Reviews 215 Hanvelt, Marc, The Politics of Eloquence: David Hume's Polite Rhetoric, Toronto, University of Toronto Tress, 2012. 217pp. ISBN 978-1-44264379 -6 In this closely reasoned and commendably lucid book Marc Hanvelt acknowledges more explicitly than most historians of eloquence that his study of the rhetorical past is shaped by a preoccupation with the poli­ tics of the present. Hume's thinking about persuasion is important to him not only because it is unusually subtle, philosophically grounded, and dis­ tinctive in its own time, but also because it can tell us something about how we might better conduct our politics today. A key to Hume's thought, Hanvelt argues, is his enduring hostilitv towards a religious and political fanaticism which "has its parallels in our contemporary world" (p. 6). We need Hume's "accurate, just, and polite rhetoric" as an alternative or, as Hanvelt puts it, "antidote" (p. 75) to the "low rhetoric" of zealotry and fac­ tion which threatens to undermine the balanced opposition of interests on which modern democracies depend. As Hanvelt explains, the conclusions Hume reaches in his philosophical writings, which famously emphasize the relative weakness of reason as an influence in human nature, commits him to a conception of rhetoric in which the passions must play a lead­ ing role. But unlike the rhetoric of the zealots, Hanvelt argues, Hume's is an appeal to the passions modified bv politeness. Transferred from its eighteenth-century context, and stripped of its restrictive associations with an elitist code of manners, this "polite rhetoric" refuses to manipulate its audiences by oversimplifying or closing down choices, respects their capac­ ity for making judgements, and engages them on equal terms in sociable discourse. Other scholars have commented on what Arthur Walzer well de­ scribes as "Hume's rhetoric-friendly epistemology" and have assessed its eighteenth-century influence. Hanvelt's ambition is to proceed a step further and retrieve a coherent conception of rhetoric from Hume's own writings. Although he does not restrict himself to Hume's philosophical works, and indeed examines the later volumes of the History as an important source for Hume's thinking about rhetoric, the philosophy of mind Hume formulates in the Treatise and Enquiries is at the heart of his study. In its central chapters (2-5) Hanvelt teases out the rhetorical implications of Hume's conception of belief as a "lively idea" and elucidates Hume's view that eloquence can reproduce the "feeling" of belief that is more usually derived by means of association from custom and experience. By raising vivid and forceful ideas in the mind eloquence excites the passions and operates on the will. What, then, sets Hume's conception of rhetoric apart from the oratory of the fanatics (Hume's and, one infers, Hanvelt's antagonists) who work singlemindedly on the passions of their audiences? Hanvelt finds the answer to this question in Hume's conception of politeness, a moderating influence which equips the orator with the gentlemanly attributes of trustworthiness of character, conversational ease, and enlarged views. With the arguments of 216 RHETORICA Adam Potkay's The Fate ofEloquence in the Age ofHume (1994) in mind, he ac­ knowledges that in the eighteenth century "the polite virtues of manners and moderation . . . were generally considered to be incompatible with impas­ sioned rhetoric" (pp. 54—55). But Hume's politeness, like Hume s rhetoric, was distinctive. He associated politeness with moderation but unlike his friend Adam Smith he did not conceive of moderation as necessarily dis­ passionate. Politeness modified but did not repudiate the models of ancient eloquence, which Hume held in high regard. While Hume "distrusted impo­ lite rhetoric," Hanvelt concludes, he did not distrust rhetoric 'because it is impolite' (p. 76). The clarity with which Hanvelt disentangles complex ideas and explains how Hume differed from contemporary rhetoricians such as Campbell and Smith is one of the strengths of this book. He demonstrates beyond doubt that the idea of eloquence was unusually important to Hume, not least as an illustration and confirmation of his discoveries in the science of mind. But the approach he has taken to reading Hume's texts is not unproblematic. Acknowledging that "Hume never laid...

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

Modern scholars have sometimes noticed in the Lysianic speeches some affinities with characters and plots of the (New) Comedy. Through a survey of the corpus, this paper resumes the critical data, adds some new elements of similarity, not only with Comedy, but generally with literature and suggests that Lysias usually worked in this way. If so, it could be preferable to suppose that the logographer took the cue not from comedy, but from everyday life; secondarily, that he sketched characters and plots starting from the particular (his client) to the general; finally, that these artistic elements wrere useful to jury’s persuasion and not added to a following publication.

100 RHETORICA che sarebbe stata attiva presso il santuario di Pergamo (p. 21). Pochi i refusi, in un testo nel complesso ben curato. Elisabetta Berardi Università degli Studi di Torino Juliette Dross, Voir la philosophie. Les représentations de la philosophie à Rome. Rhétorique et philosophie de Cicéron à Marc Aurèle (Études anciennes, série latine 71), Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010. 413 pp., ISBN 978-2-251-32883-6 Cet ouvrage, version remaniée d'une thèse soutenue en 2004, est consa­ cré aux rapports de la philosophie et de la rhétorique à travers la question de la représentation esthétique:1 il s'agit de montrer comment et surtout pourquoi certains philosophes romains ont mis en image le concept de philosophie. Cette étude, placée sous Yauctoritas de Cicéron, vise à explorer un double paradoxe: 1. De manière générale, l'usage problématique de l'image, en tant qu'artifice de persuasion, dans les écrits de philosophes qui, à la suite de Platon, affichent une certaine méfiance à l'égard de la rhétorique; 2. En ce qui concerne la doctrine stoïcienne en particulier, la contradic­ tion entre rejet de la représentation rhétorique et réhabilitation épistémo­ logique de l'image dans le processus cognitif (p. 13). Les principaux auteurs étudiés (Cicéron, Sénèque, Marc-Aurèle) per­ mettent de couvrir une période de trois siècles mais l'enquête se fonde en réalité sur un corpus qui va d'Homère à Boèce et ne comporte pas moins de 130 œuvres. Le plan adopté évite l'écueil du catalogue et permet de mettre en évidence le double enjeu de ce travail, qui s'attache à analyser, d'une part, le rôle attribué aux représentations par les philosophes eux-mêmes, d'autre part, ce que révèlent ces dernières sur la conception que les philosophes avaient de leur discipline. Après une remarquable introduction, qui expose de façon limpide les enjeux liés à la notion de représentation dans l'histoire de la philosophie romaine (pp. 7-21), la première partie, fondée sur la lecture des rhéteurs antiques, est consacrée à l'étude de la notion de « représentation» rhétorique en relation avec ses fondements théoriques et philosophiques (pp. 25-102). Après une enquête sur la signification et l'évolution des termes repraesentatio, euidentia, enargeia, phantasia, cette partie donne lieu à une définition des tropes (métaphore, synecdoque, métonymie, catachrèse, allégorie, hyperbole) et ^ue l'auteur veuille bien excuser le caractère tardif du présent compte rendu. Le rapporteur, qui a reçu 1 ouvrage en août 2012, tient cependant à préciser que ce retard ne lui est pas entièrement imputable. Reviews 101 des figures (comparaison, éthopée, prosopopée, hypotypose) associés à la représentation (pp. 41-80). Ces deux chapitres assez descriptifs constituent un préalable théorique nécessaire à l'analyse du pouvoir de l'image, qui est menée à partir d'une réflexion sur les relations entre évidence, passion et imagination (pp. 81102 ). Juliette Dross souligne a juste titre le rôle joué par le traité Du sublime et 1 Institution oratoire dans 1 élaboration d'une théorie rhétorique de la phantasin . Elle démontre de façon convaincante que le Ps-Longin tend à rapprocher la phantasia logike des stoïciens, dans laquelle Venargeia constitue un critère de vérité objectif, de la phantasia imaginative des orateurs, fondée sur la mise en forme discursive d'un spectacle fictif. À la différence de Cicéron, qui avait lexicalement distingué l'évidence des philosophes (rendue par euidentia ou perspicuitns) et celle des orateurs (traduite par illustris oratio), Quintilien ac­ centue l'assimilation en usant du même substantif latin euidentia pour évo­ quer ces deux types d'enargeiai. D'où une conclusion partielle qui résume parfaitement la première étape de la démonstration: «On comprend dès lors l'intérêt de l'usage de la représentation rhétorique dans la prose philoso­ phique...

This essay argues that Edmund Spenser's legal poem, the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, considers how civil conflicts implicitly generate a basis for their own evaluation and resolution. To illustrate this idea, Spenser draws from a tradition of rhetorical argumentation stretching from Aristotle and Cicero to Rudolph Agricola and Philip Sidney. This tradition emphasizes how fictions establish the shared questions that can create a deliberative context for equitable judgment when general law and particular case come into conflict. Dramatizing this rational process through an allegorical legal trial, Spenser illuminates how divergent judgments and actions become ethically legible to one another as parts of the same deliberative whole.

This paper examines Abelard's engagement with disputation (disputatio) from the vantage point of twelfth-century scholasticism. Eschewing the well-worn details of Abelard's personal life and philosophical positions, analysis is instead focused on two parallel dimensions of his career: the manner in which he attempted to face-off with his adversaries through public debate and his underlying theory of disputation. It is argued that Abelard's theory is to be found not in his theological or logical works, but in his polemical letters and his ethical dialogue, the Collationes, which together offer a coherent hermeneutical strategy for discerning truth. Abelard's contribution to the art of disputation needs to be assessed in light of his broader involvement in the scholastic method and contemporary Jewish-Christian relations.

Thomas Hobbes is a severe critic of rhetoric but he is also a careful student and skillful practitioner of the art of persuasion. Many critics have therefore argued that Hobbes's views of rhetoric are both conflicted and inconsistent. In contrast, I argue that Hobbes's conception of rhetoric displays remarkable consistency. While he rejects the abuses of rhetoric abundant in political oratory he nevertheless embraces the power of eloquence. In Leviathan Hobbes reconciles his appreciation of eloquence with his distrust of oratory by refashioning rhetoric into a private, rather than public art, which fulfills many of the traditional duties of rhetoric.

Thomas Hobbes is a severe critic of rhetoric but he is also a careful student and skillful practitioner of the art of persuasion. Many critics have therefore argued that Hobbes’s views of rhetoric are both conflicted and inconsistent. In contrast, I argue that Hobbes’s conception of rhetoric displays remarkable consistency. While he rejects the abuses of rhetoric abundant in political oratory he nevertheless embraces the power of eloquence. In Leviathan Hobbes reconciles his appreciation of eloquence with his distrust of oratory by refashioning rhetoric into a private, rather than public art, which fulfills many of the traditional duties of rhetoric.

414 RHETORICA The focus of "Chapter 5 Giving and Getting Advice by Letter" is the way advice was offered as a gift to the recipient. This act of advice giving, though, was fraught with many perils. White's analysis of these perils shows encyclopedic knowledge of Cicero's social relationships and sensitive close reading. He shows how the advice giver had to balance the risk of bad advice with the opposite risk that bland generalities would be useless, and the hierarchical problem that while detailed and specific advice was the most useful gift, it could also appear condescending. Furthermore, advice given or received could implicate the interlocutors in each others' actions, leading to credit in the case of good results and discredit otherwise. Finally, "Chapter 6: Letter Writing and Leadership," shows the role of letters in the political events of 44 and 43, showing how letters functioned as part of political persuasion, influence peddling, and strategic communica­ tion. White shows how Cicero's letters help us understand his involvement in these events in a more personal and direct manner than the Philippic Orations and provide for us a rare opportunity to understand the positions, motivations, and maneuvers of the Roman political elite in a time of crisis. Overall, Cicero in Letters is an erudite, readable and original work that promises to be a major landmark in its area. Rhetorical scholars, however, will find frustrating a few significant lacunae in White's approach. The first, and most obvious, is that in explaining Ciceronian persuasion, White does not cite Cicero's rhetorical works at all, apparently thinking that Cicero's books on persuasion are of no use at all in helping us understand his per­ suasive practices. A second issue not addressed by White is the pedagogical circulation of letters. Roland Barthes famously said that "literature is what is taught" (1986). As many letter collections circulated in antiquity as peda­ gogical models, and Cicero's orations also functioned as models for students of rhetoric, it is puzzling that White does not address the possibility of peda­ gogical intentions and uses of the letters. Despite lack of direct interaction with rhetorical scholarship and rhetorical approaches to epistolography and epistolary theory, White's Cicero in Letters lays invaluable groundwork for future rhetorical studies of Ciceronian letters. Carol Poster York University Samuel McCormick, Letters to Power: Public Advocacy Without Pub­ lic Intellectuals. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.197 pp. ISBN (Hardcover) 978-0-271-05073-7 Samuel McCormick s new volume holds two arguments in equipoise. As its title suggests, the first argument focuses on Letters to Power. It is an investigation of epistolary rhetoric, its form, its audiences, its strategies, and its cunning. Make no mistake, this is not your standard issue ars dictaininis. Reviews 415 Under McCormick s careful hand, the old art of letter writing is invested with a host of pressing lessons: about power, about the professoriate, and about the history of rhetoric. As his subtitle suggests, the second argument is about Public Advocacy Without Public Intellectuals. Here McCormick's concern is with learned intervention. In an age in which the classic role of the public intellectual is increasingly unavailable, McCormick asks what modes of resistance are available for today's institutionalized academics? The book's conceit, of course, is that these two arguments work in tandem: that the epistolary form provides rhetorical resources for learned advocacy. McCormick's account of epistolary rhetoric is grounded in the letters of Seneca the Younger, Christine de Pizan, Immanuel Kant, and Soren Kierkegaard. He argues that the epistolary form constitutes a "minor rhe­ toric" (13). It is a "minor" rhetoric not because letters are subordinate to treatises, but because the letters harbor the capacity to destabilize the hierar­ chy according to which treatises or tomes are more important than personal letters. Most importantly from my perspective, as a "minor rhetoric" the letter harbors the potential to reshape the history of rhetoric. From the per­ spective of the epistolary form, Seneca, Christine, Kant, and Kierkegaard now fit squarely in rhetorical history. Significantly, their place in such a history requires no recourse to the thematics of their thought; Seneca thematized retirement and Kierkegaard...

