English Literature as a university subject is a Scottish invention" and to 98 RHETORICA explore the implications of this thesis in the context of issues such as national identity, cultural politics, and gender in Scotland, England, America, and Australasia. Robert Crawford introduces the volume by situating it within the context of recent accounts of the development of university English. He then addresses the establishment of courses in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at St. Andrews, focusing in particular on the career of Robert Watson, who was appointed Professor of Logic, Rhetoric and Metaphysics in 1756. In the second article, Neil Rhodes continues Crawford's discussion of the curriculum at St. Andrew's by detailing the influence of Ramus on the teaching of Belles Lettres. Rhodes argues that it was the dissemination of Ramist pedagogy through the work of Roland Macllmaine at St. Andrews which led in the eighteenth century to the "redescription of Rhetoric as Criticism", first in the lectures of Watson and later in the work of Lord Karnes (p. 31). Joan Pittock focuses on the Scottish development of English Studies by examining the curriculum at Aberdeen. In her article, she illustrates the philosophical approach to Belles Lettres in the works of Aberdonian scholars such as David Fordyce, Alexander Gerard, and James Beattie, as well as the critical connections these scholars make between the concept of taste and the social and ethical development of students. The important social function of English Studies is also taken up by Paul Bator in his discussion of the novel in the Scottish university curriculum. Bator demonstrates the rise of the novel as a serious genre of study through careful analysis of lecture notes from Professors of Rhetoric at St. Andrews and Aberdeen Universities, acquisition and library borrowing records, and activities of the Edinburgh Belles Lettres Society. He argues that for Scottish professors of rhetoric in the eighteenth century "the novel provided a unique and unstoppable vehicle by which their students could observe and learn vicariously the manners of their English brethren" (p. 90). The new genre, then, functioned as a form of conduct literature through which the values of mainstream British culture were perpetuated in Scotland. Bator's analysis of the Edinburgh Belles Lettres Society, however, indicates that the study of the novel in the Scottish universities...

Short Reviews Cheryl Glenn, Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997) xii + 235pp. Glenn's purpose in Rhetoric Retold is feminist and cartographic: to remap the history of rhetoric by putting female rhetoricians and rhetorical practices solidly on the map. She challenges patriarchal rhetorical history at the center by including the voices of women who practiced rhetoric from the margins. Her hope is to revitalize "rhetorical theory by shaking the conceptual foundations of rhetorical study itself" (p. 10). Glenn's method derives from historiography, feminism, and gender studies. She uses "resistant readings...of the paternal narrative" and "female-authored rhetorical works" as well as "broad definitions of rhetoric" (p. 4). Her rationale for subject selection appears in Chapter One. Thereafter, she develops each historical chapter by overviewing cultural conditions of the period, describing women's place in those worlds, sketching the nature of patriarchal rhetoric at the time, then presenting the rhetorical activities of some exceptional women who were able to speak and write from the margins. Whenever she can, she highlights significant "points of contact" across all of the subjects she considers. Chapter Two examines pretheoretical sources of rhetorical consciousness in ancient Greece. Her reading of Sappho and female Phythagorians (Theano, Phintys, Perictyone) present rhetorical avenues that mainstream tradition never explored. She details public (argumentative) rhetoric (Corax, Gorgias, and Isocrates), then treats Aspasia as a silent heartbeat at the center of Pericles's intellectual circle. Aspasia was as likely a source of inspiration to Socrates and Plato as was Diotima. Glenn examines© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVII, Number 1 (Winter 1999) 89 RHETORICA 90 tradition (Cicero and Quintilian), challenging this tradition with voices from the margins. Here we meet Vergima, Cornelia, Hortensia, Amasia Senta, Gaia Afrania, Sempronia, Fulvia, and Octavia. In Chapter Three Glenn details Christian cultural dynamics, calling the Bible the "ur-text of history, wisdom, and doctrine" (p. 75). She discusses inheritance laws, conceptions of women's bodies, the theoretical equality of men and women in the eyes of Christ, yet the practical inequality of doctrine and of Christian institutional piety. Examining representations of women in medieval literature (imaginative, Marian, inspirational), Glenn contends that women never received "the full range of human feelings or characteristics" (p. 86). Women appear as inferior to rational men, some of whose (Augustine, Jerome) rhetorical practices (ars poetica, ars dictaminis, ars praedicandi) Glenn treats next in some detail. She shows how a small group of religious women achieved some release from the cultural hold, such as Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, whose unusual rhetorical practices Glenn tells in illuminating detail. In Chapter Four Glenn overviews the general nature of Renaissance culture, tracing the patriarchal bias of laws, the nature of women's work both outside and inside the home, the inferiority of women's bodies when compared to men's, and more. She situates classical and Christian humanism, showing the usefulness of humanistic education in society and religious life. Some special English women, according to Glenn, received humanistic training, and she traces their (modest) literary accomplishments. She contrasts these women to the fake representations of women in literature; some women appear overly assertive (Edmund Spenser's Britomart, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth), while others appear willfully disobedient (Juliet, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi). Such images reinforced women's exclusion from the public world of traditional Ciceronian rhetorical practice, though the entry of educated women became more probable as rhetoric and poetics converged in early English rhetorics that focused on style and eloquence. Glenn shows how three exceptional woman each used their own versions of rhetorical eloquence to make an impact on the public Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult...

