Rhetorica

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June 2020

  1. 1 Corinthians 10:1–4: The Rhetorical-Poetic Effect of Vividness and Emotions in Paul’s Exhortation to Monotheism in the Context of 10:1–22
    Abstract

    In 1 Cor. 10:1–22, Paul deals with the role of Christ and his relationship to God. This is an important ethical topic that Paul deems necessary to discuss with the Corinthian believers. In order to make an effective, thus persuasive, argument, he follows the ancient Greco-Roman tradition of rhetoric and poetics. I argue that vv. 1–4 is Paul’s introduction to his vivid representation of monotheism (vv. 5–22). As he presents his narrative of the wilderness events, he employs various rhetorical-poetic techniques to evoke in his hearers imaginative and emotional experiences that will transport them into a higher level of ethical consciousness, a new monotheistic reality in Christ.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0008
  2. Il velo delle parole. L’eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greci di Menico Caroli
    Abstract

    Book Reviews Menico Caroli, Il velo delle parole. L'eufemismo nella lingua e nella storia dei Greet. Bari: Levante editori, 2017, 464 pp. ISBN 9788879496766 Parlare di eufemismi a proposito di alcuni autori della letteratura greca, come per esempio Aristofane, potrebbe sembrare un paradosso: come sa bene chi ha preso almeno una volta in mano il mitico saggio di Jeffrey Henderson dedicato alia 'musa maculata',1 Aristofane, e con lui tutti i poeti comici delYarchaia, diceva pane al pane e vino al vino. Eppure non sempre, tra un termine schiettamente osceno e il suo equivalente piu o meno pudico, chi scriveva commedie (o si dedicava ad altri generi letterari che, in modo analogo, non disprezzavano il greco non politically correct, come per esem­ pio il giambo o l'epigramma) sceglieva il primo. Lo dimostrano i numerosissimi esempi raccolti da Menico Caroli (d'ora in avanti C.) nel suo bellissimo libro II velo delle parole, dedicato al ruolo dell 'eufemismo nella lingua e nella cultura greca (ma con continui sconfinamenti nel mondo romano), nato da una tesi di laurea in Grammatica greca seguita da Francesco De Martino e discussa alEUniversita di Bari. C., che oggi insegna lingua e letteratura greca alEUniversita di Foggia, ha dedicato alia commedia la parte piu cospicua del suo voluminoso saggio (che, se si contano anche le died illustrazioni inserite in fondo al volume, sfiora le cinquecento pagine). L'ultimo capitolo, intitolato L'eufemismo e il comune senso del pudore, discute a lungo dei tentativi (nel complesso, peraltro, assai poco riusciti) di evitare, quando era possibile, il ricorso all'aischrologhia nelle tante scene comiche che riproducevano situazioni francamente oscene. Prima di Aristofane e dei suoi sodali, perd, C. ha affrontato anche altri autori (o meglio, altri ambiti semantici e culturali), dove l'eufemismo ha sem­ pre giocato un ruolo di primo piano. Nella seconda parte del libro, intitolata Lessico degli eufemismi greci, egli attraversa con sicurezza mondi differenti, passando dalla religione alia filosofia, dalla giurisprudenza alia storia, dalla politica al teatro, utilizzando come base documentaria non solo le testimonianze letterarie, ma anche quelle epigrafiche e papirologiche, che sono state spesso escluse dall'indagine dei linguisti. :J. Henderson, The Maculate Muse. Obscene Language in Attic Comedy (New Haven-London 19751; New York-Oxford 19912). Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVTH, Issue 3, pp. 321-332. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.38.3.j>21 322 RHETORICA Una posizione particolare occupano i capitoli che aprono la sezione: L’eufemismo e le tenebre della superstizione e "Non abbellirmi la morte''. In questi due capitoli, dedicati alia modalita dell'interdizione magico-religiosa, C. affronta i temi legati al destino dell'uomo e, in particolare, alia morte (quel concetto che, molto piu degli altri, gli antichi - cosi come fanno anche i modemi - cercavano di velare grazie alia tecnica deU'eufemismo). A dimostrazione dell'ampiezza e della profondita della sua indagine c'e inoltre il fatto che, tra i tanti autori vagliati da C., ci sono anche figure secondarie , come per esempio la misteriosa Filenide, la scrittrice di Samo vissuta tra il IV e il III secolo a.C., alia quale si deve il piu antico manuale erotico della civilta occidental, conservato in modo purtroppo estremamente frammentario da un papiro ossirinchita,2 i cui pochi resti vengono discussi nel capitolo La permuta eufemistica del difetto, dedicato al "lessico dei vizi e dei difetti, di natura e di comportamento". Un altro autore poco noto e Damascio di Damasco, ultimo scolarca dell'Accademia filosofica di Atene, che tra il V e il VI secolo d.C. scrisse l'opera Sulla vita del filosofo Isidoro, a noi nota grazie alia 'recensione' che ne fece il patriarca Fozio nella sua Biblioteca-. nello stesso capitolo, C. ricorda come, secondo il suo biografo, Damascio rifiutasse sdegnoso tutti quegli accorgimenti linguistici che permettevano di ridimensionare i difetti e le debolezze degli altri, smascherando quindi la pericolosa vicinanza tra l...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0012
  3. Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus by Tushar Irani, and: The Rhetoric of Plato’s Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion by James L. Kastely
    Abstract

    328 RHETORICA de cinq siecles qui separe le pseudo-Platon et Maxime). L'ouvrage hesite, puisqu'il mentionne incidemment ces auteurs platoniciens, tout comme il hesite, pour les besoins de son objet, entre un traitement exclusivement philosophique et une approche plus rhetorique de la priere. On forme evidemment ces regrets parce que Ton y est conduit par l'aptitude d'AT a produire des syntheses eclairantes. Sans doute Porphyre et ses predecesseurs platoniciens n'avaient-ils pas lu Lacan, mais ils n'en tenaient pas moins lame pour structuree, consciemment et inconsciemment, comme un langage. Qu'elle ne soit pas exprimee en paroles, phonetiquement, ne change rien au fait qu'elle est foncierement logike (meme si elle se fait sans le truchement du logos, y compris du logos interieur, empreint de passion ; p. 158), qu'elle est de l'ordre du discours et que la pensee est toujours, depuis Platon, un discours, sinon un dialogue. AT nous invite a distinguer de maniere tranchee la priere silencieuse et phi­ losophique de la priere prononcee. Mais sans doute doit-on temperer cette opposition. La priere silencieuse en quoi consiste l'exercice theoretique de l'intellection, est une forme de communication, de partage et d'entente avec la divinite. C'est ce qui explique, pour n'en retenir qu'un exemple, que les demons soient designes par Porphyre comme des divinites intermediaries, des « transporters » de messages, qui font circuler prieres humaines ou pre­ scriptions divines en les transmettant d'un destinataire a l'autre. Comme le dit le debut de la longue sequence demonologique du De Abstinentia, en II 36 (§3), c'est la mission proprement angelique des demons que de transmettre des messages et des conseils. Parmi lesquels figurent les prieres. Le silence n'est aucunement suspension de l'expression et de la communication entre les hommes et les dieux. L'ouvrage d'AT connaitra la meme fortune que sa precedente synthese« demonologique », en devenant l'etude de reference sur son objet. Jean-Francois Pradeau Universite Lyon III - Jean Moulin Tushar Irani, Plato on the Value of Philosophy: The Art of Argument in the Gorgias and Phaedrus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, xiv + 217 pp. ISBN 9781316855621 James L. Kastely, The Rhetoric of Plato's Republic: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015, xvii + 260 pp. ISBN 9780226278629 Scholarship on rhetoric in Plato habitually suffers from certain limita­ tions. While recent decades have seen profound revolutions in how Plato's dialogues are read and interpreted (inspiring profound changes in Plato Book Reviews 329 scholarship generally), these changes have had too little impact on how Plato's treatment of sophistry and rhetoric is conceived. Among the most important of these changes is the development of literary-dramatic readings of the dialogues, which consider the works' philosophical content by relation to their literary form as dialogues. According to this view, reading Plato entails an awareness of dialogue's distinctive capacity for masking authorial intention and voice. Such a reading resists the hasty assumption that the works put forth Plato's dogmatic or doctrinal positions for which Socrates was the presumed mouthpiece. Rather, as literary-dramatic representations, the dialogues give voice to indirect positions and hidden views. In spite of this enhanced sensitivity to Plato's authorial choices, there has been on the whole no significant alteration to the view that Plato held rhetoric in contempt or extreme distrust, believing it to be a sham art, a threat to true philosophy, and an inferior method to dialectic. Hence rhetoric is mere rhetoric—the lesser counterpart of philosophy, useful only for speaking to ignorant masses, for whom more rational methods are ineffectual. He may have offered marginal and grudging allowance for rhetoric in the Phaedrus dialogue, but only as an unrealizable ideal that sacrifices practical effectiveness. This leads to the second limitation. Studies of rhetoric in Plato often orbit around the two dialogues where rhetoric is treated most explicitly— the Gorgias and the Phaedrus—and neglect the relevance of many of Plato's other dialogues for understanding his conception of rhetoric, despite the fact that language, rhetoric, and sophistry are abiding (albeit implicit) concerns across the corpus of dialogues. Where these...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0015
  4. La prière dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon à Proclus par Andrei Timotin
    Abstract