This paper examines Abelard’s engagement with disputation <i>(disputatio)</i> from the vantage point of twelfth-century scholasticism. Eschewing the well-worn details of Abelard’s personal life and philosophical positions, analysis is instead focused on two parallel dimensions of his career: the manner in which he attempted to face-off with his adversaries through public debate and his underlying theory of disputation. It is argued that Abelard’s theory is to be found not in his theological or logical works, but in his polemical letters and his ethical dialogue, the <i>Collationes</i>, which together offer a coherent hermeneutical strategy for discerning truth. Abelard’s contribution to the art of disputation needs to be assessed in light of his broader involvement in the scholastic method and contemporary Jewish-Christian relations.

This essay argues that Edmund Spenser’s legal poem, the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie, considers how civil conflicts implicitly generate a basis for their own evaluation and resolution. To illustrate this idea, Spenser draws from a tradition of rhetorical argumentation stretching from Aristotle and Cicero to Rudolph Agricola and Philip Sidney This tradition emphasizes how fictions establish the shared questions that can create a deliberative context for equitable judgment when general law and particular case come into conflict. Dramatizing this rational process through an allegorical legal trial, Spenser illuminates how divergent judgments and actions become ethically legible to one another as parts of the same deliberative whole.

This essay takes up a discussion concerning the 1929 debate between the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger by reading it as an instatiation of an ongoing dilemma within the field of rhetoric. I argue that the Davos meeting may be productively read through the lens of rhetorical theory and that such a reading can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this event. The essay concludes by making a case for Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms as a normative ground for a rhetorical theory whose central purpose is to construct a decent, cultured, cosmopolitan, critical humanism.

This essay takes up a discussion concerning the 1929 debate between the philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger by reading it as an instatiation of an ongoing dilemma within the field of rhetoric. I argue that the Davos meeting may be productively read through the lens of rhetorical theory and that such a reading can contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this event. The essay concludes by making a case for Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms as a normative ground for a rhetorical theory whose central purpose is to construct a decent, cultured, cosmopolitan, critical humanism.

Reviews Christopher Reid, "Imprison'd Wranglers": The Rhetorical Culture ofthe House ofCommons, 1760-1800, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 270 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-958109-2 As rhetoricians expand the parameters of rhetorical histories, the inter­ actions between politicians and the people on "Main Street" or "out of doors" become as important as the words of famous orators. In Imprison'd Wranglers, Christopher Reid extends this approach to the eighteenth-century British Parliament. He argues for a "rhetorical culture" surrounding the House of Commons in an era when politicians became public figures. According to Reid, new relationships developed between Members and constituents with the expansion of print culture: "eloquence was flowing outside the House, to be captured, admired, or caricatured in print, before flowing back in the form of pamphlets and newspaper reports... which were read in the Chamber " (p. 14). By tracing this flow through multiple institutions and media, he produces a comprehensive account of change and continuity in parliamentary oratory. The title of Reid's book comes from William Cowper's The Task (1785), in which the poet, reading newspaper reports of debates, longs to "set th' im­ prison'd wranglers free." While Cowper reconstructs orators' performances, Reid examines now MPs were metaphorically "imprisoned" in the "chain of newspaper mediations that brought speech events in Westminster" to distant constituents and reassesses the rhetorical dynamics of distributing parliamentary speech in print (p. 3). By addressing "the complex reciprocity between print and oratory" in late eighteenth-century Britain, Imprison'd Wranglers complements recent work by Carolyn Eastman (A Nation ofSpeechifiers , 2009) and Sandra Gustafson (Imagining Deliberative Democracy, 2011), who explore how printed American oratory fostered new political identities in the new nation and promoted new forms of rhetorical education at the turn of the nineteenth century (Eastman, p. 10). Reid likewise studies how print reconstructions of the British Commons "brought parliamentary debate onto a broader terrain of public argument," "permanently altered the rhetorical context" of political speech, and gave the people "a stake in Parliament" (Reid, p. 11, 75). To survey the breadth of Parliament's "rhetorical culture," Reid exam­ ines newspapers, pamphlets, letters, collections like William Cobbett's ParliaRhetorica , Vol. XXXII, Issue 3, pp. 312-323, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2014 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.2014.32.3.312. Reviews 313 ntaty History ofEngland, and satirical sketches (p. 3). The architecture of the Chamber, the classical curriculum, and the working conditions of newspaper reporters also come under his purview. He draws on political historians like David Cannadine and Joanna Innes but approaches parliamentary texts and practices as a historian of rhetoric. Reid compares parliamentary speaking techniques to classical and eighteenth-century rhetorical theories and ad­ dresses the challenges of working with transcripts of oral performances. For him, reporters transcripts matter less as accurate representations of speech than as efforts to represent "the House as a place of collective rhetorical action ... in which political arguments and meanings were forged" (p. 17). These archives, including the transcripts, the Chamber, and reporting practices, re­ veal how oratory circulated beyond the Chamber and brought constituents into the political nation. Imprison'd Wranglers comprises four sections: Part 1 (Chapter 2) ap­ plies Roxanne Mountford's "geography of a communicative event" to St. Stephen's Chapel, the home of the eighteenth-century Commons (p. 25). The three chapters of Part 2 discuss how Parliament reached the public through the "fictitious tribunals of the press" (Chapter 3), reporters who copied debates from memory (Chapter 4), and visual satirists like James Gillray (Chapter 5) (p. 75). In Part 3, Reid examines how MPs modified classical rhetorical practices including declamation (Chapter 6) and the con­ cept of ethos (Chapter 7) in the face of increasing publicity. Part 4 features a broader view of parliamentary rhetorical culture with a case study of the 1773 Lord Clive debates (Chapter 8) and an exploration of MPs' persuasive uses of quotation (Chapter 9). Reid concludes with...

204 RHETORICA on the value for the human sciences of "contested concepts" and the endless debate which must go on around them. This collection provides models of different ways of studying the fas­ cinating parallelism between medicine and rhetoric. It shows how rhetorical knowledge can enhance our understanding of early modern medical and health-related works and it offers engaging readings of some very interesting little-known texts. Peter Mack Warburg Institute, London Patricia Pender, Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (Early Modern Literature in History, eds. Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield), New York: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2012. 218 pp., ISBN: 978-0-230-36224-6 In Early Modern Women's Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty, Patricia Pender argues that the modesty topos frequent in early modern English women's works should not be read literally, but as "the very mark of liter­ ariness" and "early modern women's subtle and strategic self-fashioning" (3). In the introduction, Pender surveys earlier feminist criticism on modesty topoi that used this material to explain women's lower rate of publication, and argues that these critics have read the passages too literally, and, as a consequence, that we continue "to underrate [early modern women's] con­ siderable rhetorical ability and agency" (6). Pender's study reviews the use of modesty topoi in prefaces and writings by English authors Anne Askew, Katherine Parr, Mary Sidney, Aemilia Lanyer, and Anne Bradstreet, and also examines what Pender sees as a general tendency "to read women's modesty tropes autobiographically" (7). Chapter 1 surveys advice for the deployment of modesty topoi in classi­ cal and Renaissance rhetorics: Cicero, Quintilian, Ad Herennium, Castiglione, George Puttenham, Abraham Fraunce, and John Hoskins. Especially helpful is the summary (pp. 22-24) of the flexible and varied forms of this rhetorical strategy: disavowal of authorship, remorse, belittling the achievement, lack of time for writing, writing only at the behest of another, role of compiler not author, apology citing utility of the subject, and, in general, writers' discounting of their abilities. Pender links the use of the modesty topos to early modern understanding of figures as "dissimulation" (borrowing from Puttenham) and early modern anxiety about "women's innate duplicity" (34). Pender, whose background is English literature not history of rhetoric, convincingly argues that for women, as well as for men, avowing modesty is often not an apology, but rather a display of rhetorical proficiency. In Chapter 2 Pender quite brilliantly uses John Bale's editing of Anne Askew s Examinations as an example of the emphasis on "collaborative co- Reviews 205 authorship (al) in the early modern history of the book. However, in­ stead of seeing Bale as supporting Askew's purpose, Pender searches for those places where Askew's words "exceed the frame that Bale provides for them, finding that Askew offers a "profoundly confident and combative self-representation under the guise of weak and humble woman" (49). This conclusion is not news in Askew criticism, although reading Askew through the rhetoric of modesty is innovative and helpful. It is disappointing that Pender did not follow through, though, on her initial observation. For ex­ ample, she argues that Bale misunderstands Askew's rhetoric of modesty (complimenting judges, humble submission, quoting authority) to circum­ vent her accusers (60-61), that Bale himself is misled by Askew's modesty into reading her as a weak woman made strong by God's grace (59-60): "[wjhan she semed most feble, than was she most stronge. And gladly she rejoiced in that weaknesse, that Christ's power myght strongelye dwell in her" (61). Here is a missed opportunity to argue, instead, for collaborative coathorship, to see that Bale does understand Askew, recognizing her wily use of Paul's celebration of the weak and foolish made strong and wise by Christ (1 Corinthians 1:27—a celebration that Erasmus had famously deployed in The Praise of Folly). In Chapter 3, Pender suggests that focusing on modesty rhetoric in Katherine Parr's Prayers or Medytacions refines "our understanding of her development of a degendered, generically-human speaking subject" (72). But, suggests Pender, although Parr does not apologize for her sex, substi­ tuting the...