Reviews 91 from the margins—Margaret More, Anne Askew, and Queen Elizabeth I. In Chapter Five Glenn stresses the performative value of her project: the "promise that rhetorical histories and theories will eventually (and naturally) include women" (p. 174). She presents "four ways...[to] work together to realize...[these] performative...goals": we must recognize our common ground, "explore various means of collaboration", reevaluate the notion of "silence", and recognize the unlimited opportunities for research in this area (p. 174-78). This was a difficult book to write. Feminist rhetorical scholars have already identified at least three limits such revisions must observe: any feminist account of the history of rhetoric cannot stand alone, but must be continuous somehow with mainstream rhetorical histories; simply inserting "exceptional women" into an otherwise unrevised traditional account is insufficient; and only by exposing the cultural oppressions that silenced women can we hope to break their hold. Glenn succeeds brilliantly in balancing these demands as she makes the best connections she can among new kinds of (feminist) interdisciplinary research, while observing a time limit necessary for publication. Her accomplishment is significant, even though there are probably readers who will want to set the record straight about this historical person or that fact, or to join the pieces of the story more amply. Nonetheless, the space her work creates teems with opportunities for research and for insights about possible rhetorical selves for us all. MOLLY MEIJER WERTHEIMER Pennsylvania State University Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed., Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997) 408 pp. Studies of women's contributions and challenges to the rhetorical tradition are still sparse but, thankfully, growing. Listening to Their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities ofHistorical Women constitutes a welcome addition to this blossoming field. Edited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer, Listening to Their Voices comprises an RHETORICA 92 impressive array of eighteen articles on women's rhetorical activities in contexts ranging from Ancient Egypt to twentiethcentury Europe and America. Authored by American scholars (with the exception of one Canadian), these articles greatly increase the available research on women in the history of rhetoric. The range of historical periods and cultural contexts that the articles address underscores the neglected richness and diversity of women's contributions to rhetoric, as well as the extent of all that remains to be recovered and reinterpreted. Notably, the collection stretches the realm of rhetorical activity beyond its traditional focus on public, argumentative speech or writing to include, in particular, the non-traditional genres of private letter­ writing and conversation. The inclusionary diversity of Listening to Their Voices reveals, as Wertheimer notes in her introduction, a feminist appreciation of difference and multiplicity (p. 4). At the same time, this collection is well-unified. Its unity stems, most fundamentally, from the authors' joint assumption that the study of women's rhetorical activities is worthwhile and important to the history of rhetoric. As well, the articles demonstrate a consistently fine historical contextualization of the women rhetors and rhetoricians they discuss, uniformly avoiding the imposition of contemporary social categories on these women of the past, highlighting instead the cultural and political realities which motivated and shaped their rhetorical activities. In some cases, these activities are presented as those of an "exceptional" woman who was "able to be heard in the male public sphere" (p. ix). More intriguingly, in my view, several of the studies foreground the practices of communities of women as well as rhetorical activities addressed to contexts beyond the "male public sphere". The volume is divided thematically into four main sections, an organization that allows us to perceive non-chronological links between the articles' differing historical points of focus. I will review each section in turn, commenting only—in the interests of brevity, not of ranking—on several but not all of the articles. The first section, entitled "Making Delicate Images", includes three articles that highlight the difficulties of recovering the rhetorical roles and contributions of women within a patriarchal tradition. Cheryl Glenn, for example, relocates Aspasia "on the rhetorical Reviews 93 map" by sifting through and reading against the "powerful gendered lens" of references to her in male-authored texts (p. 24...