    Book Reviews 325 Americans rioted on behalf their favorite American actor—was Quickly turned into a lecture hall in the following year where Emerson gave his lectures on "England," lectures that would become some of his most popular. Another hugely important part of Lecturing the Atlantic is its critical method of combining close reading with audience reception. Despite the many books discussing Emerson's lecture career, Wright has done exciting new work tracing newspaper responses to his lectures on England, and this full-dress chapter has the highly pleasing effect of conveying a genuinely open-ended examination of evidence, rather than forcefully trying to fit material to his thesis. Indeed, throughout the book, Wright seeks to unite careful readings of lecture texts with actual audience responses, plotting regional variations against local, national, and international politics, and squarely acknowledging counter-evidence where he finds it. Methodologically speaking, Wright provi­ des a solid balance of studying a focused number of primary texts and giving appropriate space to unfold their social context. Worth the price of admission itself are Wright's two introductory chap­ ters, which survey early nineteenth-century lecture culture more generally, sharing new information about the transatlantic roots of the lyceum, and argu­ ing that educational lecturing has yet to be fully integrated with studies of literature and theater culture. The beginning of the book is a concise statement of current research in the area for scholars interested in connecting lecture cul­ ture to their work. Granville Ganter St. John's University Queens, New York Timotin, Andrei, La priere dans la tradition platonicienne, de Platon a Proclus. Turnhout, Brepols [coll. Recherches sur les rhetoriques religieuses ], 2017, 296 pp. Andrei Timotin (AT par la suite) publie un ouvrage qui obeit a une methode deja eprouvee dans son precedent ouvrage, lui aussi ecrit en fran^ais, La demonologie platonicienne : histoire de la notion de daimon de Platon aux derniers neoplatoniciens, paru a Leyden chez Brill en 2012 ; une methode de recherche a la fois thematique et conceptuelle, qui procede par examens successifs de textes. L'ouvrage « demonologique » procedait ainsi chronologiquement , en suivant Telaboration d'une reflexion sur les demons a la fois extremement developpee par les neoplatoniciens, mais aussi et en meme temps ancree dans la doctrine platonicienne. La presente etude procede de maniere semblable, en proposant d'examiner les definitions et les usages philosophiques de la priere dans la tradition platonicienne, depuis le divin Platon jusqu'a Proclus. Apres une introduction, sept chapitres se succedent chronologiquement et traitent respectivement de la priere dans les dialogues 326 RHETORICA de Platon; dans l'apocryphe (et hellenistique) Second Alcibiade ; chez Maxime de Tyr ; chez Plotin ; chez Porphyre ; chez Jamblique ; enfin, chez Proclus. L'ensemble du volume est homogene, les chapitres sont d'une egale impor­ tance et procedent selon une meme trame, puisque AT s'attache a chaque fois a montrer comment la reflexion sur la priere procede depuis Platon sur le double registre de la critique de la priere ordinaire et celui de la conception a nouveaux frais d'une priere veritablement philosophique, c'est-a-dire savante et silencieuse, soucieuse d'honorer la divinite sans rien (ou presque) lui demander. AT montre de fagon convaincante que la priere est une activite cultuelle que Platon defend, en depit meme de toutes les errances dont font preuve ses contemporains, en matiere de cultes et de conceptions du divin. C'est avant tout (comme l'etablissent les Lois, et plus particulierement leur livre X dont AT restitue l'argument) comme un element reglemente du culte public (Platon, rappelons-le, interdit tout culte prive dans la cite des Magnetes), qui a sa necessite pourvu que la priere soit a jamais expurgee de toute forme de demande. Qu'un etre vivant passible, souvent pathetique, se pense en mesure de demander, sinon de contraindre par la croyance, une divinite impassible qui exerce eternellement une activite noetique, n'est pas concevable . Il faut done promouvoir une nouvelle forme de priere, dont AT montre bien comment, dans les dialogues de Platon, elle est distinguee des pratiques communes tant selon l'objet que selon la forme. Selon l'objet parce que la priere de culte public est done conservee, pourvu qu...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0014

May 2020

  1. La Construcción Retórica de la Ciencia por el Joven Adam Smith: The Rhetoric Construction of Science by the Young Adam Smith
    Abstract

    El presente artículo interpreta la obra de Adam Smith a partir de la retórica. Basándose en el análisis comparativo de los textos, afirma la dependencia de la Historia de la Astronomía con respecto a las Lecciones sobre retórica y, con ello, la naturaleza retórica del uso smithiano de la ciencia. Tras analizar las metáforas utilizadas por Smith, deja de lado la metáfora gravitacional y la de la mano invisible y se centra en las basadas en el teatro y en la analogía con la máquina. De esto concluye que Smith recurrió al potencial constructivo de la retórica para superar el escepticismo humeano, lo cual, a su vez, tiene consecuencias sobre nuestra comprensión de la historia de la retórica.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.200
  2. <i>Invention and Authorship in Medieval England</i>, by Robert R. Edwards
    Abstract

    Book Review| May 01 2020 Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, by Robert R. Edwards Robert R.Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus: The Ohio State Press, 2017. 230 pp. ISBN 9780814213407 Jordan Loveridge Jordan Loveridge Jordan Loveridge Departments of Communication and English Mount Saint Mary's University 16300 Old Emmitsburg Rd. Emmitsburg, MD 21727 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 232–234. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.232 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jordan Loveridge; Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, by Robert R. Edwards. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 232–234. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.232 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.232
  3. Aspetti del parlato nell'oratoria sacra secentesca: tra retorica e pragmatica
    Abstract

    Il saggio esamina alcuni trattati di retorica pubblicati tra la fine del Cinque e l'inizio del Seicento. Partendo dall'analisi di alcune retoriche cinquecentesche, passando dal confronto tra due dei maggiori esponenti teorici dell'oratoria sacra, Francesco Panigarola e Paolo Aresi, e arrivando ad alcuni trattatisti del primo Seicento, il contributo si concentrerà prevalentemente sulle informazioni retoriche relative alla pragmatica, ossia tutto ciò che nella predicazione riguarda l'uso della voce e dei gesti. L’actio infatti si configura come un'importante chiave di lettura per l'interpretazione della predica cinque e secentesca e permette di individuare come e quanto il parlato intervenga sullo scritto.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.180
  4. <i>Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures</i>, by Jean Bessette
    Abstract

    Book Review| May 01 2020 Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures, by Jean Bessette JeanBessette, Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017, 202 pp. ISBN 9780809336234 Morgan DiCesare Morgan DiCesare Morgan DiCesare Department of Communication Studies University of Iowa 25 South Madison Street Iowa City, IA 52242 morgan-dicesare@uiowa.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 225–227. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.225 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Morgan DiCesare; Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures, by Jean Bessette. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 225–227. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.225 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.225
  5. <i>The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory</i>, by Peter A. O'Connell
    Abstract

    Book Review| May 01 2020 The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, by Peter A. O'Connell Peter A.O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 Ruth Webb Ruth Webb Ruth Webb Universite dé Lille ruth.webb@univ-lille.fr Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 227–229. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Ruth Webb; The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, by Peter A. O'Connell. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 227–229. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.227
  6. <i>Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus</i> by Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch
    Abstract