Reviews Walker, Jeffrey. The Genuine Teachers ofThis Art. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2011.356 pp., ISBN: 978-1-61117-016-0 Walker s 1 he Genuine Tenehers of This Art takes its title from a line in Cicero s De orntore in which Antonius attempts to delineate "inexperienced teachers ' who do not train rhetors like Aristotle from sophists like Isocrates who train skilled speakers (pp. 5,44). The title line frames the major argument of the book—that training rhetors, that is, teaching is the unifying element of rhetoric that brings together strains of "discourse, practices, analysis, [and] teaching" (p.l). Walker claims scholars of rhetoric have much overlooked the "school masters." His attempt to correct this omission establishes Isocrates as the founder of the sophistic paideia, which Walker traces from the fourth century BCE, through the Hellenistic period and stasis theory, the late Repub­ lic in Cicero's De orntore, and finally into the Second Sophistic in the works of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Through this pedagogical history, Walker ar­ gues, that for Isocrates the "handbook" (teehne) and sophistic traditions were one, effectivelv decentering the "philosophic" tradition. There are too manv high points in The Genuine Teachers of This Art, particularly' for scholars of the history of rhetoric and teachers of rhetoric and composition, to summarize here but permit me to try to touch on a few. Walker's first chapter, a (counter) reading of Cicero's De orntore, begins by classifying Aristotle's rhetoric as primarily interested in "judgment and theory" as opposed to "civic deliberation" and therefore largely outside the realm of training rhetors (pp. 19, 22). Walker makes a brief but interesting argument that Antonius' topics are not from Aristotle but rather are closer to Isocrates' ideai, arguing Aristotle is primarily referenced for the sake of authority (pp. 23, 30-1, 48). Ultimately, Walker argues what Cicero's Crassus and Antonius finally agree on—broad experience—is fundamentally Isocratean (pp. 41, 53, 56). The claim that "there was a teehne of Isocrates, and that it probably was the ancestor of the later sophistic technai” concludes Walker's second chapter (p 90). In order to advance the possibility of an Isocratean teehne, Walker must refute several lines of argument prevalent in the field, specifically that if Isocrates did write a teehne, it was more likely a collection of example speeches, that the teehne attributed to Isocrates was written by a "younger Rhetorica, Vol. XXXII, Issue 2, pp. 195-211, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . C2014 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.2014.32.2.195. 196 RHETORICA Isocrates/' and that it was against Isocrates' own philosophy to write a handbook of precepts. These lines of argument, predominantly advanced by Karl Barwick, though fairly broadly accepted, are refuted by Walker at length, in part, by using parallel case based on other sophistic technai and, most interestingly, by suggesting two definitions of techne, which Walker distinguishes with a subscript to differentiate a non-creative, rule driven art with a more or less guaranteed product from a creative, methodological driven art with the possibility of a successful outcome produced by a skilled practitioner (pp. 63-75). The following chapter takes in an in-depth look at what a techne of Isocrates might have looked like with Walker concluding that the techne likely had two main parts, "the pragmatikos topos [concerned with inquiry and invention] and the lektikos topos [concerned with style] and possibly ... an organized set of progymnasmata" (p. 154). While many of Walker's conclusions in this chapter suggest the techne probably looked similar to the Rhetoric to Alexander, this third chapter is a fascinating look inside Isocrates' pedagogy. These two chapters on Isocrates are likely the most controversial in the book, and while Walker admits he has offered no "irrefutable" evidence of a techne of Isocrates, he does marshal a persuasive case based on available evidence, however scant. The Fourth Chapter, "In the Garden of...

202 RHETORICA mainstream composition studies, especially in the model of conversation for pedagogy" (p. 127). Examples of an exception as well as this merging are explored in texts by women such as Mary Augusta Jordan and Gertrude Buck, respectively. As noted, the conclusion argues that the tradition s de­ cline is linked to women starting to write rhetoric and composition textbooks for mixed-gender audiences. I would have liked to see more discussion of this claim, particularly related to the discussion of Buck. For instance, Buck's texts emerged directly from the all-women classes she taught at Vassar Col­ lege, and many examples in her books are targeted specifically at women. Although Buck's case may have been atypical, perhaps these differences could have been explored. In addressing new questions related to women's theorizing of rhetoric, Conversational Rhetoric is to be commended for enacting the new directions that historians and feminist scholars in the field have urged (Royster and Kirsch 2012; Gold 2012). In so doing, it illuminates a significant tradition of women theorizing conversation and introduces us to women with whom we may be unfamiliar. The book also suggests the need to investigate other examples of how women have theorized conversation and other potential ways that women have conceptualized communication. In spanning three hundred years and investigating such a wide array of texts, the book also is exemplary in terms of the breadth and depth that Donawerth brings to such an analysis. Suzanne Bordelon San Diego State University Stephen Pender and Nancy Struever eds, Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, ix, 299 pp., ISBN: 9781 -4094-3022-6 Rhetoric and Medicine have been compared since antiquity. Both are eminently practical arts, requiring their practitioners to work with the vari­ ability of human experience, on the basis of a growing but still contestable body of theory. Both are intimately concerned with persuasion and with the emotions. Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe is a collection of ten essays, introduction and afterword, based on panels from the 2003 annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. This is a thought-provoking collection, including some excellent essays, which explores the relations be­ tween medicine and rhetoric from many different points of view and in relation to a range of different types of subject-matter. Stephen Pender in­ troduces the collection with an analysis of the physician's different needs for persuasion (rational and emotional). His own essay "Between Medicine and Rhetoric (revised from his 2005 article in Early Science and MLedicine} surveys the relations between rhetoric and the art of medicine in Plato's Phaedrus and Reviews 203 Gorgias, Aristotle s Rhetoric and the early modern English physician John Cotta's A Short Discoverie of the Unobserved Dangers ofSeverall Sorts ofIgnorant and Unconsiderate Practisers of Physicke in England (1612). Focusing on the uncertainty of medical diagnosis and treatment enables Cotta to align the physician's pragmatic flexibility with the prudence of the orator: "a practical, prudential interpretation of probable signs directed toward intervention.. .is at the heart of medical practice" (p. 59). Jean Dietz Moss analyses five local physician's descriptions of the health­ giving properties of the waters of Bath, which aimed to promote the attrac­ tions of the spa, written between 1572 and 1697. She analyses the rhetori­ cal techniques employed by these publicists, discussing their deployment of narratives, authorities and evidence in order to extol the divinely pro­ vided health-giving properties of the spa. Richard Sugg analyses the use of the metaphor of anatomy in a range of sixteenth and seventtenth-century titles. Andrea Carlino resituates Andreas Vesalius within the humanist mi­ lieu of 1540s Padua and particularly within the Accademia degli Infiammati. He argues that the title of Vesalius's famous work De humani corporis fab­ rica libri septeni (1543) alludes through the word fabrica both to Cicero's De natnra deorum and to architectural works such as Sebastiano Serlio's Sette libri d'Architettnra. He documents Vesalius's connections with members of the Accademia degli infiammati, including a letter to Benedetto Varchi in which he mentions the recent publication of Daniele Barbaro's commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric. He...

Reviews 85 Paddy Bullard, Edmund Burke nud the Art of Rhetoric, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 272 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00657-7 In Edmund Burke and the Art of Rhetoric Paddy Bullard "proposes a theory of Burke's rhetoric" (p. 3). Bullard approaches the question "of the artfulness with which Burke wrote and spoke" (p. 21) not by superimposing the \ ocabularv of classical rhetorical handbooks on Burke's performances; not by using Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful as a source of technical, critical vocabulary; but bv looking to Burke's oeuvre to identify the rhetorical questions that preoccupied Burke and how he addressed the questions throughout his career. Readers will witness enactment of Burkean rhetorical virtues as Bullard examines Burke from perspectives as broad as classical and early modern thinking about rhetoric, to the practical occasions and stakes of Burke's political writing and speaking, to the textual dynamics of his rhetoric. The result is a compelling analysis of Burke's rhetoric that deserves to be read by scholars of eighteenth-century rhetorical theories and practices, and by any scholar interested in generating theory based on practice—indeed anv scholar who wants to read exemplary rhetorical criticism. Broadly speaking, the central question or issue that preoccupies Burke is the nature of the speaker-audience relationship. Bullard describes Burke's rhetoric as a "rhetoric of character," concerned with "who is addressing whom, on behalf of whom" (p. 5; see also pp. 7, 11). Bullard captures the dynamic nature of the relationship when he describes Burke's art of rhetoric as "an art of moral equipoise" (p. 10; see also p. 22). Put differently, "A well-established ethos giv es a speaker licence to be urgent, to abjure false delicacy, and to resist neutrality, and it allows him to do all this without renouncing the claims of equity" (p. 9). The speaker earns the audience's trust by displaying knowledge of characters and his own political judgment, and the audience grants the speaker a license to advocate with zeal. Bullard develops his analysis and argument in an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion. In the introduction Bullard defends his objects of study and critical vocabulary. He chooses to focus on "the relatively small number of treatises and speeches that Burke authorized as his own (either through publication or private endorsement), while the texts of his publicly reported speeches are treated with caution" (p. 21). Readers will almost certainly find the arguments for the selection to be sound, the central one being that Burke calls for attention to, and Bullard attends to, stylistic detail because this is where the action is—where audiences experience rhetorical effects. In chapters 1 and 2, Bullard covers standard topics in writing the history of rhetoric, namely Burke's intellectual context for thinking about rhetoric and the place of rhetoric in Irish education. This is not a routine history of rhetoric that broadly covers the usual suspects but instead focuses on clas­ sical, seventeenth-century and contemporary writers who explored the idea that is at the heart of Burke's rhetoric of character: that orators are best able to 86 RHETORICA secure a good moral character in the minds of their audience by demonstrat­ ing their understanding of what moral character is" (p. 28). Bullard covers Aristotle's treatment of rhetorical ethos and its guises in Roman thinkers in­ cluding Cicero and Quintilian. He uses Locke as a critical prompt to discuss writings by Hobbes, Edward Reynolds, and La Bruyère and to trace "how the rhetorical category of ethos returned to relevance during the seventeenth century as part of a popularized prudential moralism" (p. 42) in history, psy­ chology, and character-writing. He traces the Aristotelian model's adaptions in writings about pulpit eloquence and their secular processes in Shaftesbury and Smith. Similarly, the history of eighteenth-century rhetoric education among English speakers is not commonplace but instead advances the claim that "there are several important respects in which the Irish, rather than the Scots, should be seen as the real pioneers of this new development ["the study of literature in modern vernacular languages"] in the art of rhetoric" (p...

88 RHETORICA who seek a history of rhetorical theory that teaches, delights, and moves will find it here. Beth Innocenti University ofKansas William Pallister, Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). ISBN 978-0-80209835 -1; Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art ofRhetoric (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2012). isbn: 978-1-107-02150-1 Two books published in the last few years each have much to offer on the subject of how the English poet and statesman John Milton (1608-74) employed rhetoric in his various works and particularly in his epic poem Paradise Lost. William Pallister reminds or perhaps informs Miltonists of the centrality of rhetoric in the Renaissance and its utility both for persuasion and morality. He argues that contemporary criticism has overlooked the formal poetic and rhetorical presentation of Milton's ideas (7-8). Pallister's particu­ lar focus is Paradise Lost and the rhetorical issue of future contingency, which he traces through Milton's epic poem in terms of three distinct rhetorics, of hell, of heaven, and of paradise, the paradisal one being the most rhetorical because the most contingent. Pallister divides his book into two equal halves. His first five chapters are heavily documented demonstrations of Renaissance rhetoric, its clas­ sical roots, and Milton's engagement with it. In chapter one, Pallister first identifies contingency and probability as key issues in deliberative rhetoric and locates their discussion in such authors as Augustine, Boethius, Ock­ ham, Aquinas, Valla, Pomponazzi, Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin. He then demonstrates how Milton's theological concerns for free will in Paradise Lost are reflected in his preservation therein of future contingency. Chap­ ter two surveys the classical rhetoricians who had written on contingency, such as Isocrates, Aristotle, and Cicero, since Milton cites these authorities in his short pedagogical tract, Of Education (1644) rather than any of the educational theorists of his own period. Chapter three surveys Renaissance rhetoric in terms of its focus on eloquent style and its prescribed utility in politics, ethics, poetry, and theology, and in chapter four demonstrates how Milton's own prose identifies eloquence as "none . . . but the serious and hearty love of truth" (80; An Apology against a Pamphlet, Yale Prose 1: 948-49), a love that Pallister associates with Milton's "humanistic faith in the power of eloquence to captivate its audience and compel them to accept Christian values" (10). Chapter five considers rhetoric's relation to Christian theology and particularly the Bible as a rhetorical text, preaching as a rhetorical art, and God as a rhetorical and especially a poetic speaker. Reviews 89 With this foundation laid, Pallister proceeds in the second half of his book to investigate the rhetorical nature of Paradise Lost. In chapter six, he takes us to the poitions of Milton s epic that take place in heaven. Since there is little contingency possible in God's omniscience, the master tropes of hea\ en aie polugtoton and especiallv conduplica110, and the favored genus dieendi is epideixis, especially praise. Chapter seven surveys Satan's presentation as an orator in various authors before and including Milton, whose Satan is an accomplished orator, and chapter eight identifies the master trope of hell as demotes, or rhetorical cleverness, by which Satan not only deceives others but “tricks himself into seeing a contingent future that no longer exists for the defeated angels" (176). Chapters nine and ten treat rhetoric in the Carden of Eden, “the hub of Milton's rhetorical universe, [where] the theological, dramatic, and discursive conditions exist for rhetoric to thrive on all levels" (197) and where it comes most into its own as a agent of moral persuasion in the psychomachia of man's inner being (198). Pallister's text is a manifestly learned, monograph-length discussion of how Renaissance rhetoric, and particularly deliberative rhetoric, informs the greatest epic in the English language. Elis volume is well worthy to have won the Modern Language Association of America's Prize for Independent Scholars in 2009. Like all sublunary publications, however, it is not always perfect. Its extensive surveys in the first half are sometimes more trees than forest and might have benefitted from more signposting...