Research Article| November 01 1998 Short Reviews George Kennedy,Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Crosscultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).Andrea A. Lunsford ed.. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995).Takis Poulakos,Speaking for the Polis: Isocrates' Rhetorical Education (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997), xii +128 pp.David Roochnik,Of Art and Wisdom: Plato's Understanding of Techne (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996) xii + 300 pp.Peter Auksi,Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal (Monfreal:McGill-Queen's University Press, 1995).Carole Levin and Patricia R. Sullivan eds. Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995) xiv + 293 pp.Marjorie O'Rourke Boyle,Loyola's Acts: The Rhetoric of the Self(Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1997) xv+274pp.L. L. Gaillet ed., Scottish Rhetoric and Its Influences (Mahwah, N.J.: Hermagoras Press, 1998) xviii + 238pp.Thomas W. Benson,Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth- Century America (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997) 200 pp. Mary Garrett, Mary Garrett School of Communication, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Shirley Sharon-Zisser, Shirley Sharon-Zisser Dept of English, Tel Aviv Univeristy, Ramat Aviv 69 978, Israel Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar C. Jan Swearingen, C. Jan Swearingen Dept of English, Texas A & M University, College Station, Texas 77843, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Edward Schiappa, Edward Schiappa Dept of Communication, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jameela Lares, Jameela Lares Dept of English, University of Southem Mississippi, Southem Station Box 5037, Hattiesburg, Mississippi 39406, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Victor Skretkowicz, Victor Skretkowicz Dept of English, University of Dundee, Dundee DDl 4HN, Scotland Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Don Paul Abbott, Don Paul Abbott Dept of English, University of Califomia, Davis, Califomia 95616, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Paul Bator, Paul Bator Dept of English, Stanford University, Stanford, Califomia 94305, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Thomas Miller Thomas Miller Dept of English, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1998) 16 (4): 431–454. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.4.431 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 Mary Garrett, Shirley Sharon-Zisser, C. Jan Swearingen, Edward Schiappa, Jameela Lares, Victor Skretkowicz, Don Paul Abbott, Paul Bator, Thomas Miller; Short Reviews. Rhetorica 1 November 1998; 16 (4): 431–454. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1998.16.4.431 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. Copyright 1998, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1998 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 433 the starting points for quite some time for those interested in other rhetorical traditions. Although Kennedy validates these traditions by placing them under the aegis of Greco-Roman rhetoric, this still constitutes a step forward in our study of world rhetorics, and we can be grateful to him for taking this first, hardest step. Mary Garrett Ohio State University Andrea A. Lunsford ed., Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995). Inscribing women into canons of writing from which they had long been excluded by a male-dominated canon-forging orthodoxy, telling (as a consequence of these inscriptions) new stories, "her" stories as distinct from his-stories, about past traditions of writing and speaking, pointing out what Carol Gilligan (1982) calls the "different voice" of women, those distinctive formal characteristics that distinguish "feminine" from "masculine" uses of language, all those have been standard goals of feminist criticism of the past two decades. In pursuing those goals, Reclaiming Rhetorica positions itself in relation to significant feminist critical projects such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's path-breaking The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) or Elaine Showalter's The New Feminist Criticism (1985) Most of the essays in the volume do, indeed, engage in reclamations of female voices and in the inscriptions of those voices in canons of writing and speech. Susan Jarratt and Rory Ong reconstruct the figure of Aspasia, who had been a teacher of rhetoric in classical Greece, from the fragmentary references to her in male-authored texts, and in the course of doing so, offer a compelling reading of the way in which Aspasia, as represented in Plato's Menexenus, both "exceeds the gender boundaries of Greek citizenship" that excluded women from oratory and is used to 434 RHETORICA "ventriloquize the very principles of exclusion that she challenges" by insisting on the myth of autochtonous birth of the Athenian citizen, which divests women of their reproductive role in the polis (pp. 19-20). Cheryl Glenn argues for redefining the English canon to include The Book of Margery Kempe on the basis not of the gender of its author but of her innovative contribution to narrative technique: the invention of a form in which "female spirituality, selfhood and authorship" converge (p. 59). Some of the essays in the volume underscore the formal and political contributions made by women whose place in the canon has already been recognized such as Marie de France, the author of a manual of ethical instruction for medieval women, Mary Wollstonecraft and Margaret Fuller, pioneers of women's rights, and twentieth-century intellectuals such as Suzanne Langer and Julia Kristeva. Others carve out a space for the discursive and social achievements of African American public women whose voices had largely been silenced, such as Ida B. Wells, a liberated slave who became a journalist and mounted a verbal anti-lynching campaign (p. 177) and Soujoumer Truth, who "commanded large crowds in an effort to arouse public action on the two most crucial political and social issues of her day -slavery and suffrage" (p. 227). Other essays in the volume address another common concern of feminist criticism: the existence of a distinctive feminine or female mode of language or vision of language. Thus C. Jan Swearingen rereads Plato's Symposium to reconstruct and reclaim Diotima's view of language as animated by "feeling, desire, love, and pity", a view that she identifies with recent insights into "women's ways of knowing" that stand in stark contrast to univocal, masculinist visions of language that have dominated Western thought since Plato (pp. 48-49). Christine Mason Sutherland shows how the rhetorical theory of the seventeenthcentury rhetorician Mary Astell diverges from that of her sources (Lamy and Descartes) in its emphasis on "caring", which is said to be "typical to women's approach to ethics", and its insistence on conversation rather than agonistic confrontation which recent research has associated with a "masculine epistemology" (pp. 113-15). In a similar vein, in her discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jamie Barlowe underscores the latter's belief in Reviews 435 "dialogue" as a discursive form that is appropriate for achieving "feminist aims of effecting changes...