    Book Review| May 01 2020 Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus by Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch HaroldParker and Jan MaximilianRobitzsch, eds., Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus, (Beiträge zur Altertumskunde 368), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 202 pp. ISBN 9783110573978 Peter A. O'Connell Peter A. O'Connell Peter A. O'Connell Departments of Classics and Communication Studies The University of Georgia Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (2): 229–232. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.229 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Peter A. O'Connell; Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus by Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch. Rhetorica 1 May 2020; 38 (2): 229–232. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.229 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. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.229
  7. Socrates' Versatile Rhetoric and the Soul of the Crowd
    Abstract

    In Plato's early dialogues, the impossibility of talking to the crowd appears as a constitutive element of the opposition between rhetoric and dialectic and raises the understudied question of the role of the audience in Socratic thought. However, Xenophon's Socrates constantly identifies public and private speech. But this likening is also found in the Alcibiades Major, which gives a key to understand the true meaning of this assimilation: one can convince an audience, by talking to each individual in the crowd. The need to address each one implies an adaptation of language that can be found in the texts of different disciples of Socrates. The rhetorical aspects of the Phaedrus' psychagogia should then be understood, not as a new Platonic concept which allows the good orator to address the many, but rather as a new formulation of a well-known and shared Socratic ideal.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.2.135

March 2020

  1. The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory by Peter A. O’Connell
    Abstract

    Book Reviews 227 compelling theoretically, the case study did not fully examine the implications of the project's reliance on homonormativity. Bessette concludes with two provocations for the future of queer retroactivism. First, she argues that a near-future task may be to challenge the centrality of corporations in digital media production. And second, she follows Carla Freccero in noting that the hauntological past must be heard, on its own terms. Bessette's work with a variety of grassroots lesbian archives is an engaging read and offers a useful approach to historical scholarship. But I felt that she did not spend enough time parsing out the affordances and limitations of grassroots archives in relation to their institutional counterparts. Fittingly, Bessette's most important insight is her notion of retroactivism, a concept that can hopefully open up more space for reconsidering archival identification, queer or otherwise, into the future. Morgan DiCesare University of Iowa Peter A. O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 The close connections between rhetorical and theatrical performance as two of the major types of civic spectacle in Classical Athens are well esta­ blished, but we are hampered by the fact that our knowledge of courtroom practice is largely dependent on the surviving texts of the speeches. Unlike their Roman counterparts, the surviving fourth-century Greek treatises have little to say about delivery or about the type of spectacular effects alluded to in Attic comedy and in the speeches themselves, which creates a challenge to the modem researcher. Peter O'Connell's book, based on his PhD disser­ tation, is one of several recent studies to take up that challenge1 and is dis­ tinguished by its focus on sight and visual effects in Athenian trials. O'Connell's book stands out for its focus on the role of vision, both physical and mental, and metaphors of sight in forensic oratory (with a brief foray into the funeral oration). It makes an important contribution to the study of vivid language and visual effects as an integral part of the process of persuasion and underlines the continuing importance of these tools through modem comparisons. The author's solution to the lack of theoretical discussions contemporary with the speeches is to draw principally on an impressively wide range of ancient speeches, giving close readings of ^ee, for example, N. Villaceque, Spectateurs de Paroles: Deliberation democratique et theatre a Athenes a Vepoque classique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013) and A. Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (London : Routledge, 2017). 228 RHETORICA selected passages (summaries of all the speeches discussed are given in an invaluable appendix). The astute close readings of these passages are supple­ mented by appeals - made with all due caution — to the critical and theoreti­ cal discussions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The result sheds a new light on the functioning of judicial oratory as a multi-sensory persuasive per­ formance, though the nature of the material inevitably raises some questions. All the major passages are quoted in the Greek and in the author's own English versions. The choice of a very literal translation style serves to clarify the sense of the words discussed but at the occasional cost of fluidity. The first of the book's three parts asks what was visible to the jury within the courtroom, analysing passages that comment on the impact of the presence and physical appearance of the various parties to the case in the courtroom and of material evidence. Against the background of the close association of vision and knowledge in the Greek language, the second section analyses the importance of vision and of metaphors of vision in Athenian law, forensic oratory, and, beyond the courts, in classical Greek philosophical and medical texts. It is here that O'Connell, through citations from Sophists such as Protagoras, Antiphon, and Gorgias, raises the vital epis­ temological question of how juries could decide upon events they had not themselves witnessed. This is backed up by an illuminating analysis of the lan­ guage of visibility in Antiphon and in Gorgias' Defense of Palamedes, which explores the challenge of proving the non-existence...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0021
  2. Chrétien the Jay: Avian Rhetoric in Philomena
    Abstract

    I argue here that the medieval French Philomena, found exclusively within the Ovide moralisé, a fourteenth-century translation and adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, adumbrates a theory of vocal repetition as an aesthetic that is shared by both birds and humans. Various common rhetorical devices that foreground acoustic reduplication appear in high density in the text, where they are often collocated with evocations of birdsong. After exploring the parallels between these devices and the structure of avian vocalization, I show the presence of several passages in the text that can be read simultaneously as onomatopoeic evocations of birdsong and as standard referential language. I also propose a solution to the mysterious label associated with the text's author, "Chrétien li gois" ("Chretien the jay").

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0017
  3. Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato’s Menexenus ed. by Harold Parker, Jan Maximilian Robitzsch
    Abstract

    Book Reviews 229 O'Connell is very effective when analysing the use of vivid language to make the audience imagine scenes they have not witnessed themselves, dis­ cussing Aeschines' passage on the sack of Thebes, Demosthenes on Phokis, and Lycurgus on the scene at Athens after the catastrophic military defeat at Chaeronea. His analyses make use of both ancient criticism and modem lit­ erary tools. Taken together, they make a strong case for accepting the ancient commentators' evaluation of these passages as able to make the audience "see" the scene in imagination. The most stimulating part of this final section however is the final chapter on "shared spectatorship" with its examples of the interaction between the mental images of past actions or absent persons created by the orators' language and the actual sights of the courtroom. O'Connell shows how the orators encourage a type of mental superimposition (my term) of the idea of the sight evoked - and created - by the orator onto the accused present in the courtroom. This is particularly satisfying as an example of actual and virtual sights being used as a sustained strategy throughout a speech and underlines the multiple possibilities for manipulation. One area that could have been addressed in more detail is the sugges­ tion on p. 32 that appearance—real or imagined—might spark a process of enthymematic reasoning (the accused has the commonly accepted characte­ ristics of a murderer/adulterer therefore it is likely that he is guilty as char­ ged). But this rich and stimulating study has a great deal to offer specialists in ancient and modem rhetoric and in ancient Greek literature and culture. Ruth Webb Universite de Lille Harold Parker and Jan Maximilian Robitzsch, eds., Speeches for the Dead: Essays on Plato's Menexenus, (Beitrage zur Altertumskunde 368), Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. 202 pp. ISBN 9783110573978 Plato's Menexenus is a rhetorical masterpiece. That, at any rate, seems to have been the judgment of generations of Athenians, who, Cicero tells us, had someone recite Socrates' funeral oration annually (Orator 151). The speech can be stirring, especially when Socrates speaks in the voice of the dead soldiers and urges their sons to lives of virtue. But is it sincere? Before he delivers the speech, Socrates claims that it is easy to give funeral orations, since all you have to do is praise Athenians to Athenians. The speech misrepresents historical events and doesn't even reflect Socrates own sentiments, since he attributes it to Pericles mistress Aspasia. To make matters worse, Socrates seems to be delivering the speech years after he, and probably Aspasia as well, had died. The puzzles of the Menexenus have no easy answer. Unable to resolve its contradictions in a satisfactory t47av, scholars have tended to focus on its relationship with other surviving 230 RHETORICA Athenian funeral orations and with the rest of Plato's works. This thoughtprovoking volume is no exception. The contributors approach the text from the perspectives of philosophy and political thought, but their argu­ ments will also be inspiring to readers interested in rhetoric in Plato and in Classical Athens. After a brief introduction, Speechesfor the Dead reprints Charles H. Kahn's 1963 article, "Plato's Funeral Oration: The Motive of the Menexenus" Kahn argues that the Menexenus is a political pamphlet, expressing Plato's dislike of the policies of Pericles and his successors, especially the capitulation to Persia in the King's Peace of 386. The eight new essays in Speeches for the Dead are influenced not so much by Kahn's specific arguments as by his approach, which poses five questions about the Menexenus: Why Aspasia? Why the anachronisms? Why the historical distortions? Why did Plato write a funeral oration? Why did that oration continue to be delivered years after it was written? Only some of the authors invoke these questions directly, but a fundamental "why" lies behind each of the essays. They all seek to explain why the Menexenus is the way it is by treating it as a work of serious Platonic philosophy. In "Reading the Menexenus Intertextually," Mark Zelcer takes seriously Socrates' claim that Aspasia composed the speech he delivers by gluing together pieces she had left...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0022
  4. Aspetti del parlato nell’oratoria sacra secentesca: Tra retorica e pragmatica
    Abstract