Reviews 91 my own undergraduate teaching, especially Pallister's idea that there are master tropes for heaven, hell, and paradise and Shore's denial that Milton engages in iconoclasm, and I have recommended the full texts to my graduate students. Historians of rhetoric at any institution that regularly teaches Milton or his period would do well to order copies for their libraries and also to consider acquiring copies for themselves. Jameela Lares The University of Southern Mississippi The Complete Prose Works ofJohn Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82); Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00747-5; Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Fig­ uring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England, Ithaca and Lon­ don: Cornell University Press, 2012. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-4965-9; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 202 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4378-9; Garry Wills, Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.186 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-15218-0 Once upon a time (or so the story goes), the study of language and rhetoric in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature was dominated by con­ siderations of style, and style meant especially figurative language. Since then, a generation or two of critics including Joel Altman, Marion Trousdale, Thomas Sloane, Wayne Rebhorn, Frank Whigham, Victoria Kahn, Lorna Hut­ son, Peter Mack, and Lynne Magnusson have shown the importance for early modern literature and culture of a richer conception of rhetoric, one which understands rhetoric as a vital contributor to a wide range of intellectual, political, and social processes and agendas. In view of this work, one could be forgiven for suspecting that the prominence of figuration in the latest crop of books on rhetoric and the literature of Shakespeare's England means that literary criticism is doing the time warp again. As we will see, however, this is not quite your grandparents' rhetorical criticism, though the intervening years have changed less than one might have expected. The first of the four books under review here, Raphael Lyne's Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition argues that rhetoric in Shakespeare is a means not only of presentation and persuasion but also of thought. By "rhetoric" Lyne means primarily tropes, or figures of thought. He grounds this argument in recent research in cognitive linguistics, which probes the relationship between language (especially metaphor) and cognitive processes in the brain, and he devotes a chapter to surveying both this work and a wide range 92 RHETORICA of studies that find similar links between rhetoric, literature, and thought. Another chapter argues that early modern rhetoric manuals implicitly tie tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche to mental processes and thus constitute a "proleptic cognitive science" (50). Lyne then illustrates his thesis in chapters on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Qymbeline, Othello, and the Sonnets, concentrating on the thought patterns found in ornate speeches delivered at stressful moments. He reads Dream as a study of how metaphor works, showing the different ways that characters and groups in the play try to make sense of their experience: "Characters think differently and therefore they speak differently" (129). His study of Cymbeline shows how its characters, faced with "secrets, revelations, and impossibilities," "struggle to find the tropes by which to understand their world" (158). Othello depicts a world debased by Iago's ability to transfer his "twisted cognitive patterns" (186) to others, causing "a kind of heuristic short-circuit, where rhetoric becomes self-fulfilling and inward-looking" (163). The Sonnets show that thought can happen outside dramatic characters, while confirming that rhetoric can bring "heuristic failure" (209) as well as success. As this summary suggests, I don't find a distinctive thesis about Shake­ spearean thought in this book, and in noting the many critics and rhetoricians who have connected literature and rhetoric to thought Lyne undercuts his claim to originality. Possibly Lyne means his contribution to lie less in his conclusions than in his method, for he begins the Dream chapter by claiming to have found "a different way of reading some...

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

Reviews Michael S. Kochin. Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing, and Art. University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Univer­ sity Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-291-03455-3 The selections in this hook are best read as a series of loosely connected essays, situated within political science, informed bv scholarship in the rhetoric of Greek and Roman antiquity They build, in a leisurely way, toward a theory of rhetoric as an art of persuasive speech especially suited to the task of the politician—the construction of political advice. In his introduction, Michael Kochin proposes to use the diffusion of ideas in scientific communities as a model of political persuasion: "the politician seeks an understanding of policy through his or her operations within political institutions, just as the scientist seeks understanding through his or her operation wdthin political institutions. Scientific knowledge is thus created and distributed throughout the netw'ork: it is not merely diffused through it from center to periphery. I appeal to this clear case to explain the unclear case of public life: because the social structure of science is well studied, the rhetorical concepts I want to explicate are more clearly visible in it" (11). That w'ould have been an interesting book, but it is not the one Kochin ended up writing. Five Chapters forgets all about scientific communication for chapters on end, and the ideas that it develops about political communication are a very mixed bag. It is, for all that, an engaging and stimulating book. Kochin offers fix e topics for the investigation of political persuasion: character (or ethos), action (or stasis), things (the creation of facts), nothing (communication that maintains relationships) and art (specifically rhetoric as a means of understanding artful speech). Issues of argument and affect are dismissed in the introduction: political persuasion, according to Kochin, depends on the credibility of the speaker and the telling power of facts, and emotion is "a junk category" (15). Both the topics that Kochin has chosen and those he has left aside offer a reader fair warning that the ride ahead will not be a trot through familiar territories. The chapters on character, action, things, and nothing approach issues of political persuasion from different directions. Character takes up the Aristotelean traits of knowledge, benevolence, and virtue, treated here under the topics of competence, identification, and empathy. The chapter also Khetorica, Vol. XXXI, issue 4, pp. 445-464, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . T2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2013.31.4.445. 446 RHETORICA discusses the ways in which political leaders "empty" their personalities of idiosyncracies, the better to reflect common values (40). He critiques theories of ethos that see it as artificial, connecting Aristotle's rhetorical ethos to his political ethos. And he introduces a theme that will connect these four chapters: any program that favors "measures, not men" as the focus of political discourse fails to take into account the public's need to judge measures by the men who advocate them. The chapter on action is an extended reading of Demosthenes' "On the Crown," taken as a model for political advocacy in its orientation to the future, and to the possible. Kochin insists that the Athenian audience's approval of the speech is an extension of its judgment of Demosthenes as a competent, benevolent counselor who represents the collective interests of the Athenians. Judgments based on motives or on the results of actions are necessarily flawed, incomplete, or irrelevant. Kochin illustrates this analysis with examples from American political discourse, including the first of many positive citations of Calvin Coolidge, a president I do not ordinarily associate with rhetorical skill. The chapter on things is one of the strongest in the book. Kochin de­ velops an account of enargeia in a discussion of political speeches that deploy facts, statistics, vivid narratives, and images. The range of examples, from Begin to Coolidge (again!) is impressive; Kochin connects the persuasive force of...

450 RHETORICA The Pennsylvania State University Nathan Crick, Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. 225 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-876-1 Democracy and Rhetoric: John Dewey on the Arts of Becoming foreshadows its full trajectory in the quote from Dewey that opens the book: "The end of democracy is a radical end.... It is radical because it requires great change in existing social institutions, economic, legal and cultural" (p. 1). Dewey's identification of genuine democracy as a radical ideal has a contemporary resonance in the light of resurgent progressive protest here and around the world. His call is directed at "the inequities and tragedies of life that mark the present system," just as grass-roots movements have advanced systemic critiques of systemic injustice (p. 1). But it becomes immediately clear that Dewey's invocation of radicality is in part a provocative rhetorical gesture, because he immediately qualifies it. Those who espouse radical ends must not indulge the desire "for the overthrow of the existing system by any means whatever," but work within the democratic process (p. 1). The concept of the radical is disciplined by the stipulation that there is "nothing more radical than insistence upon democratic methods" (p. 1). Dewey's quote ends by asserting that victory against systemic inequity can only come "from a living faith in our common human nature and in the power of voluntary action based on collective intelligence" (p. 1). The radical is thus put in tension with itself by Dewey's effort to find congruence between means and ends. An analogous split within the concept of the radical underlies Nathan Crick's effort to bring Dewey to the discipline of rhetoric. As the book title suggests, Dewey can help in the contemporary revision of rhetoric as an ontological project. That is surely a radical appeal given the reductive instrumentalism that has so often diminished rhetoric as a techne even within the discipline. But Crick accepts Dewey's constraint on the radical by giving presumption to faith in a common human nature, voluntary action, and collective intelligence. Within the critical rhetoric community in the United States these three presuppositions have been in play for some time, given the suspicion introduced to notions of transparent agency, the autonomy of the will, and faith in the Enlightenment project. The distinction between the two forms of radicality - one that attempts to undermine, and one that attempts to reaffirm the hopeful possibility of a unitary deliberative community through persuasion - is crucial for a grasp of the orientation of Crick's effort, since academic rhetoric in the United States is pulled between the two tendencies. The opposite case was made by Ronald Greene, who attributes to Dewey "the tendencv to translate communication into an aesthetic-moral theory of eloquent citizenship [that] Reviews 451 puts argumentation studies to work for, rather than against, new forms of bio-political control."1 The greatest service of Crick's book may be that it brings this debate to prominence. It should be said that Crick does make efforts to incorporate radical structural thinking in his rapprochement. Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Stewart Hall, Thomas Kuhn, Bruno Latour, Richard Rorty and others weave in and out of Crick's widely cast net. But does Crick adequately wrestle with Dewey's faith in the public sphere, and does he address the challenge posed by a system of discursive display that, at least at the national level, seems to have subsumed public communication into a facade of consensus? That seems to me to be the real test of his assertion of radicality. Crick does address Greene's argument early on (Greene is er­ roneously excluded from the bibliography), arguing that Dewey's radicality had a material dimension, quoting Dewey to this effect: "Democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial as well as civil and political" (p. 6). Crick asserts that Dewey provides a "third alternative" to, on the one hand, a naive faith in the reformist power of the public sphere, and on the other hand, an impotent posture of critique against the insurmountable Leviathon (p...

This essay explores how rules for handling testimonial evidence were developed in the contexts of the British jurisprudence, epistemology and theological debate over the course of the eighteenth century, and shows how Thomas Paine appropriated these rules in The Age of Reason, his deistic manifesto.

This essay explores how rules for handling testimonial evidence were developed in the contexts of the British jurisprudence, epistemology and theological debate over the course of the eighteenth century, and shows how Thomas Paine appropriated these rules in The Age of Reason, his deistic manifesto.