Reviews 441 discrepancy between ideal simplicity and actual practice, as for instance among the Byzantine iconoclasts who were also patrons of secular art. At the least, this study on the tensions between modes of discourse suggests interesting directions for further study. Jameela Lares University ofSouthern Mississippi Carole Levin and Patricia R. Sullivan eds, Political Rhetoric, Power, and Renaissance Women, (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1995) xiv + 293 pp. This is a collection of essays by different authors on women who either wrote against, or were victimized by, misogynists. It closes where it begins, with Carole Levin and Patricia Sullivan associating Hillary Clinton and four queens: Isabel, Catherine de Médicis, Elizabeth I and Mary II (pp. 7, 275-81). It is a connection made in other papers, but here it is supported by another between the Republican Rev. Pat Robertson and John Knox (pp. 4-5). Where these title essays are destined to be short-lived, the critical essays sandwiched between vary enormously in subject and approach, are learned, and bear re-reading. But as there is no apparent theme to the entire book, and the organization is simply chronological, I try to group the material here into meaningful clusters. Only Jane Donaworth, choosing examples from Madelaine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish, Margaret Fell, Bathusa Reginald Makin, and Mary Astell, especially in Part 2 of A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1697), deals with the call for a revival of classical rhetorical education for women. Throughout the rest of this book "rhetoric" has other meanings. Daniel Kempton explores how Christine de Pizan teaches women to survive male oppression by 'dissimulation' or hypocrisy in Cité des Dames (1405) and Trésor de la Cité Des Dames. "Rhetoric" means "cant" or "slander" in the demonising of Anne Boleyn that Retha Wamicke describes; in the reiteration of allusions to women as breeding stock that Jo Eldrige Carney identifies in Shakespeare s Henry VIII; and in the representation of women as commodities to 442 RHETORICA be bought, sold, won or lost in the wagers of Puritan Whigs that Arlen Feldwick produces multiple examples of in the royalist Margaret Cavendish's comedies. In balancing the accusations of promiscuousness leveled by Jacobites against Mary II, or eulogies by her supporters, W. M. Spellman urges rejection of conventional seventeenth-century biographical material in order to reassess Mary's active political role in episcopal appointments. There are three essays on Elizabeth I. Ilona Bell contrasts de Feria's and de Quadra's accounts of Elizabeth's "rhetoric of courtship", comparing "Camden's retrospective vision of the virgin queen" (pp. 61, 77). Lena Cowen Orlin collects examples of Elizabeth's "spousal trope", of her "fictional motherhood" of her state and nobles, and her "trope of royal kinship" towards a "figurative family of European sovereigns" (pp. 89-95). Dennis Moore places Henry Howard's unpublished "Dutiful Defence of the Lawful Regiment of Women" (1590) into the context both of other defenses of female rule, and attacks upon it. Elaine Kruse compares propaganda against Hillary Clinton with that used against Catherine de Medicis after the 1572 massacre at Paris, and Marie Antoinette, all vilified on the grounds that they control power. And Elizabeth Mazola sees in Anne Askew's semiautobiographical Examinations her "larger project to educate her accusers about their epistemological faults" (p. 164). In the remaining essays the focus is not on rhetoric so much as on women and politics. Gwynne Kennedy describes Margaret Cavendish's reformist intentions in the History of the Life, Reign and Death of Edward II, where Cavendish repeatedly urges better government in practice rather than rebellion. The fly in the ointment is the Queen's vindictively cruel streak that manifests itself after she gains power: a "rhetorical marginalisation" that ' calls attention to...a disjunction in Isabel's characterization". There is also a separate note on Cavendish's authorship. And finally, Carole Levin describes two case histories of impersonation, the claim by Mary Boynton to be the daughter of Henry VIII and of Anne Burnell to be daughter of Philip II, reviewing the unfortunate consequences waiting those who almost talk their way into power. Although this book is in the SUNY series...