    Il saggio esamina alcuni trattati di retorica pubblicati tra la fine del Cinque e l’inizio del Seicento. Partendo dall’analisi di alcune retoriche cinquecentesche, passando dal confronto tra due dei maggiori esponenti teorici dell’oratoria sacra, Francesco Panigarola e Paolo Aresi, e arrivando ad alcuni trattatisti del primo Seicento, il contribute si concentrerà prevalentemente sulle informazioni retoriche relative alla pragmatica, ossia tutto ciò che nella predicazione riguarda l’uso della voce e dei gesti. L’actio infatti si configura come un’importante chiave di lettura per l’interpretazione della predica cinque e secentesca e permette di individuare come e quanto il parlato intervenga sullo scritto.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0018
  5. Invention and Authorship in Medieval England by Robert R. Edwards
    Abstract

    232 RHETORICA concludes it is the definitive guide to the Menexenus that the back cover pro­ mises, there is something here for everyone who wants to think critically about the dialogue and its problems. Peter A. O'Connell The University of Georgia Robert R. Edwards, Invention and Authorship in Medieval England (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture), Columbus: The Ohio State Press, 2017. 230 pp. ISBN 9780814213407 It is a philological distinction commonly invoked by historians of rhetoric that invention, rhetoric's first and arguably foremost canon, has something of a double meaning. The Latin invenire can mean "to find" or "to come upon," or it can mean "to create" or "to contrive." In Invention and Authorship in Medieval England, Robert Edwards shows how medieval authors invented (in both senses of the term) authorial identities that wor­ ked within accepted traditions of literary production and interpretation, and also sometimes questioned or subverted those traditions, showing that "authorship is at once rhetorical and literary, historical and poetic" (xi). Yet, while Edwards observes that rhetorical theory was an important ele­ ment of literary production and of identification with distinct traditions, the relationship between the literary, the rhetorical, and distinct models of authorship remains comparatively underexplored. The result is a deep and compelling literary analysis of canonical English authors such as Marie de France, Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate, but a somewhat incom­ plete discussion of the intersection of rhetoric and poetics in English literary culture. This incompleteness, however, should not dissuade the prospective reader from engaging with this text. Edwards' deep knowledge of classical and medieval culture is evident throughout all of the chapters of Invention and Authorship in Medieval England. Indeed, the relationship of each literary figure to classical and vernacular traditions is of paramount concern to Edwards, as he notes that "the agency . . . working in medieval English texts consciously foregrounds the decision to write within traditions and conventions" (xv), meaning that authors only achieve authorship by "consciously placing themselves through their works within the interpretive structure of a literary system" (xvi). Each chapter, then, endeavors to place each literary figure within such a liter­ ary system. Chapter 2, for instance, demonstrates how Marie de France "exer­ cises agency to revise her received materials [e.g. primarily those of Ovid] from popular and learned sources and to create a hybrid classicism in which she operates as a counterpart and conscious alternative to a Latin auetor" (34). In general, Edwards' claims in regard to such systems are well-defended; for instance, he thoroughly defends his assertion that "in Ovid's Book Reviews 233 erotodidactic poems . . . Marie finds a topic and conceptual frame for invention and authorship rather than rhetorical adornment and learned allusion" (40). This assessment is itself valuable, as it counters common readings of Marie (and indeed, many other medieval authors) that reduce their receptions and appropriations of classical literary culture to derivate borrowings, as Edwards himself observes (39). Likewise, Edwards' discus­ sion of Gower and his use of elements of scribal and textual culture—such as the accessus,- prologues, paratexts, and others (63-104)—is well-supported and fascinating. Yet, some other chapters, such as the section on Chaucer, do not fully account for the potential influence of contemporary theories of rhetoric and poetics that would have been instrumental for defining attitudes toward lit­ erary authorship. This omission is striking, first, because Edwards observes the connections between literary authorship and rhetoric in the introductory chapters of his text, and second, because his incorporation of scholarship by historians of rhetoric such as Rita Copeland and James J. Murphy suggests a knowledge of this sub-field and how it may have influenced English literary attitudes. For example, while Edwards observes that Chaucer is associated with a catalogue of works by his contemporaries, as well as that these works are largely "generated through forms of poetic imitation," (110) it was sur­ prising to see that he made little connection to the tradition of the medieval artes poetriae (aside from a reference in a footnote citing Murphy, which men­ tioned Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Matthew of Venddme). Arguably these artes represent an early example of the codification of contemporary medieval poets such as Alan of...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0023
  6. Socrates’ Versatile Rhetoric and the Soul of the Crowd
    Abstract

    In Plato’s early dialogues, the impossibility of talking to the crowd appears as a constitutive element of the opposition between rhetoric and dialectic and raises the understudied question of the role of the audience in Socratic thought. However, Xenophon’s Socrates constantly identifies public and private speech. But this likening is also found in the Alcibiades Major, which gives a key to understand the true meaning of this assimilation: one can convince an audience, by talking to each individual in the crowd. The need to address each one implies an adaptation of language that can be found in the texts of different disciples of Socrates. The rhetorical aspects of the Phaedrus’ psychagogia should then be understood, not as a new Platonic concept which allows the good orator to address the many, but rather as a new formulation of a well-known and shared Socratic ideal.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0016
  7. Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures by Jean Bessette
    Abstract

    Book Reviews Jean Bessette, Retroactivism in the Lesbian Archives: Composing Pasts and Futures. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017, 202 pp. ISBN 9780809336234 Since queer, feminist, and rhetorical scholars have "returned" to the archive over the past twenty years, Bessette's book brings queer and feminist archival theories to bear on rhetorical studies. Bessette is concerned with how lesbian collectives have composed a past for themselves and oriented themselves toward new possibilities for identification that could challenge "then-present social and political denigrations of same-sex desire and rela­ tionships" (2). The result is a retooling of familiar rhetorical concepts for the study and historiographic consideration of queer and feminist collective pasts. Bessette's rewriting of archival logics through rhetorical concepts is useful for both queer rhetoricians and wider archival studies. Particularly, her read­ ing of identification through retroactivism and the notion of "documenting the search" offer new approaches for any archival engagement (125). The book begins with the theoretical insights of queer and feminist archival scholarship before turning to specific technologies in each chapter that offer insights into the retroactivist impulses of lesbian rhetors and lesbian communities. Bessette begins by drawing on Lucas Hilderbrand's "retroactivism," a concept that Hilderbrand uses to engage his longings for a personal and nostalgic queer past. Bessette links retroactivism to the account of identifica­ tion given by Kenneth Burke to argue that grassroots collectives sought the "displacement—and replacing—of pejorative accounts of lesbianism with new versions of the past" (10). These revisions of the past were marshalled to produce different definitions of lesbianism and open space for alternative futures. She argues that rhetorical studies, and particularly Burke's under­ standing of identification, already offer the requisite tools for engagements with queer archives. Chapter one contends that Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon's influential book LesbianANoman is itself an archive. Bessette reads the short personal stories contained in LesbianANoman as anecdotes that demonstrate the ephemeraUty of the queer archive (26). She argues that these anecdotes were arranged to produce a respectable white middle-class narrative of lesbian identity, in line with the goals of its authors who were leaders in the Daughters of Bilitis. This identity was framed to challenge dominant homophobic social narratives, and Bessette centers the function of exclusion in identification. Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVhl, Issue 2, pp. 225-234. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.38.2.225 226 RHETORICA Whereas chapter one addresses a printed text as archive, chapter two turns to a "place-based" understanding of archives through a reading of the Lesbian Herstory Archives (LHA) and the June L. Mazer Archives (JLMA). Bessette argues that classification in the LHA, an archive which accepts "any­ thing a lesbian has touched," operates as a "rhetorical topos" which "blurs the boundaries between archival categories, creating the conditions for a genera­ tive, flexible identity" (61). Bessette contends that the LHA offers the possibil­ ity of making seemingly disparate connections through browsing. Bessette then turns to the JLMA and a photograph collage from Ester Bentley that sits in view outside of the domain of a particular collection. Due to its position, she argues that these photos instill in visitors a sense of possibility for historical connection that crosses the categories of the archive. The chapter concludes with a brief review of the JLMA's recent partnership with UCLA. Bessette suggests that the queemess of the JLMA's collection may be lost when viewing their materials in UCLA's straight, institutional reading room, a point I believe needs additional substantiation. Chapter three turns to documentary films and their "fabrication of the past" (95). Bessette reads these films as allowing for a composition of lesbian histories that challenge "dependencies upon lesbian history for present sexual identification" (97). Bessette analyzes five historiographic lesbian films through a relevant multimodal rhetorical strategy. The films and their respective strategies include "unstable identity categories" in The Female...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0020
  8. La Constructión Retórica de la Ciencia por el Joven Adam Smith: The Rhetoric Construction of Science by the Young Adam Smith
    Abstract