Reviews 345 moindre éloge que l'on puisse décerner à ce volume que d'avoir contribué à rendre au sophiste la profondeui, 1 humanité et 1 actualité de son éloquence. Anne-Marie Favreau-Linder Clermont Ferrand Benjamin Kelly, Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt. (Oxford Studies in Ancient Documents), Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xix, 427. ISBN 9780199599615. $150.00. Benjamin Kelly's Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt (hereafter PLSCR) is an erudite, original, systematic, and clearly written study of how petitions functioned as instruments of social control in GraecoRoman Egypt from 30 BC to 284 AD. It is unique in surveying, and categoriz­ ing in appendices, the complete published corpus of 568 petitions and 227 proceedings reports from the period. As it is the best and most comprehen­ sive analysis of Graeco-Egyptian papyrus petitions and a landmark in juristic papyrology, as well as providing in-depth analysis of numerous individual petitions, it belongs in the personal libraries of rhetoricians researching late antiquity, and should be consulted by scholars interested in petitioning or forensic rhetoric in other periods. Although the hardcover price of $150 is somewhat daunting for scholars not working in the specific subfield, PLSCR is available via Oxford University Scholarship Online. PLSCR consists of nine chapters (333 pages), a glossary, maps, three appendices, a bibliography and indices. "Chapter 1: Introduction" (pp. 137 ) begins by discussing a small group of petitions concerning an ongoing feud between Satabous and Nestnephis, two Egyptian priests in a village in the Fayoum region. Close analysis of the specific petitions concerning this feud leads to more general discussion of what can legitimately be deduced from extant petitions and the limitations of petitions specifically, and papyri generally, as evidence. In a sense, PLSCR starts as a corpus of evidence in search of a theory. After discussing limitations of methodological frames such as criminality and dispute resolution, Kelly focuses on the theme of social control as a lens through which to analyze his corpus of petitions. Although primarily intended as background information, the lucid treatment of diachronic changes in administrative structure and terminology relevant to petitioning will be particularly valuable to non-papyrologists investigating Graeco-Egyptian rhetoric. The second chapter, "Petitions and Social Elistory" (pp. 38-74), analyzes the nature of petitions as evidence for social history. The treatment of peti­ tions as evidence is sensible and meticulous, addressing patterns of survival, the actual processes and contexts within which petitions were created, pre­ sented, archived, and answered, and the relationship of petitioning to the 346 RHETORICA court system. The description of the interplay of orality and literacy and petition and trial will be of particular interest to rhetoricians. In order to investigate social history through the medium of petition, Kelly, in essence, is trying to read through the petitions to the underlying realities. When he analyzes rhetorical formulae, it is to dismiss formulaic elements as irrele­ vant to determining the "innermost thoughts" of the petitioners and actual events. Thus the elements of petitioning which are of greatest interest to rhetoricians serve, as it were, as obstacles to social history, while the facts of the social historian would be the minimally relevant "atechnai pisteis" for the rhetorician, outside the art of rhetoric proper. "Chapter 3: Legal Control in Roman Egypt" (pp. 75-122) examines the efficacy of the petitioning system as a mechanism of social control. Kelly argues convincingly that Roman administrators' ethos of efficiency and justice was grounded in reality, but that the complexity of the system, with unclear jurisdictions, multiple levels of hierarchy, and limited staffing, made petitioning of limited effectiveness as a formal method of social control, albeit more useful as an informal one. For rhetoricians, the most useful material will be the comprehensive treatment of administrative process, application of multiple simultaneous (i.e. Egyptian, Roman, Jewish, and Greek) systems of law, and the way that petitioners could manipulate the system. Although Kelly's focus is not rhetorical history, this material provides fertile ground for a revaluation of the importance of the translative or jurisdictional stasis, which is normally treated as somewhat of a trivial afterthought, but which appears far more substantial and useful in light...

Reviews 339 He shows the omnipresence of the antilogic of Protagoras in the essays— instability, uncertainty, relativity yield a multiplicity of possibilities. Fortune, or Kairos, dictates the answers. MacPhail deserves great praise for the strength and originality of his arguments, but perhaps some blame as well for a few weaknesses in his study. The book is far too short. In addition to the neglect of the discipline of rhetoric mentioned above, treatment of the relation of antilogic—the hallmark of sophistry—to the practice of classical dialectic is missing, a subject Aristotle treated at length in the Topics. Such a discussion in the first part of the book would have enriched treatment of the principle of non-contradiction and that of the decay of dialectic in the second half. Finally, translations should have been routinely provided for non English quotations. The practice varies. Greek quotations are never translated; Latin often, but not always. Since the author at times points out the centrality of a quotation to his argument, consistently expressing it in English would have secured the point for a wider audience. Despite these caveats, MacPhail has made a significant contribution to classical, neo-Latin and Renaissance studies. Whether he has also shown that the sophists did ultimately effect a relativist revolution among renaissance humanists, as he has argued, may be a subject worthy of future debate, dialogue, or irresolution. Jean Dietz Moss The Catholic University ofAmerica Dino Piovan, Memoria e ohlio della guerra civile: strategie giudiziarie e racconto del passato in Lisia. Studi e testi di storia antica, 19. Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2011. Pp. 356. ISBN 9788846728258. 22.00 (pb). A partiré dalle parole chiave del titolo, il libro di D.P. illustra attraverso l'oratoria di Lisia le tensioni tra memoria collettiva e coinvolgimento degli individui nelle vicende drammatiche dell'Atene del biennio 405-03, dalla sconfitta finale di Egospotami, alia resa e alTinstaurazione del regime dei Trenta e poi alia sua caduta: anni di sventure, symphorai che divengono pa­ radigma per Timmaginario collettivo e che nel tempo della restaurazione democrática sono da superare attraverso una complessa elaborazione della memoria e deli'oblio: in particolare a confronto col principio del me mnesikakein in funzione della convivenza civile nella ricostituita unitá della polis ateniese, con tutte le difficoltá che ció necessariamente dovette comportare da una parte e dalTaltra tra democratici e oligarchici. Se gli eventi furono problematici, cosí fu il loro peso nella coscienza collettiva. D.P. analizza in dettaglio fatti e memoria cívica attraverso una acuta indagine delle orazioni lisiane che richiamano gli eventi di questo periodo negli anni immediatamente successivi (in particolare le orazioni 12,13, 25, alie quali sono dedicati 340 RHETORICA i primi tre capitoli, ma anche Lys. 31, 16, 26, 30, 18 e 2, che sono discusse più sintéticamente nel quarto capitolo). Ampio è il confronto delle diverse fonti a disposizione, in particolare Senofonte, la Athenaion politeia, Isocrate, Diodoro, le testimonianze epigrafiche, etc., e approfondita è la discussione sulla vasta bibliografía, dai problemi di datazione alie questioni testuali che hanno rilevanza per le questioni trattate (vd. pp. 313-43): il volume si avvale della nuova edizione lisiana di Ch. Carey e del nuovo commento di S. Todd (Oxford 2007). Dell'analisi di D.P. si possono fare qui due esempi relativi alla ricostruzione lisiana, per certi versi contraddittoria, tratti dalle orazioni forensi, e un terzo esempio dalEEpitafio, per il diverso contesto e la sua funzione pubblica. L'orazione Contro Eratostene (Lys. 12), discussa nel cap. 1, è costruita dal punto di vista ideológico come un diretto atto di accusa contro il governo dei Trenta (e in particolare contro uno dei suoi rappresentanti), con una prospettiva certo più ampia rispetto all'uccisione del fratello Polemarco: Li­ sia vi formula la tesi della 'cospirazione oligarchica' che ha condotto Atene alla rovina e ai lutti della guerra civile, un vero e proprio tradimento nei confront! della polis. Una demonizzazione utile, o meglio necessaria per il contesto e per gli obiettivi. Particolare rilievo per il problema della memoria riveste Pinsistenza di Lisia sulla kakia di Teramene e sul suo trasformismo. Le fonti successive muteranno orientamento, ma in Lisia, quando gli eventi sono ancora vicini, non v...

Book Review| May 01 2013 Review: Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, by Carruthers, Mary Carruthers, Mary, ed., Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, ed. Alastair Minnis). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 316 pp. ISBN 9780521515306. Rhetorica (2013) 31 (2): 220–223. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2013.31.2.220 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 Review: Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, by Carruthers, Mary. Rhetorica 1 May 2013; 31 (2): 220–223. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2013.31.2.220 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. © 2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In A Rhetoric of Motives Kenneth Burke revises the traditional understanding of rhetoric as persuasion.He introduces the concept of identification to define persuasion dialectically by locating it in a formal opposition to identification. The ultimate motives that drive this dialectical tension are love and strife. As dialectical creatures, human are drawn toward each other and seek to distinguish themselves from one another. For a world threatened by its own misunderstanding of ambition and its unreflective acceptance of historical identities, Burke's philosophy of rhetoric offers a way to understand what itmeans to be a dialectical being at a particular point of history, and it does so because it has the practical objective of making the world more just.

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

226 RHETORICA Matthew Lauzon, Signs ofLight: French and British Theories ofLinguistic Communication, 1648-1789, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.256 pp. ISBN 9780801448478. Matthew Lauzon's Signs ofLight: French and British Theories ofLinguistic Communication, 1648-1789 explores a broad array of Enlightenment perspec­ tives on discourse, from seventeenth-century discussions of Native Amer­ ican eloquence and animal communication to the longstanding debate over the relative merits of English and French that continued up to the French Revolution. Arguing that historians of the period, who overemphasize the impact of Locke's view of language, "have therefore tended to ignore both the period's tremendous engagement with the broader social implications of different languages that prevailed across the European republic of let­ ters and the ways in which such an engagement involved much more than issues of semantic and logical clarity" (p. 4), he surveys a wide range of treatises, literary works, reports, and studies to demonstrate the diversity of Enlightenment views concerning language and human community. The book is divided into three primary sections, each comprising a pair of chapters. Part I, "Animal Communication," seeks to fill the gap left by historians who have neglected "the suggestion by some in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that animals might communicate more clearly and therefore more effectively" than humans (p. 9). The first chapter in this section, "Bestial Banter," takes up Enlightenment claims of the potential su­ periority of animal communication developed by relatively obscure figures such as Marin Cureau de la Chambre and John Webster, as well as more well-known theorists such as John Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The second chapter, "Homo Risus: Making Light of Animal Language," features Enlightenment critiques of animal languages, both real and imaginary, that elucidate the complexity of human discourse and attempt to destabilize the virtue of clarity developed in the previous chapter. Lauzon provides analyses of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable ofthe Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, part 4 Four of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant's Amusement philosophique sur le langage des betes. Part II, "Savage Eloquence," explores "how late-seventeenth-century missionary concerns about the sincerity of American Indian conversions gen­ erated a particularly positive representation of savage speech" (p. 6). Chap­ ter 3, entitled "Warming Savage Hearts and Heating Eloquent Tongues," emphasizes the seventeenth-century Puritans' and Jesuits' praise of the elo­ quence of Native American converts to Christianity. Featuring a series of works produced by John Eliot and his missionary colleagues, Lauzon ar­ gues that the Puritans were impressed by the pathos of Native American Christians, whose words reflected the "Christian grand style" originally identified by Augustine. Through analyses of texts from the Jesuit Relations, which recorded seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit activities in the New World, Lauzon demonstrates that Jesuit missionaries also praised what amounted to that style in the emotional appeals of Native American converts, Reviews 227 who communicated far more movingly than conventional touchstones of Jesuit rhetoric like Cicero" (p. 90). Chapter 4, "From Savage Orators to Sav­ age Languages/' marshals subsequent Enlightenment treatments of the per­ ceived energetic quality of Native American languages as further critique of Locke's rather single-minded emphasis on clarity. The final section of Szy/zs ofLight, "Civilized Tongues," features "discus­ sions about how the French and English languages reflected and reinforced distinct national practices of enlightened communication" (p. 7). Chapter 5, "French Levity," treats the spirited argument for the superiority the French language set forth bv advocates such as François Charpentier, Nicholas Beuzée, Antoine de Rivarol, Denis Diderot, and Dominique de Bouhours, based on criteria such as clarity, the sweetness of its soft sounds, the "light­ ness" of its lexicon (p. 146), the wit of the bel esprit, and its universality. The final chapter, "English Energy," provides the corresponding arguments in praise of the English tongue, which emphasized its phonotactic qualities, its syntax, its gravity, and its ability to express natural passions. Lauzon's Coda, "French Levity and English Energy in the Revolutionary Wake," extends the issues raised in chapters 5 and 6 through and beyond the French Revolution. The particular strengths of Signs ofLight are the extensive range of works and...