Abstract: The fact that classical and early medieval allegorical personifications were exclusively female has long perplexed literary scholars and rhetoricians. Although arguments have been made about this gendering using grammatical formalism for the most part, an examination of rhetoric's own deep structure—that is, the discursive metaphors it has always employed to talk about tropes and figures—promises to better articulate the gendered bases of the figure. Using analytical tactics drawn from Paul de Man's discussions of prosopopeia, this essay re-examines some of the rhetorical record along with programmatic imagery from patristic writings in order to demonstrate how women theinselves could serve as the “figures of figuration.”

The fact that classical and early medieval allegorical personifications were exclusively female has long perplexed literary scholars and rhetoricians. Although arguments have been made about this gendering using grammatical formalism for the most part, an examination of rhetoric’s own deep structure—that is, the discursive metaphors it has always employed to talk about tropes and figures—promises to better articulate the gendered bases of the figure. Using analytical tactics drawn from Paul de Man’s discussions of prosopopeia, this essay re-examines some of the rhetorical record along with programmatic imagery from patristic writings in order to demonstrate how women themselves could serve as the “figures of figuration.”

In the late Renaissance in England and France women appropriated classical rhetorical theory for their own purposes, creating a revised version that presented discourse as modeled on conversation rather than public speaking. In Les Femmes Illustres (1642), Conversations Sur Divers Sujets (1680), and Conversations Nouvelles sur Divers Sujets, Dediées Au Roy (1684), Madeleine de Scudéry adapted classical rhetorical theory from Cicero, Quintilian, Aristotle, and the sophists to a theory of salon conversation and letter writing. In The Worlds Olio (1655), Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, feminizes rhetoric by analogies from women's experience and inserts women into empiricist rhetoric by assuming discourse based on conversation rather than public speaking. In Women's Speaking Justified (1667), Margaret Fell revises sermon rhetorics, claiming preaching for women, but preaching in private spaces, in the Quaker prophetic fashion. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1701), Mary Astell adapts Augustine, proposing a women's college to promote a "Holy Conversation", and a rhetoric of written discourse treating writer and reader as conversational partners. These women use categories of the ideal woman to contest the gendering of discourse in their culture, questioning "private" and "public" as defining terms for communication.