    El presente artículo interprets la obra de Adam Smith a partir de la retórica. Basándose en el análisis comparative de los textos, afirma la dependencia de la <i>Historic de la Astronomía</i> con respecto a las <i>Lecciones sobre retórica</i> y, con ello, la naturaleza retórica del uso smithiano de la ciencia. Tras analizar las metáforas utilizadas por Smith, deja de lado la metáfora gravitacional y la de la mano invisible y se centra en las basadas en el teatro y en la analogía con la máquina. De esto concluye que Smith recurrió al potencial constructive de la retórica para superar el escepticismo humeano, lo cual, a su vez, tiene consecuencias sobre nuestra comprensión de la historia de la retórica.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0019

February 2020

  1. Review: The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People, by Xing Lu
    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.126
  2. Review: The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, by David Randall
    Abstract

    Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, by David Randall David Randall, The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, vi + 266 pp. ISBN 9781474430104David Randall, The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, vii + 288 pp. ISBN 9781474448666 James Donathan Garner James Donathan Garner James Donathan Garner Department of Rhetoric and Writing University of Texas at Austin 204 W 21ST ST Austin, TX 78712 j.garner@utexas.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 122–126. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.122 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation James Donathan Garner; Review: The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, by David Randall. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 122–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.122 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.122
  3. Il dialogismos: un caso esemplare nell'insegnamento retorico-grammaticale
    Abstract

    The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos, in Charisius' Ars grammatica, in Iulius Ruphinianus' De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.14
  4. Review: From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, by Quentin Skinner
    Abstract

    Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, by Quentin Skinner Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 432 pp. ISBN 9781107128859 Kathy Eden Kathy Eden Kathy Eden English Department Columbia University 602 Philosophy Hall New York, New York 10027 khe1@columbia.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 118–122. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.118 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kathy Eden; Review: From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics, by Quentin Skinner. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 118–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.118 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.118
  5. Staging Oratory in Renaissance Germany: The Delivery of Andrés Laguna's Europa Heautentimorumene (1543)
    Abstract

    Not much is known about the actual practice of delivering orations in the Renaissance. In some instances—particularly in instances of orations held at universities—there is the possibility to consult sources like the diaries of the faculties, in order to get some information about the actio of a specific oration. In other instances, sometimes the printed orations themselves, the context they were given in, the author's rhetorical upbringing, and the links between oratory and contemporary acting can provide indications of the way orations were performed. The Latin oration Europa heautentimorumene by the Spanish doctor Andrés Laguna, which was delivered in January 1543 at the University of Cologne and printed shortly afterwards, constitutes such a case.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.84
  6. Review: An Argument on Rhetorical Style, by Marie Lund
    Abstract

    Book Review| February 01 2020 Review: An Argument on Rhetorical Style, by Marie Lund Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 220 pp. $25 (paper). ISBN 9788771844344 Arthur E. Walzer Arthur E. Walzer Arthur Walzer Professor Emeritus, Communication Studies University of Minnesota 40 Prospect Park W, 1J Brooklyn, NY 11215 awalzer@umn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2020) 38 (1): 129–132. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.129 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Arthur E. Walzer; Review: An Argument on Rhetorical Style, by Marie Lund. Rhetorica 1 February 2020; 38 (1): 129–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.129 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.129

January 2020

  1. Staging Oratory in Renaissance Germany: The Delivery of Andrés Laguna’s Europa Heautentimorumene (1543)
    Abstract

    Not much is known about the actual practice of delivering orations in the Renaissance. In some instances—particularly in instances of orations held at universities—there is the possibility to consult sources like the diaries of the faculties, in order to get some information about the actio of a specific oration. In other instances, sometimes the printed orations themselves, the context they were given in, the author’s rhetorical upbringing, and the links between oratory and contemporary acting can provide indications of the way orations were performed. The Latin oration Europa heautentimorumene by the Spanish doctor Andrés Laguna, which was delivered in January 1543 at the University of Cologne and printed shortly afterwards, constitutes such a case.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0028
  2. Il dialogismos: Un caso esemplare nell’insegnamento retorico-grammaticale
    Abstract

    The presence of a singular rhetorical figure, the dialogismos, in Charisius’ Ars grammatica, in Iulius Ruphinianus’ De figuris and in some exegetical notes by Donatus to Terence, yields the opportunity to reflect on the mutual influences between rhetoric and grammar in the textbooks of the Late Empire. A mediating role seems to be played by the Progymnasmata.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0025
  3. The Horatian Tradition in Medieval Rhetoric: From the Twelfth-Century “Materia” Commentary to Landino 1482
    Abstract

    Horace’s Art of Poetry supplied the medieval schools with the only available classical doctrines on fiction and poetry before Aristotle’s Poetics became widely studied in the fifteenth century. Horace exercized both practical and theoretical influence on literary exegesis, and shaped medieval and early Renaissance doctrines of composition by discussing the very nature of fiction, narrative techniques, authorial roles, description of character and tone, including performance and reading of a text. The anonymous commentators as well as the Dante commentator Francesco da Buti (1395) were deeply influenced by the twelfth-century “Materia” Commentary, but also by the Arabic notion of an independent art of poetics, and remained in lively dialogue with the teaching of Ciceronian rhetoric of invention, disposition, elocution, and delivery.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0026
  4. An Argument on Rhetorical Style by Marie Lund
    Abstract