Reviews 233 Lucia Pasetti, [Quintiliano] ll veleno versato (Declamazioni maggiori, 17), Cassino: Edizioni Université di Cassino, 2011, 252 pp. ISBN 978-888317 -055-3. Si arricchisce di un nuovo volume la elegante e preziosa collana che ormai da anni, per le cure di Oronzo Pecere e Antonio Stramaglia, l'Università di Cassino dedica alie Declamazioni maggiori dello pseudo-Quintiliano, fornendo per ciascuno dei pezzi che compongono la silloge un'introduzione, un testo criticamente riveduto, un amplissimo commento e una altrettanto ricca bibliografía. Dopo le declamazioni 6,8, 9,12,14 e 15, e mentre altri commenti sono già in procinto di vedere la luce, è ora la volta della diciassettesima Maior , Venemim effusum, opportunamente affidata ad una giovane e ferratissima studiosa, Lucia Pasetti (d'ora innanzi P), che a questa controversia ha già ripetutamente dedicato le sue cure in anni recenti (Un suicidiofallito. La tópica dell’ars moriendi;nella xvii declamazione maggiore pseudo-quintilianea, 2007; Fi­ losofía e retorica di scnola nelle Declamazioni Maggiori;pseudoquintilianee, 2008; Gli antichi e la fiction. Realtd e immaginazione nella Declamazione maggiore ;17, 2009-2010) e che qui raccoglie e porta a sintesi il frutto dei suoi lavori precedenti. Il tema della declamazione è dei più consueti nelPuniverso delle controversie di scuola: un padre ha tentato ripetutamente di ripudiare il proprio figlio attraverso lo strumento della abdicatio, venendo di volta in volta sconfitto in tribunale e costretto a riprendere in casa il giovane; lo sorprende quindi in secreta domus parte mentre prepara un fármaco. Interrogato, il figlio risponde che si tratta di un veleno destinato a se stesso, ma alla richiesta paterna di berlo lo versa a terra, esponendosi cosi ad un'accusa di tentato parricidio. Tema consueto, si diceva, nelle scuole di declamazione, attestato con qualche variante nell'antologia di Seneca il Vecchio (7, 3) e nelle Minores di Quintiliano (377), ricordato con ironía da Giovenale fra i motivi più triti delPinsegnamento scolastico (7, 166-170) e schedato nelPanonima lista dei Problemata in status contenuta nell'ottavo volume dei Rhetores Graeci di Walz. Ma tema consueto, quello della diciassettesima Maior, anche perché convoca sulla scena due protagonisti di assoluto spicco dell'universo declamatorio come il padre e il figlio ed esplora una volta di più le patologie della loro relazione, i cortocircuiti dello scontro generazionale, le schermaglie di un conflitto che sembra non conoscere attenuazioni o forme credibili di composizione, e dunque perché rientra a pieno titolo in quella riflessione sul rapporto padri-figli cosi centrale nella retorica di scuola e sulla quale gli studi degli ultimi vent'anni hanno fatto largamente luce. NelPampia introduzione (pp. 13-51) P. muove anzitutto dalla complessa questione del rapporto fra declamazione e mondo reale. La studiosa rileva per un verso la frequenza dei casi di veneficio a Roma e la presenza nella cultura romana di una vera e propria ossessione del parricidio, per Paltro la stretta connessione che sussiste fra tale ossessione e la ricorrente presenza dei termini parricidiurn/parricida nella retorica di scuola, dove numerosissimi 234 RHETORICA sono i temi che mettono in scena le tensioni legate all'esercizio della patria potestas e i conflitti che esso rischiava ad ogni passo di innescare all'interno della famiglia. La conclusione di P. è che per il testo in questione «si puô ricorrere alEossimorica definizione di "declamazione realistica,/>> (p. 20). Alla studiosa non sfugge tuttavia che temi come il parricidio e il veneficio hanno anche un vistoso spessore letterario: la stessa richiesta di here una coppa che si teme possa conteneré un veleno per attestare la bontà delle proprie intenzioni compare ad esempio nel romanzo, ma non è assente neppure in certa storiografia più incline alla ricerca del pathos. Più in generale, P richiama opportunamente la natura della declamazione comefiction, come testo destinato certo in prima istanza alla didattica delle scuole, ma aperto anche ad una fruizione che ne faceva un prodotto di consumo rivolto ad un vasto pubblico adulto. P. passa quindi a verificare come si articola, nel concreto svolgimento della declamazione, il rapporto tra padre e figlio: attenendosi ai precetti che maestri come il Quintiliano autentico fornivano nei propri manuali, i declamatori tratteggiano la figura del figlio (al quale è lasciata la parola) attribuendogli i colori...

In A Rhetoric of Motives Kenneth Burke revises the traditional understanding of rhetoric as persuasion. He introduces the concept of identification to define persuasion dialectically by locating it in a formal opposition to identification. The ultimate motives that drive this dialectical tension are love and strife. As dialectical creatures, human are drawn toward each other and seek to distinguish themselves from one another. For a world threatened by its own misunderstanding of ambition and its unreflective acceptance of historical identities, Burke’s philosophy of rhetoric offers a way to understand what it means to be a dialectical being at a particular point of history, and it does so because it has the practical objective of making the world more just.

It has long been stated that, in Isocrates' Helen, there seems to be an open contradiction between the author's harsh criticism of logoi paradoxoi and the simple fact that his own encomia of Helen and Busiris appear to be specimens of that very genre. Traditionally, this contradiction has been explained by Isocrates' need to distanciate his own work from that of his predecessors. This paper undertakes a different approach. Isocrates' criticism of paradoxographic literature is based upon observations about what is and what is not allowed in moral epideictic discourse. Isocrates' specific instructions about proper and improper moral argumentation can function as hermeneutical tool to analyze Helen and Busiris. Only in Helen does he observe the rules of argumentation formulated in that very discourse. In Busiris, however, Isocrates adopts the typical modes of argumentation in paradoxographic literature as represented in the works of Gorgias or Polycrates. In consequence, his arguments in Busiris prove to be unconvincing when measured by his own standards formulated in the proemium of both Helen and Busiris. Consequently, the discourse ends in an apology of these arguments which is, once again, defective. In his corresponding discourses Helen and Busiris, Isocrates implictly demonstrates the moral and technical defects inherent in paradoxical discourse. He explicitly reflects these defects in the proemia and epilogues of both speeches. Helen and Busiris should, therefore, be understood as Isocrates' manifesto for moral discourse as opposed to paradoxographic showpieces.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus's account of ethopoeia at Lysias 8 is often cited as evidence of Lysias mastery of character portrayal, but the passage itself has received little in-depth analysis. As a consequence, Dionysius's meaning has at times been misinterpreted, and some of his insights on characterization have been neglected. When the account is examined closely, three unique points of emphasis emerge which, taken together, constitute a particular type of characterization: persuasive, as opposed to propriety-oriented, ethopoeia. Making this distinction promotes conceptual clarity with regard to ethopoeia while calling attention to Dionysius's insights on the role of style and composition in the creation of persuasive ethos.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Cicero in his in Vatinium employs the iconic power of the body of the accused, Vatinius, and its repulsive strumae as a logical tool to support his persuasion strategy, thereby creating an enthymeme based upon the premises provided by the features of the body. This way of reasoning rests upon a strongly oriented and often distorting reading of the physical characteristics of the body in accordance with the physiognomic and pathognomonic doctrines. As a result, the de-formities of Vatinius's body, instead of being used to commend Vatinius, become important elements in Cicero's strategy of belittling his opponent's authority.

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how Cicero in his in Vatinium employs the iconic power of the body of the accused, Vatinius, and its repulsive strumae as a logical tool to support his persuasion strategy, thereby creating an enthymeme based upon the premises provided by the features of the body This way of reasoning rests upon a strongly oriented and often distorting reading of the physical characteristics of the body in accordance with the physiognomic and pathognomonic doctrines. As a result, the deformities of Vatinius’s body, instead of being used to commend Vatinius, become important elements in Cicero’s strategy of belittling his opponent’s authority.

124 RHETORICA Díaz Marroquin's most original contribution appears in the study's final chapters: Is it possible to move the current public's affects and passions, living in a society so far apart from the early-modern one, both conceptually and psychologically? As an answer, she chooses late 20i,z century artists who, using different means, achieve similar goals as those attained by the classical masters of rhetoric, by the authors of the baroque plays and by the early composers and librettists of the proto-operatic dramas. Some of these are the videoartists B. Viola and Nam June Paik, the stage director P. Sellars and the group La Fura dels Baus. The study's last section operates as a foreword for the present economic crisis. In view of the economic difficulties many theatres -including opera theatres- are currently encountering, Diaz Marroquin wonders whether the practice of performing repertoires created centuries ago may still achieve coherence on the 21st century stage. She concludes that the key lies in the controversial field of memory. This concept may be understood in the classical sense, as one of the cannons of rhetoric, but also in the mnemonic, in the historical one and, over all, as the affective memory described in treatises on dramatic technique such as Garcia's or, later on, Stanislavski's. As she affirms, "[La] memoria estetiza la experiencia personal y, superadas las fases de dolor en el acceso a determinadas zonas, se la ofrece, fertilizada, a la interpretación dramática" (p. 297). Human beings, no matter whether we live within the limits characterizing the pre-Romantic subjectivity or beyond them, seem to experience similar patterns of thought and emotion, although our circumstances may be different according to the diverse power schemes we live in. Analyzing the pre-Romantic emotion, therefore, implies identifying these circumstances and translating them to codes intelligible to the 21st century reader and performer. Diaz Marroquin's La retórica de los afectos operates as this kind of translation: A lucid, lively and critical travel across the at times tortuous, but always fascinating territories of reason and emotion. Aurelia Pessarrodona Universitd di Bologna, Fundación Española para la Ciencia i/ la Tecnología. Christopher Lyle Johnstone, Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Coming of Wisdom in Ancient Greece. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 300 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-854-9 Christopher Lyle Johnstone's Listening to the Logos: Speech and the Com­ ing of Wisdom in Ancient Greece revisits rhetoric's relationship to philoso­ phy; Johnstone's contribution is to examine this relationship in light of an­ cient notions of wisdom. The book demonstrates that speech will not align neatly with rhetoric nor wisdom with philosophy. Rather Johnstone main­ tains that both rhetoric and philosophy use language to develop different Reviews 125 kinds of wisdom: philosophy leans toward metaphysical or natural wisdom, while rhetoric is inclined toward practical wisdom. Listening to the Logos traces Greek conceptions of wisdom from Homer to Aristotle, emphasizing throughout that wisdom has always relied on logos. Though Johnstone concludes his history of wisdom with Aristotle's tax­ onomy of knowledge, his challenge is to trace sophia and phronesis backwards. Early on Johnstone confronts the problems that attend reading ancient texts. Much of the book, for example, focuses on pre-Socratic nn/thos and logos for which we have only fragmentary sources. However, Johnstone's interpreta­ tions are buttressed by commentaries and secondary sources. He recovers very early notions of sophia, which, he argues, is "a kind of active knowledge or competence that is linked specifically with the practice of a techne, an art or craft" and phronesis is linked to the body, especially the heart (p. 29). Since in these mythopoetic texts sophia and phronesis do not yet suggest their Aristotelian meanings, Johnstone searches for other analogues. Based on his interpretation of narratives, Johnstone concludes that in a mythopoetic worldview "[h]uman wisdom is derivative" and "comes from the gods, who alone can apprehend true justice, who alone can know what the Fates have ordained" (p. 31). People are wise, then, when they understand the gods through history and myth (p. 31); knowledge of the...

Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s account of ethopoeia at Lysias 8 is often cited as evidence of Lysias’s mastery of character portrayal, but the passage itself has received little in-depth analysis. As a consequence, Dionysius’s meaning has at times been misinterpreted, and some of his insights on characterization have been neglected. When the account is examined closely, three unique points of emphasis emerge which, taken together, constitute a particular type of characterization: persuasive, as opposed to propriety-oriented, ethopoeia. Making this distinction promotes conceptual clarity with regard to ethopoeia while calling attention to Dionysius’s insights on the role of style and composition in the creation of persuasive ethos.