Ever since Aristotle noted in the Rhetoric that, when fashionable, delivery ταύτό πoiήσϵι τη υποκριτική (has “the same effect as acting”; 1404a), classical and medieval rhetorical theorists fulminated against a crowd-pleasing oratory that had devolved into a theatrical spectacle more akin to that provided by the comic “actress” or the “effeminate” male. It cannot be coincidental, however, that, as the fifth rhetorical canon documents the theatricalization of rhetoric, it also offers companion testimony about the so-called emasculation of eloquence. In this essay, I examine the early belief that legal and religious rituals crossed gender lines into effeminacy at they same time that they crossed genre lines into theater. Close analysis suggests that the persistent association between theatrics, bad rhetoric, and effeminacy struck four different targets in a single, well-conceived blow: it marginalized women, homosexuals, bad oratory, and theater by casting certain types of speakers and speech as perverse and disempowered. Delivering delivery today thus entails exposing the ways in which early theorists themselves attempted to deliver it from evil.

Abstract: Ideology can be considered the ethos of the modern, liberal, democratic, capitalist nation state. Working from the descriptions of political ethos in Aristotle's Rhetoric, Tapies, and Politics, the differences from and similarities to post-Renaissance political structures underline the modern insistence on ways to stabilise the representation of the group in power, giving it its veil of authority, as well as ways to stabilise the description or definition of the individual within the nation. Looking at a number of contemporary commentaries from both political theory and cultural studies, the essay elaborates the rhetoric necessary to constitute ideology as the ethos of the nation state, and goes on to detail some of the constraints on the individual who, in gaining access to power, becomes subject to that state. The rhetoric of ideology provides not only an ethos for the character of the group in power, but also a set of guidelines for establishing a spedfic responsive state in the audience, an ethics of pathos. Its ethos is a strategy that imposes a strategy. The circularity of this ethos marks many of the analyses undertaken by current theory, and it has only recently been challenged by, among others, feminist historians of rhetoric. The discussion moves to a point where it asks: given that multinational and transnational corporations now share with the nation state the regularisation of capitalist exploitation, is ideology effective as a political rhetoric any more? Who is the wife of the nation state? And, what is the ethos of the multinational?

Abstract: In this essay, we explore the intersections of rhetoric and feminism and the resulting transformations to both disciplines. Rhetoric offers feminism a vibrant process of inquiring, organizing, and thinking, as well as a theorized space to talk about effective communication; feminism offers rhetoric a reason to bridge differences, to include, and to empower, as well as a politicized space to discuss rhetorical values. The fraditional rhetorical canons, with their enthymematic familiarity, mark the sections of this essay, for they emphasize the mutually heuristic nature of the border crossings between these two disdplines. Although the linearity of print demands that we treat the canons consecutively, they, nevertheless, have a tendency to overlap and interact. Our discussions of arrangement, style, and delivery, for instance, both assume and depend upon a rethinking of invention and memory—a rethinking that recognizes the role that both these canons play in current efforts to reconceptualize and reenact what it means to know, speak, and write. As our essay argues, such attention to what we speak about, and how and why we speak, urges ail of us not only to continued exploration and interrogation but also to a renewed responsibility for our professional and personal discursive acts.

Research Article| August 01 1991 Man Cannot Speak for Her Man Cannot Speak for Her, by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell. New York: Praeger, 1989. Vol. 1: A Critical Study of Early Feminist Rhetoric, pp. viii + 212. Vol. 2: Key Texts of the Early Feminists, pp. xxviii + 559. Christine Oravec Christine Oravec Communication Department, The University of Utah, Humanities Center, 201 Carlson Hall, Salt Lake City, Utah 84112. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1991) 9 (3): 275–278. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.3.275 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christine Oravec; Man Cannot Speak for Her. Rhetorica 1 August 1991; 9 (3): 275–278. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.3.275 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. Copyright 1991, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1991 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| May 01 1991 Outside the Rhetorical Tradition: Mary Astell's Advice to Women in Seventeenth-Century England Christine Mason Sutherland Christine Mason Sutherland The Faculty of General Studies, The University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive N. W., Calgary, Alberta T2N 1N4, Canada. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1991) 9 (2): 147–163. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.2.147 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 Christine Mason Sutherland; Outside the Rhetorical Tradition: Mary Astell's Advice to Women in Seventeenth-Century England. Rhetorica 1 May 1991; 9 (2): 147–163. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1991.9.2.147 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. Copyright 1991, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1991 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.