    Reviews 129 to rebrand old ideologies and invent new rhetorical repertoires with direct appeal to twenty-first-century audiences both at home and abroad. Reading The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong is a true delight, a delight that is made possible by Xing Lu s dispassionate and deeply engaging study of political rhetoric in modern China in general and Mao's transformative rhet­ oric in particular. As China continues to make its presence importantly felt on the world stage, understanding and developing a productive dialogue with its rhetoric is imperative. The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong should serve as an efficacious guide toward this urgent task confronting today's rhetori­ cians and politicians of all persuasions. Luming Mao University of Utah Marie Lund, An Argument on Rhetorical Style. Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2017, 220 pp. $25 (paper). ISBN 9788771844344 In An Argument on Rhetorical Style, Marie Lund builds on the work of Maurice Charland on constitutive rhetoric to advance constitutive style as an original contribution to rhetorical theory. To what extent is Lund's claim to have made an original contribution to centuries-long thought about style borne out by her argument? The first part of An Argument on Rhetorical Style is conceptual, distin­ guishing "constitutive style" from other ways of theorizing style. Lund draws on Wolfgang G. Muller's analysis to organize a taxonomy. In Topik des Stilbegriffs (1981), Muller identifies two tropes as dominating concep­ tions of style in the West: "style as dress" and "style as the man." Both have complicated histories. Style as dress would seem to see style as divorced from underlying ideas and, therefore, as decorative. But in the Renaissance, where the style as dress trope flourishes, Lund notes that ornatus was often thought of more as armament than decoration (58): for example, in John Hoskins' Directions for Speech and Style. Still, in so far as the live canons are thought of as a sequence, traditional rhetoric has fostered the idea that stylistic concerns are belated. With regard to "style is the man," this too is a complicated trope. When Comte de Buffon wrote in "Discourse on Style" that Le style c'est Thomme meme, he meant something quite different from both Quintilian who claimed that speech is commonly an index of character (Institutes, 11.1.30) and from the Romantics with their emphasis on the uniqueness of a personality as reflected in speech. Regardless of these diffe­ rences, Lund's claim that we have often theorized style as the formal embodiment of the speaker or writer's personality" (208) is true enough. Muller's two tropes of style serve as the ground on which Lund mounts her claim for a third topos: style as constitutive: "Wolfgang Muller is responsible for the first two topoi, while the last [constitutive] is my own invention," Lund writes (208). She reviews previous work on the figures 130 RHETORICA and on style generally to place her work in context and to shore up her claim of originality. Among scholars working on the rhetorical figures, Jeanne Fahnestock receives the most attention. Although Fahnestock does consider the figures as constitutive in her Rhetorical Figures in Science (p.22), she does not oppose constitutive to decorative, as Lund does. Instead, she distinguishes figures as functional or not—as advancing an argument or distracting from it. Fahnestock shows that even in scientific argument, figures are present and often serve a functional purpose by for­ mally epitomizing the structure of a scientific argument. For example, in the argument Darwin advances in the Origin that gradual change in response to natural selection turns variations from incipient species to new species, Fahnestock shows that the formal qualities of this argument are captured in the figure gradatio that characterizes Darwin's style (Fahnes­ tock 113-14). But it would be wrong to say that the gradatio is constitutive of the argument because gradatio, like all figures, is in itself skeletal, lacking evi­ dence and is not, therefore, probative. Lund also discusses Lakoff and John­ son on cognitive metaphor. But their point is that metaphor is a generative cognitive process—and therefore relates to invention. If a metaphor goes unnoticed, can we say it contributes to style? Lund's...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0032
  5. The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero’s Sermo to the Grand Siècle’s Conversation by David Randall and, The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought by David Randall
    Abstract

    122 RHETORIC A rejected some time ago,1 goes beyond redescribing Aristotelian virtues as vices in decoupling Aristotle's twin arts of politics and ethics according to the Aristotelian distinction between making and doing. Whereas the outcome of the former is a product, that of the latter is an action. And products differ from actions in that as made things products must be judged in and of them­ selves, according to how well they work and how long they last. Actions, in contrast, can only be qualified in terms of the moral character and intentions of the agents. As a made thing or product, then, the state, which, as we have seen, must be preserved at all costs, does not derive its quality of being good or bad from the moral dispositions of its rulers. Compared rather to the doc­ tor and the painter, Machiavelli's prince practices an art rooted ultimately in techrie rather than arete understood as excellence in any moral sense. Kathy Eden Columbia University David Randall, The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siecle's Conversation. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, vi + 266 pp. ISBN 9781474430104 David Randall, The Conversational Enlightenment: The Reconception of Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh Uni­ versity Press, 2019, vii + 288 pp. ISBN 9781474448666 In The Concept of Conversation and The Conversational Enlightenment, David Randall proposes that conversation as a social, cultural, and histor­ ical force has not received its due, especially in the history of rhetoric. True, books on conversation appear every so often within and outside the academy, whether historian Peter Burke's modest essay collection The Art of Conversation, literary scholar Jane Donawerth's recovery of con­ versation as a model for women's rhetorical theory in Conversational Rhet­ oric, or American essayist Stephen Miller's quasi-apocalyptic jeremiad, Conversation: A Historij of a Declining Art. But Randall's ambitions are gran­ der. Beginning with these two volumes and promising an as-vet-untitled sequel, he unfolds the concept of conversation's development from ancient Rome through the Enlightenment, as well as its struggle to displace oratory as the dominant rhetorical mode. With these ends in mind, Randall Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Renaissance (Cambridge, 1978), 131-38, esp. 135: "Thus the difference between Machiavelli and his contemporaries cannot adequately be characterized as a difference between a moral view of politics and a view of politics as divorced from morality. The essential contrast is rather between two different moralities—two rival and incompatible accounts of what ought ultimately to be done." Reviews 123 promises two interventions common to both books: first, to reveal conver­ sation s place in rhetoric s history, and second, to realize a larger narrative reorganization along the lines of Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transfor­ mation of the Public Sphere and Theory and Practice (Concept 2-3, 8-10). Beginning with Cicero's Rome and concluding with the Republic of Letters, The Concept of Conversation challenges conversation's exclusion from the history of rhetoric by following the parallel advances of sermo (or con­ versation) and conversatio (which Randall glosses variously in both books as "behavior" and "mutual conduct") until their convergence into a wider ranging phenomenon of sociability motivated by economic self-interest (Concept 1, 5, 183; Conversational 5). After the introduction establishes the many conceptual and theoretical terms Randall juggles, chapters 1, 2, and 3 track how conversation transcended its origins as interpersonal discus­ sion. Per Chapter 1, ancient sermo was familiar, leisured conversation that sought philosophical truth conducted among the educated, male, Roman elite. It was represented in print in dialogue form and generally thought to expiate oratory's transgressions, even as its own vices—flattery, for instance—threatened its irenic aims. Chapter 2 details how Medieval Chris­ tianity universalized the concept of friendship, while the increasing public­ ness of letters pushed the ars dictaminis toward oratorical rather than conversational ends. The third chapter traces how Renaissance humanism loosened conversation's connection to Ciceronian sermo further, making conversation "the synecdoche for all conversational modes of inquiry." In this way, conversation became a metaphor that extended far beyond in-person discussion (Concept 83). These opening...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0030
  6. The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People by Xing Lu
    Abstract

    126 RHETORICA argument seems to be the subject of his next book, so perhaps we shall have to wait and see (Conversational 11). Relatedly, the exclusion of some significant studies feels puzzling. Peter Mack's 2011 A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, for instance, is nowhere to be found, while Cheryl Glenn's Rhetoric Retold would have been a useful interlocutor regarding women's place in rhetorical history. Finally, the books' sweeping arc narrating conversation's inevitable march toward the Madisonian republic may leave readers—especially ones well-versed in par­ ticular figures and periods—wishing for greater consideration of complicat­ ing biographical and cultural context. My own interest in the English Civil Wars, for instance, left me wanting greater attention throughout to the influence of theology, as religion largely disappears by the midpoint of The Conversational Enlightenment. Nonetheless, as Randall concedes, it is impossible to read (and therefore write about) everything (Conversational 16). His bibliography is long enough, and his claims about specific texts are modest. The citations point readers to internecine arguments on individ­ ual texts and authors. In penning a broad history of conversation that capablv finds continu­ ities and productive discontinuities, Randall has written two books that largely succeed in many of their aims. Though they are on conversation rather than toleration, the books share a kindred spirit with the similarly sweeping Toleration in Conflict by Rainer Forst. For historians of rhetoric, Randall provides a useful primer on the history of conversation and renders visible its ongoing tensions with oratory in ways that should open produc­ tive areas of inquiry. Readers who are curious about how Randall's argu­ ment about Habermas will conclude are advised to read both volumes, but thanks to a generous summary of The Concept of Conversation that opens The Conversational Enlightenment, scholars invested in specific periods or figures may read whichever volume is more germane to their work with lit­ tle trouble. In this reader's estimation, The Conversational Enlightenment is the better book if only for Randall's conceptual bravura in tracking conver­ sation's broader metaphorization and influence beyond obviously verbal texts and mediums. How Randall's revision of Habermas will resolve remains to be seen, but these books make a compelling case that there is still plenty more to say about conversation. James Donathan Garner University of Texas at Austin Xing Lu, The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its Peo­ ple. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2017, 261 pp. ISBN 978161177527 Much ink of mostly binary ilk has been spilled ox er Mao Zedong, the founder of the People's Republic of China. A revolutionarx and charismatic leader, Mao was hailed as a savior for liberating millions of Chinese people Reviews 127 from the Japanese Occupation and for ending the civil war in 1949, but he was also blamed or condemned for the social and economic turmoil he single-handedly brought about through his many political campaigns, including the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, not much has been written about his rhetoric, about how he deployed language and other symbolic resources to weaponize his political campaigns, to mobilize the Chinese people and to transform Chinese society. In the process, he also transformed himself into a demigod who was both greatly admired and worshiped by his people and feared and despised by his opponents. The 2017 publication of The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong: Transforming China and Its People by Xing Lu, an award-winning scholar of Chinese and comparative rhetoric, certainly has provided a much-needed response to this lack or absence. In fact, the monograph also opens a timely window onto the mak­ ing of political discourse in the twentieth-century China and beyond. As a first book-length study of Mao Zedong's rhetoric, Lu's mono­ graph has a lot to offer to rhetoric scholars and students of political rhetoric in the twenty-first century. Consisting of seven major chapters plus an intro­ duction and a conclusion, The Rhetoric of Mao Zedong develops a detailed and highly contextualized study of Mao's writings and speeches throughout his lifetime beginning in 1913 and ending in 1975, the year before his pass­ ing. Rejecting past...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0031
  7. In memoriam
    Abstract