Reviews 113 to emergent communities, heretical selves: mystics or Ranters, for instance. Instead, lapses into heretical selfhood are signaled by the emergence of affect, which requires subvention by the inarticulate, as if emotions had to wait for the inchoate in order to appear. For example, as both character and play, Hamlet "foregrounds" the inarticulate as a "cultural construct," as a "means by which 'feeling' could surface," and as a principle of inter-subjective vulnerability (176). Perceiving this counterintuitive pulsion at work, seeing the inarticulate in a "more positive light," requires an exploration of a Tudor "aesthetics of feeling," Mazzio contends (180). Nowhere does she offer such an aesthetics. Rather, she relies on contemporary literary theory for many of her historical arguments, and readers are frequently directed to Eve Sedgwick or Lacan, Jean-Luc Nancy or Hegel in lieu of evidence from the period. Yet The Inarticulate Renaissance succeeds: Mazzio focuses our attention on the suitability of English for worship and ceremony, scripture and poetry, on the fortunes of theatrical mumbling and print polemic, on audiences as 'assemblies,' above all on what Tomkis in Lingua calls a "tunes without sense, words inarticulate." However, in some ways, Mazzio's inquiry is reminiscent of the decline of rhetorical engagement late in the period she studies, of the ways in which past thinkers distrusted rhetoric as a guide to both speech and practice, of the ways oratio was emptied of ratio. In this ambitious, learned work, Mazzio is equally wary: a focus on the inarticulate is symptomatic of distrust. But it also signs a trend in contemporary scholarship. Boredom, ennui, anxiety, and now the inarticulate are experiencing a renaissance, in part because current perceptions of (early) modernity are conditioned by its failures, by its perils not its promises. One promise was transparency—of both method and communication—and 'words inarticulate' court opacity. But as 'feeling' rather than 'telling,' as a rhetoric that develops and refines a deepening commitment to pathos, inarticulation necessarily assumes the eloquence of the age. Stephen Pender University of Windsor Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. xi + 290 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-18019-9 Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010. xi + 316 pp. ISBN 9780087013980-2 114 RHETORICA Sandra M. Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. x + 271 pp. ISBN 978-0-226-31129-6 Jennifer R. Mercieca, Founding Fictions. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. xi + 274 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1690-7 In 1690, as the Enlightenment was just glimmering on the English hori­ zon, John Locke calumniated rhetoric (Essay Concerning Human Understand­ ing III.10). In 1790, as the Enlightenment's dusk settled over Koenigsberg, Immanuel Kant similarly decried the art (Critique of Pure Judgment 1.53). Though a century and a continent apart, they expressed a common disdain for rhetoric. Notably absent from this account are the American continents. Recent scholarship, however, finds that the American Enlightenment yielded a wealth of innovative rhetorical practice, placing public argument at the heart (or rather in the agora) of healthy democracy. Brian Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) exemplifies a now common effort to catalogue the British and European hostility to rhetoric while lauding United States thinkers, such as James Madison, who celebrated free public debate. If the Euro­ pean Enlightenment philosophically counseled, sapere aude, then the Amer­ ican Enlightenment pragmatically retorted disputare aude. Four recent books, two by historians and two by rhetoricians, more fully chronicle this prac­ tical response to the philosophical penchant, a rhetorical contrast with the philosophes' critical Enlightenment. Sandra Gustafson's Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early Amer­ ican Republic charts the course of U.S. "deliberative democracy," which "emphasizefs] the political power of language and advancejs] a commit­ ment to dialogue and persuasion as the best means to resolve conflicts and forge a progressive tradition" (220). She highlights dueling conciliatory and prophetic traditions of public address. The conciliatory tradition dominated the United States circa 1815-1835. Paying particular attention to political and pulpit oratory, Gustafson contrasts the Hellenistic William...

128 RHETORICA dom is. Although the title highlights logos, Listening to the Logos is really wisdom's story. Emily Murphy Cope University of Tennessee, Knoxville Charles Guérin, Persona. L'élaboration d'une notion rhétorique au 1er siècle av. J.-C. - Volume I : Antécédents grecs et première rhétorique latine, Vrin, Paris, 2009 (431 pp. ISBN 978-2-7116-2234-4) - Volume II : Théorisation cicéronienne de la persona oratoire, Vrin, Paris, 2011. 474 pp. ISBN 978-2-7116-2351-8 Après la publication en 2007 de l'ouvrage de Frédérique Woerther, L'èthos aristotélicien. Genèse d'une notion rhétorique, les éditions Vrin viennent d'enrichir le catalogue de la collection « Textes et traditions » d'une vraie somme, la version publiée de la thèse de doctorat de Charles Guérin (CG), jeune chercheur spécialiste de rhétorique et d'éloquence gréco-latines. Ces deux travaux, qui, par-delà les différences de leurs objets d'étude et de leurs méthodes, sont d'une remarquable complémentarité, confirment le dynamisme et la valeur reconnue de l'école française de rhétorique ancienne, dans le sillage du Professeur Pierre Chiron. Les deux volumes que CG consacre à l'étude de la notion de persona constituent une contribution majeure tout à la fois à l'histoire de la rhétorique gréco-latine, à l'histoire des idées à Rome, à la connaissance de l'éloquence en milieu romain, à la compréhension de la pensée et de la production oratoire cicéroniennes. Le projet de CG est ambitieux et la réussite réelle : reconstituer une archéologie du savoir et de la pratique oratoires à Rome au L' siècle av. J.-C., le siècle de Cicéron, à travers la question de la mise en scène de la personne de l'orateur, élément central de la parole persuasive, question que les Romains ont approchée par l'intermédiaire d'une notion qui leur est propre : la persona. CG défend une idée forte (p.14) : « On peut voir émerger, au moyen d'une notion spécifiquement latine ... une vision englobante de l'orateur à la fois différente et comparable à celle de Yèthos grec. » Dans cette vaste enquête, conduite depuis les origines grecques (la rhétorique de l'Athènes classique) jusqu'à la fin de l'époque cicéronienne et les derniers traités de l'année 46 av. J.-C. (Brutus, De optimo genere oratoruni, Orator), c'est la question de l'émergence d'un objet nouveau dans le champ de la pensée antique qui est au cœur du projet de CG. Pour cela, l'auteur adopte une saine démarche méthodologique, qui de­ vrait guider tous les travaux sur l'antiquité gréco-romaine, et qui consiste à prendre en compte prioritairement le contexte social, culturel, institutionnel, idéologique dans lequel les idées et les œuvres littéraires ont pris forme. Un des apports majeurs d'une telle méthode est de montrer que la catégorie Reviews 129 de Vèthos, abondamment convoquée dans les travaux critiques pour analy­ ser la construction, dans l'éloquence romaine, de la figure de l'orateur, ne correspond que partiellement à celle de persona, notion que Rome a forgée pour rendre compte précisément des spécificités de la parole dans l'espace de VVrbs, parole du magistrat et parole du patronus. De fait, chacune des deux parties qui structurent le premier volume (« Le paradigme athénien : référence théorique et point de comparaison ,guillemotright pp.35-218, et« La notion de persona dans la pratique oratoire et la rhétorique des débuts du F' siècle av. J.-C. ,guillemotright pp.219-426), est inaugurée par un cha­ pitre descriptif et historique, qui analyse de manière détaillée le contexte athénien et le contexte romain de la parole, pour en mettre en évidence les points de contact et les différences. Le lecteur peut ainsi lire avec intérêt une histoire culturelle comparée qui redessine, dans le...

Reviews 121 prenda l'esempio del commente a migaeque canorae del v. 322, che Piccolomini glossa idest sonus et tuviitiis verborum tumidorum sine sueco, sine pondere, sine rebus. Lo studioso traduce «vale a dire il suono squillante di parole timide senza sueco, senza peso, senza sostanza» : se da un lato confesso di non comprendere la scelta di «parole timide» per verborum tumidorum (semmai«gonfie, roboanti,» ma si tratta con ogni probabilité di un semplice lapsus che ha indotto a leggere timidorum), dall'altro mi pare ottima la resa di sine rebus con «senza sostanza,» che contribuisce efficacemente a rimarcare 1 importanza che Piccolomini assegnava aile res, corne giustamente anche Refini sottolinea (p. 198, n. 131). Ampliando la prospettiva, si potrebbe affermare corne all'erudito senese sia estranea la possibilité di una poesía caratterizzata da un'autonomia del significante che a priori prescinda da un nesso col significato, e quindi con la realté. Questa prospettiva inizia a manifestarsi nella seconda meté del Cinquecento, quando la distanza tra verba e res si accentua per approdare poi al concettismo barocco. L'Apparato critico (pp. 217-219), un intéressante corredo di tavole (tra cui, alie pp. 222-223, uno specimen del manoscritto senese del commento oraziano), gli ludid e una ricca bibliografía concludono molto degnamente un ricco volume che, a parte qualche imprecisione e forse la tendenza (del resto típica delle tesi di laurea) a ribadire i concetti in modo talora eccessivamente analítico, si caratterizza per notevole dottrina, rigore critico e maturité di giudizio. Sergio Audano Chiavari. Italy Lucía Díaz Marroquin, La retórica de los afectos (Estudios de Literatura 110, De Música 13), Kassel: Reichenberger, 2008. 298 pp. ISBN 9783 -937734-59-0 The relationship between emotion and reason has fluctuated consistently within the Western-European territories, traditions and cultural identities. The same tension applies to the one existing between the realms of pathos and ethos. Ever since the Platonic dualism soul/body was inherited and as­ similated by the early-modern humanists, their dilemma used to consist in finding the conceptual and physical loci where the phenomenon of emotion takes place. One of this search's objectives is achieving the perfect synchro­ nization of the human spirit with the biological, visceral and even animal spheres configuring the masculine and the feminine natures. This provokes rhetorical and poetic consequences which, in the course of history, have often received severe moral condemnation. In the 21st century, emotions are generally perceived and evoked ac­ cording to psychoanalytic and post-structuralist viewpoints, deriving from Romantic perspectives which are still in force. This may lead us to forget 122 RHETORICA the sophisticated code inherited from the Platonic, Aristotelian, Galenic, and even the pseudo-Hermetic traditions which used to frame the expression of emotion before the Romanticism. Diaz Marroquin's La retórica de los afectos offers the keys necessary to understand the performance of emotion -affects, passions- within the con­ text of the Renaissance and Baroque Europe, the unmediated cultural heir of the Greek and Latin Antiquity In her own words: "Este trabajo pretende describir la noción humanista de la teoría de los afectos de ascendencia aris­ totélica y, remotamente, también hermética, desde el punto de vista de la retórica textual, de la tratadística musical y de las convenciones gestuales." (p.10). The starting point is, therefore, the actio. Diaz Marroquin's book is a detailed, systematic and interdisciplinary study on the rhetorical delivery, aiming particularly at the description of the means used by actors and protooperatic singers performing early-modern dramas. One of its strengths, in fact, consists in analyzing the vocal technique and the emotional resources a performer could employ at times prior to the generalization of the first treatises on dramatic and vocal practice. The study's approach is critical, polyhedral and eminently practical. The concepts of voice and gesture are described as the means of transmission for the emotional word, which has to do with the author's many-sided profile as an academic (philologist and musicologist) and performer (mezzosoprano). Only someone who has experienced and practiced the operatic vocal emis­ sion could identify and analyze in such...

This essay introduces Lű's Annals (Lűshi chunqiu), a classical Chinese text with a wealth of material on rhetoric. Not only does the text evaluate numerous examples of persuasion and sophistry, it also lays out a system of rhetorical precepts grounded in a distinctive ontology, that of correlative cosmology. After outlining the cosmology, epistemology, and theory of language of Lű's Annals, I trace how these shape its rhetorical theory and practices. I then consider how the text itself works as a persuasive artifact in the light of its own strictures. The essay closes with some reflections on why this valuable resource for Classical Chinese rhetoric has been neglected.

This essay introduces Lű's Annals (Lűshi chunqiu), a classical Chinese text with a wealth of material on rhetoric. Not only does the text evaluate numerous examples of persuasion and sophistry, it also lays out a system of rhetorical precepts grounded in a distinctive ontology, that of correlative cosmology. After outlining the cosmology, epistemology, and theory of language of Lű's Annals, I trace how these shape its rhetorical theory and practices. I then consider how the text itself works as a persuasive artifact in the light of its own strictures. The essay closes with some reflections on why this valuable resource for Classical Chinese rhetoric has been neglected.