    Christoph Georg Leidl In memoriam January 10, 1960 - August 17, 2019. t came as a terrible shock for all of us when just a few weeks after the Biennial Con­ ference in New Orleans this past July, where we had been together with him and shared hilarious chats, drinks, and music, the news spread that our friend, colleague and fellow ISEiR member Christoph Leidl had passed away from this world at the age of only 59 years. Born in Burghausen, Upper Bavaria in 1960, from 1979 to 1986 Christoph studied Greek, Latin, and History at the Uni­ versity of Munich, Germany, and (during the academic year 1982-1983) at St. John's College, Oxford, UK. It was from the University of Munich that he earned his M.A. in 1987 and his PhD in Ancient History, Greek and Latin in 1991, with an edition and commentary on Appian's history of the Second Punic War in Spain, printed 1996. During the years 1987 to 1999 he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics in Munich, again interrupted by a stay in Oxford from 1995 to 1997 on a research grant from the German Research Fund (DFG). From 1999 to 2001 he was Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Mannheim, until he received a tenured post as Akademischer Rat Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 1-13. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. nrnress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.1 2 RHETORICA at the University of Heidelberg in 2002 (promoted to Akademischer Oberrat in 2006), where he has been working and teaching ever since. Besides a steadily growing emphasis on the theory and history of rhetoric, in which he particularly focused on the theory of metaphor and tropes, the orator's ethos, rhetorical pedagogy, and humour in oratory, Christoph also did research and published on poetics and literary criticism, on ancient historiography and on the reception of ancient drama in music. Christoph had been an ISHR member since 1995, and missed almost none of our conferences, with the sad exception precisely of the one in Tubingen in 2015, when he fell ill. He also held various offi­ ces in ISHR. He was a Council member from 2011 to 2015, and in 2013 also took on the chair of the membership committee, a duty he fulfilled with enormous dedication and accuracy until his last days. Everyone will remember his meticulous membership reports delivered at each Council or General Business meeting. Christoph was perfectly versed not only in ancient literature, but also in modern and contemporary literatures. He knew his Shakespeare, Moliere and Goethe just as well as his Homer, Virgil, or Horace, and he was acquainted with contemporary approaches to rhetoric just as much as with Aristotle, Cicero or Quintilian. His private library filled an entire house and might have been the envy of many a department library. One wondered when, alongside his exorbitant duties in teaching and administration, he ever found the time for reading all those books. In addition, he was also a great lover of music. He had stupendous knowledge in all things music and was able to talk in minute details about concert pianists, conduc­ tors or particular recordings, and he was himself an excellent piano player. He was also a passionate mountain hiker. Besides all this, he had a wonderful and subtle sense of humour, and an extremely amiable character; his big inviting smile remains unforgettable. On the other hand, Christoph was an indefatigable worker with an outstanding sense of duty. Not only was he more than thorough in his research, but he was also always available for his students whenever they needed help. He seemed to be permanently active; it appeared as if he never rested, and indeed he may well too often have burnt the candle at both ends. Only lately he talked about a change in his way of life. But it...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0024
  8. “Fitter to Please the Court Than the School”: Courtly and Paideutic Rhetoric in Elizabethan Poetics
    Abstract

    This paper argues that Elizabethan handbooks on poetics enact two coevolving traditions in the history of rhetoric and poetics: one sees poetry as a rhetorical art of stylistic invention, while the other sees it as an object of study, analysis, and ethical training. To show this, I examine George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy and contrast it with William Scott’s recently discovered Model of Poesy. Puttenham demonstrates how poetic style works as a tool of rhetorical invention; Scott, on the other hand, treats poetics as a method of literary critical analysis. Scott’s poetics, I argue, is derived from a “paideutic” tradition, the aims of which mirror those found in educational treatises that concern the hermeneutic training students received in English grammar schools. Puttenham, writing for courtiers, instead makes a case for poetics as a means of rhetorical adaptation at court—his handbook, in short, shows poetry to be a rhetorical and pragmatic art of verbal performance that exists outside the schoolroom.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0027
  9. From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics by Quentin Skinner
    Abstract

    Reviews Quentin Skinner, From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, xiii + 432 pp. ISBN 9781107128859 Students of the rhetorical tradition will learn a great deal from Skinner's From Humanism to Hobbes; for like Elobbes, Skinner has mastered the rhetorical curriculum that informs the humanist education of sixteenthand seventeenth-century writers like Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Milton, and, of course, Hobbes himself. Even more to the point, Skinner's mastery of this tradition has made him attentive to the fundamentally adversarial nature of their writings, allowing him to uncover the argumentative structures and stylistic figures that underwrite their persuasive effects. It has also, I expect, helped him to hone his own enviable argumentative skills, whether he is making the case for the origins of political representation in the art of the actor, the role of rhetorical redescription in Machiavelli's Prince and Shakespeare's Coriolanus, or the iconographic identity of the colossus in the frontispiece of Leviathan. Without by any means exhausting the impor­ tant and wide-ranging issues addressed in this book, these three cases will surely interest the readers of this journal because they set in high relief how deeply embedded such rhetorical strategies as personation or prosopo­ poeia, paradiastole, and enargeia are in the thinking and writing of earlv modernity. Two of the twelve essays in this collection (chapters 3 and 5) turn—or, for Skinner's devoted readers, return—to the figure of paradiastole, also cal­ led rhetorical redescription by Skinner because it refers to the orator's effort to "spin" the narrative of events, including the moral characters of the agents involved, by reframing vices as virtues and vice versa, impugning caution as cowardice, for instance, or packaging recklessness as braverv. Although arguably not among the most high-profile rhetorical figures, paradiastole, as Skinner demonstrates, propels the core mission of the rhetorician to leverage the affective power of language to alter what an audience believes, to manipulate its responses by using word-choice to elevate or denigrate its targets. In keeping with this mission, Skinner also demonstrates, rhetorical theorists from Aristotle to Quintilian to Susenbrotus to Thomas Wilson take the paradiastolic move into account, whether thev feature the technical term Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 118-132. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http: wwv. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/ rh.2020.38.1.118 Reviews 119 in its polysyllabic Greek form, translate it into Latin or the vernacular, or leave it nameless. Following his signature method, Skinner arms his readers with an understanding of this key term before using it to unlock the complex texts he considers in the context of the controversies they engage. In the Prince, for instance, Machiavelli counters the long-standing tradition of classical ethics exemplified by Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero's De officiis by redescribing the qualities they endorse as political liabilities destined to destroy the state, rather than maintain it. With this single-minded end of mantenere lo stato in view, Skinner argues, Machiavelli "redefines the con­ cept of virtu" (56), exposing previously held virtues such as liberality and kindness as vices when practiced in the political arena (60). Shakespeare's use of paradiastole, on the other hand, reflects a reversal in rhetorical theory that Skinner attributes to Quintilian and finds wide­ spread among Tudor rhetoricians. Whereas the figure originally serves to expose or unmask the verbal manipulation of one's adversary, it is eventually deployed to excuse one's own shortcomings and mitigate culpability by redescribing one's vices as virtues. After flagging this strat­ egy in a number of Shakespeare's plays, Skinner concludes that "It is in the assessment of Coriolanus's character, however, that Shakespeare makes his most extended use of paradiastole" (111). For the in utramque partem structure this late Shakespearean tragedy shares with all drama encoura­ ges the representation of controversy or debate, which, in this case, invol­ ves "coloring...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2020.0029