Reviews Matthew Bevis, The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 302 pp. ISBN: 9780199593224 Heirs of the post-Enlightenment separation of ''literature" from "rhetor­ ic are likely to find the colon of Matthew Bevis's title paradoxical. Professors of "The Art of Eloquence" will not anticipate the list of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poets and novelists that follow the colon. Professors of literature will recognize the list of writers but wonder how these literary authors have become identified with rhetoric. The separation of these dis­ ciplines, after all, turns upon a view of that period in which the emergence of the category of the aesthetic warrants separate twentieth-century specialties to study "literature" and oratory. No book I have read since Jeffrey Walker's Rhetoric cud Poetics in Antiquity does more to trouble that separation than this one, for Bevis shows not only that all these literary writers were deeply engaged by the oratory of their moments but also that their literary work might best be understood as itself both a kind of rhetoric and a criticism of rhetoric. The literary texts come into clearer focus when read as responses to the rhetoric of their times, and the oratory reveals its powers and limitations when re-presented in the less exigent reflection of poems and novels. Specialist scholars have noted in passing these writers' interests in orators of their day, but Bevis convincingly makes these interests central to the style and substance of their works. Byron was an MP engaged by the rhetoric of Burke and Sheridan as well as the parliamentary conflicts of his time. Dickens, who started as a parliamentary reporter, engaged the radical rhetoric of his time and responded especially to the parliamentary rhetoric of Bulwer-Lytton. Tennyson, a public poet in his role as Laureate, followed current parliamentary debates and engaged in extended dialogue with Gladstone. Joyce was imbued with and responsive to the rhetoric of Parnell and more radical Irish nationalists. These engagements, Bevis shows, were not incidental but formative and sustaining, making it problematic to read these writers in aesthetic isolation from them. Our recent historicisms in literary studies might well have captured some of these relationships in order to debunk the purported autonomy of the aesthetic and reassert the political investments of art, but Bevis pursues a different line of argument. He works instead to recuperate the aesthetic as a Rhetorica, Vol. XXX, Issue 4, pp. 433-468, 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.2012.30.4.433. 434 RHETORICA kind of rhetoric that both responds to the immediate appeal of the rhetoric it represents and makes that rhetoric available for reflective criticism and political amelioration. Although the "art" of his title is not the Aristotelian techne oriented toward persuasion but the Kantian work of art engaged in imaginative free play, he argues that we mightfocus on how writers negotiate contending political demands in and through their work, and on how the literary arena can be considered one in which political questions are raised, entertained, and tested—not only decided or 'settled'. The conflicts and divided loyalties embodied in this arena need not be construed as merely impracticable or disingenuous hedging ofbets. They might also be seen as models of responsible political conduct, for their willingness to engage with multiple and sometimes contradictory values can prepare the groundfor a richer political response, (pp. 8-9) He sets out to redeem and apply to the work of literary art the muchmaligned Arnoldian term "disinterestedness" recapturing it from its association with a "retreat into an autotelic aesthetic realm" to link it instead with the sophistic principle of in ntramqne partem (p. 10). Following Adorno, he argues that "disinterestedness is achieved not in spite, but because, of an attentiveness to other points of view. Disinterestedness stays interested even as it seeks to resist certain forms of interest, and this resistance is...

436 RHETORICA with are the values advocated by partisans in the public discourse of the writers' polities. The work of literature is to re-present the speech of that discourse at some distance from the exigencies of decision that it responds to and attempts to create, in the cooler, more contemplative medium of writing that "wards off the decisiveness of the tongue ... and asks us to try out its words on our tongues, so that we might develop our sense of what is at stake in the process of our decision making" (p. 265). Shifting our position in literary eloquence from that of the judge listening to the calls of deliberative or forensic arguments to decide now, we would step back to the epideictic position of the theoros, critical observer, witnessing the representation of conflicting claims without an immediate call to choose, reflecting on those representations, and taking them to heart in a way that might shape our future decisions. Bevis not only rhetoricizes the principles of New Criticism; he also exemplifies a practice of close reading that brings to the fore his authors' ambivalent responses to the public oratory of their times and links their formal devices to their rhetorical criticism. New Critical preferences for ambiguity and indirection and indecision in literature return but with a crucial difference. Sometimes the only way to voice a sufficiently complex attitude is to say two things at once; sometimes an alternative meaning can only shadow the words that declare something else; sometimes the only way to suspend unreflective calls to decision to resort to aporia—that shibboleth of the deconstructive variant of New Criticism. Professors of rhetoric and of literature have much to learn from Bevis's rhetorical criticism and from the rhetorical criticism in the literary texts he explicates. They are well worth working with and, to cite a phrase Bevis cites from Empson, well worth "working out." Don Bialostosky University of Pittsburgh Jan Rothkamm, Institutio Oratorio. Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leiden: Brill 2009, 539 pp. ISBN: 9789004173286 The idea that rhetoric since the time of Plato has been foreign to philoso­ phy is antiquated today. Philosophy isn't aiming at empirical knowledge but providing certain conceptual distinctions by means of elucidations, which are introduced with the help of tropes and figures. An important question is how early modern philosophers reflected on the rhetorical use of language Reviews 437 to express their ideas. The book answers this question with respect to Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza, who appear successively on the philosophi­ cal scene in the short period from 1561 to 1679, as is shown in the instructive svnchronopsis". It was only natural that Bacon used the study of style to demonstrate his high level of education. Not originality, but familiarity with established values was a commonly accepted measure of skill. In order to adhere to good style, Descartes relied on the counsel of a rhetorician like Aemilius. At the same time Latin wasn't completely unchallenged as the one and only language of the educated anymore. Especially French proved to be an exceedingly serious competitor to the ancient languages. Spinoza's in part deliberately idiosyncratic use of Latin wasn't necessarily seen as a defect of his texts. Like many modern scientists, he committed himself to the ideal of the autonomous thinker and not of the educated reader (p. 364). Thus method is one of the most important fields of hidden effects of rhetoric in early modern philosophy. The most important result of this book is that all these effects of rhetoric are to be understood against the background of education. Bacon was well educated in oratory (p. 85). The influence of Roman rhetoric especially shows where Bacon insists on a balance between indicium and elocutio, logos and pathos, and relies on the efficiency of schemes and precepts. This fits with Bacon's strong inclination against the preference of words above matter in the "schools". The answer to "Aristotelism" had to be a new a conception of rhetoric which was at the same time dwelling on passions and actions. Rhetoric should persuade the hearer to undertake actions. The aim of rhetoric consequently is to "apply Reason to Imagination", enabling "a...

448 RHETORICA William E. Engel, Chiastic Designs in English Literaturefrom Sidney to Shakespeare, (Burlington, Ashgate Publishing, 2009), 158 pp. ISBN: 9780754666363 In his two previous books, Mapping Mortality (1995) and Death and Drama (2002), William Engel explored the role of memory and mnemonics in Renaissance literature. Chiastic Designs in English Literature from Sidney to Shakespeare is an extension of Engel's previous interests, but his project for this study focuses on +he "meaning underlying and motivating the persistence and transformations of chiasmus in the Renaissance" (12). Engel extends chiasmus beyond the classic crossing rhetorical structure and uses the category of "chiastic design" to talk about moments of echoing and doubling in the larger structural design of renaissance texts. In shifting the scale of chiasmus to consider the larger patterning of textual features Engel pushes the parameters of chiasmus as a rhetorical device to consider it as a larger rhetorical strategy. Engel argues that these larger chiastic patterns can be read as a technique for creating a type of intratextual reflexivity, or echoing about the action of the text, as well as prompting the reader to be reflective about their own experience encountering the text. In his second chapter Engel explores how situating mythical figures can be an example of chiastic design. One of the strongest offerings in this chapter is Engel's unpacking the figure of David within renaissance "allegorical imagination". Engel's intervention directs us to interrogate in novel ways the figure as not merely a reference, but rather a whole system of doubled meanings and crossings that are tied to David's struggles with his own imperfect humanity and sense of justice. The effect of these doubled inflections of idealized justice and human frailty prompt, according to Engel, nuanced philosophical reflection. This is achieved textually through points of conflict and consilience repeatedly being re-situated in relation to one another through echoes, crossings, and mirroring. To ground this assertion Engel offers a sustained treatment of the figure of David in Quarles's Divine Fancies as an illustration of a "poetics of interiority" that is based on moments that prompt the reader to look back on the action of the poem cycle. The effect of this doubling back is a layering of the situated complexity of David's experiences, both past and current to the action of the poem. The chiastic doubling of David's progress within the poem directly ties to the ars memorativa where mnemonics, like chiasmus, prompt the reflection necessary to create the connections between experience and knowledge. Engel also claims that the reader has a parallel meditative journey that is directly linked to the recursive consideration of the poem's action. In effect both David and the reader are guided through a reflexive understanding of justice, and their own fallibility, through Quarles's larger structural use of chiasmus. Engel dedicated the next chapter to the role of chiasmus in Sidney's Arcadia. By focusing on Sidney's use of architectonic chiasmus Engel aims to support his assertion that Sidney, and renaissance literacy circles more broadly, considered the symbolic to be explicitly connected to the principles Reviews 449 of ars memorativa. With this in mind, Engel aims to demonstrate that in Sid­ ney's poem chiasmus is technique that creates an ethos of loss and absence. In shifting his critical agenda regarding chiasmus away from reflective en­ gagement and towards the rhetorical processes of scaffolding an affective memory, Engel demonstrates the dexterity of chasimic design to achieve different rhetorical ends. Engel's treatment of Sidney's Arcadia traces out the poem's mnemonic framework and argues that Sidney's choice to restructure the poem was an authorial re-direction to structurally highlight an ethos of pervasive loss and searching that undergird the plot. Chiasmus in this context crosses back to demonstrate a perpetual lack or uncertainty, rather than the accretion of experience or knowledge as seen in Quarles. Engel argues that Sidney strategically created "echoes" between the eclogues and the main narrative to underscore the sense of searching that not only sup­ ports the hunt for love that the characters on all levels of the narrative are experiencing, but also prompts the reader to become psychologically...

Reviews 323 C. W. Tindale, Reason's Dark Champions: Constructive Strategies of So­ phistic Argument (Studies in Rhetoric/Communication), The Univer­ sity of South Carolina Press: Columbia, 2010. 184pp. Renewed interest in the Sophists may have achieved an unbiased, if not fully acknowledged, rehabilitation of their philosophical ideas, yet what is likely their most extensive contribution to Classical civilisation, mastery in rhetorical argumentation, has so far lacked any comprehensive summary, let alone a comparison with modern theories of reasoning. Tindale analyses the standard textual evidence on the sophists' practice of reasoning to describe those strategies which may specifically be cate­ gorised as part of their rhetorical techne. However, the inherent difficulty of separating sophists and their occupation from their contemporaries and supposed opponents (as, for example, the relevant works of Isocrates and Alcidamas indicate) makes any such endeavour, however valuable it may be, necessarily tentative. The title, Reason's Dark Champions, may seem surprising, perhaps even paradoxical, considering that the essence of sophistic argumentation required public engagement and an open display of rational discourse. In the book T. follows a dual division with the first part being devoted (one would say - almost compulsorily) to the justification of sophistic practice in the face of its often distortive Platonic and Aristotelian representation, whilst the second part brings forward an appreciative account of several individual strategies. Although this may be a practical approach, it still reflects a somewhat defensive scholarly position in studying the Sophists, which may not be justified and so necessary anymore. The introductorv chapter contrasts the opinions of key classical authors and modern scholars with a view to clear the term "sophistic" of the semantic thicket that overgrew it in the past couple of centuries, as exemplified by Xenophon's De Venatione 13. He presses ahead with his point early on that all too often eristic argumentation a la Plato's Euthydemus has become the standard label for sophistic reasoning. However, refusing to understand the positive philosophical assumptions behind strategies such as the contrasting arguments will result in overlooking the relatively solid and extensive counterevidence from Gorgias to Euripides on the legitimate use of logos to reflect the contingent nature of the world and human actions. In the second chapter T. counters the regular (albeit rather vague) charge against the Sophists that they made a weaker argument the stronger. In a lu­ cid analysis of how mistranslating "make" with "make appear could mask Aristotelian or Platonic epistemological preconceptions, T. demonstrates on a particularly vivid example the general tendency of denying the Sophists of a legitimate sceptical standpoint in judging the truth of opposing claims. In fact, the arguments in Antiphon's model speeches and Protagoras's On Truth make it clear that the sophists applied pragmatic strategies, such as probabilistic arguments, to deal with matters without an appeal to abstract principles. 324 RHETORICA The next two chapters focus on the representation of sophistic tech­ niques in selected works of Plato and Aristotle. First, T. shows how the Protagorean measure-maxim and the resulting oratorical or dialectical practice focused on persuasion was incompatible with the absolutistic epistemology of Plato, which relied on dialogue and strategies such as the elenchus to clear the way for eternal Truth. The much-reviled fallacies in the Sophistical Refutations and the Euthydemus not only demonstrate the difference be­ tween the practices of real and apparent refutations, but (more importantly) bring out the conflicting approaches to reality by the sophists and Plato. In the end T. offers a highly interesting comparison of the two kinds of refuta­ tions, showing that despite fundamental differences arising from contrasting epistemological positions both strategies show striking formal similarities. In the second major part of the book T. aims at offering a list of in­ dividual techniques that could set apart the Sophists as unique innovators of argument. Confronting the problem of distinguishing sophistic practice from later rhetorical studies T. accepts rather uncritically Schiappa's distinc­ tion between the two theories of rhetoric and logos to draw a line between the Aristotelian and Protagorean idea of persuasion. That concept, although seemingly attractive, nevertheless raises more questions about the system­ atic description of evidence on Greek sophists/rhetoricians/philosophers than it solves. The...

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...