November 2019

  1. Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 0822965135 Paige V. Banaji Paige V. Banaji Paige V. Banaji Assistant Professor, English Director of First-Year Writing English & Foreign Languages College of Arts & Sciences Barry University 11300 NE 2nd Ave Miami Shores, FL 33161 pbanaji@barry.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 422–424. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paige V. Banaji; Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 422–424. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422 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. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422
  2. Shaping the Conversation: Madeleine de Scudéry's Use of Genre in Her Rhetorical Dialogues
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.402
  3. Review: Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms, by Davida H. Charney
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms, by Davida H. Charney Davida H. Charney, Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms. Hebrew Bible Monographs 73; Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2017. xii + 156 pp. ISBN: 9781909697805. Stanley E. Porter Stanley E. Porter Stanley E. Porter McMaster Divinity College 1280 Main St. W. Hamilton, ON Canada L8S 4K1 princpl@mcmaster.ca Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 427–429. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.427 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stanley E. Porter; Review: Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms, by Davida H. Charney. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 427–429. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.427 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. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.427
  4. Review: Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, edited by Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, and Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel, edited by David R. Carlson
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, edited by Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, and Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel, edited by David R. Carlson Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, eds. Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, Leiden: Brill, 2018. 412 pp. ISBN 978904365100; David R. Carlson, ed. Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel. Cambridge, UK: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2018. 345 pp. ISBN 9781781886205 Alan G. Gross Alan G. Gross Alan Gross Professor of Communication Studies Emeritus University of Minnesota-Twin Cities 401 2nd Street North #308 Minneapolis, MN 55401 agross@umn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 424–426. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.424 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Alan G. Gross; Review: Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel, edited by Robert Sullivan and Arthur E. Walzer, and Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel, edited by David R. Carlson. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 424–426. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.424 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. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.424
  5. Review: The Keys to Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism, by Nathan Crick, The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric, by Gero Guttzeit, and Emerson and the History of Rhetoric, by Roger Thompson
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: The Keys to Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism, by Nathan Crick, The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric, by Gero Guttzeit, and Emerson and the History of Rhetoric, by Roger Thompson Nathan Crick, The Keys to Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2017. 277 pp. ISBN: 9781611177787Gero Guttzeit, The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric. Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017. 256 pp. ISBN: 9783110520156Roger Thompson, Emerson and the History of Rhetoric. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017. 158 pp. ISBN: 9780809336128 Robert Danisch Robert Danisch Robert Danisch Department of Communication Arts (ML-236B) University of Waterloo 200 University Ave Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1 Canada rdansich@uwaterloo.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 433–437. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.433 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert Danisch; Review: The Keys to Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism, by Nathan Crick, The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric, by Gero Guttzeit, and Emerson and the History of Rhetoric, by Roger Thompson. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 433–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.433 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. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.433
  6. Review: Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE, by John O. Ward
    Abstract

    Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE, by John O. Ward John O. Ward, Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. xviii + 706 pp. Rita Copeland Rita Copeland Rita Copeland Department of Classical Studies University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104 rcopelan@sas.upenn.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 429–432. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.429 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Rita Copeland; Review: Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE, by John O. Ward. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 429–432. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.429 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. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.429

September 2019

  1. Shaping the Conversation: Madeleine de Scudéry’s Use of Genre in Her Rhetorical Dialogues
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0003
  2. Sympathy for the Devil: The Myth of Plato as the Enemy of Rhetoric
    Abstract

    It is a disciplinary commonplace to identify Plato as the enemy of rhetoric. While it is also common to suggest a more complex role for Plato and his dialogues in contemporary rhetorical studies, this is often treated as a revision of his traditional role. In this article, I question the historicity of the narrative that Plato is the historical enemy of rhetoric. I investigate the role that Plato played in the rhetorical tradition from Demosthenes to Du Bois and compare it to how he is framed in the contemporary discipline - first, in disciplinary histories and second, in contemporary theory. What I find is a distinct disconnect between his traditional treatment and the contemporary construction of his place in the tradition.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0001
  3. Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel ed. by Robert Sullivan, Arthur E. Walzer, and: Thomas Elyot, The Image of Governance and Other Dialogues of Counsel ed. David R. Carlson
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0005
  4. The Keys to Power: The Rhetoric and Politics of Transcendentalism by Nathan Crick, and: The Figures of Edgar Allan Poe: Authorship, Antebellum Literature, and Transatlantic Rhetoric by Gero Guttzeit, and: Emerson and the History of Rhetoric by Roger Thompson
    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0008
  5. I dialoghi di Platone come figure della coerenza tra pensiero e vita
    Abstract

    The aim of this paper is to show how the dialogical form is an essential structure of the Platonic texts in which the interrogative form is the very form of philosophy. According to the intentio auctoris, the dialogues can change the lives of their readers and this can only happen thanks to the readers’ internalization of the dialogical form as an interrogative structure. Like Socrates’ interlocutors in the dialogues, readers with the dialogues, can change their live making it coherent with their own thoughts examined through the philosophical discourse. This form of coherence is the only possibility of virtue, and therefore of happiness.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0000
  6. Persuading God: Rhetorical Studies of First-Person Psalms by Davida H. Charney
    Abstract

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

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0006
  7. Tasteful Domesticity: Women’s Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940 by Sarah Walden
    Abstract

    Reviews Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 0822965135 In the opening line of Tasteful Domesticity, Sarah Walden notes, "Taste is an elusive concept" (p. 1). It refers to both a physical sense and a theoret­ ical concept, an individual preference and a cultural standard. Taste was also central to the empiricist philosophies and belletristic rhetorics that informed nineteenth-century American rhetorical theory. Although such theoretical discussions of taste were the province of men, Walden argues that American women in the late eighteenth through early twentieth centu­ ries engaged publicly in discourses of taste in their cookbooks. Walden reveals an evolution of taste discourse through the long nine­ teenth century. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the era with which Walden's research begins, taste discourse contributed to the proj­ ect of nation building (p. 28). Engaging in this discourse, women cookbook authors in the early republic emphasized what they represented as distinctly American virtues such as independence and frugality. Moving into the mid­ nineteenth century, discourses of taste would continue to emphasize virtue while they were further linked to Christian morality and sentimental rhetoric (p. 53). Victorian-era domestic experts emphasized and performed the role of the "true woman" in teaching and maintaining the tastes and morals of the home—and, by extension, the nation. With the rise of Progressivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prescriptions of taste would be grounded in scientific standards, and progressive-era women participating in cooking school and home economics movements sought to professionalize women's domestic work by aligning it with science. This narrative of an evolving discourse of taste, however, is not the central focus of Walden's argument. Although Tasteful Domesticity certainly offers a macrohistory of over a century of women's domestic writing, Walden's analysis reveals domestic writing as a complex and multivalent rhetorical practice that resists easy narratives. For example, readers may be surprised by Walden's inclusion of the southern antebellum cookbook The Virginia Housewife in Chapter 1: "Taste and Virtue: Domestic Citizenship and the New Republic." Unlike the other cookbook authors discussed in this chapter, Virginia Housewife author Mary Randolph refers to taste only as a sensory perception and not as a cultural standard. Walden argues that Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVII, Issue 4, pp. 422-437. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.374.422 Reviews 423 this was common in southern antebellum cookbooks (pp. 48-49). Thus, the Virginia Housewife may seem to fit better in Chapter 3: "Taste and Region: The Constitutive Function of Southern Cookbooks," where Walden examines other antebellum southern cookbooks. However, by including Randolph's text in Chapter 1, Walden complicates her argument about early nine­ teenth-century female cookbook writers' engagement in taste discourse as a nation-building rhetorical activity. In antebellum southern cookbooks (and like the republican mother associated with northern states), the southern woman played a role in the civic progress of the region through her manage­ ment of the home (p. 49). However, in the antebellum south, management of the home also included management of slave labor. Thus, Walden concludes that Randolph's Virginia Housewife "requires one to face the difficult truth that while discourses of taste serve republican virtue, they also govern those disenfranchised by its practice" (p. 52). The inclusion of Randolph's text in Chapter 1 reveals the complicated issues of identity and power lurking within discourses of taste. Throughout her analysis, Walden examines the ways women's cookbooks contributed to ideologies of nationality, class, race, region, and gender. For example, dur­ ing the Victorian era, women's participation in taste discourse reified a gen­ der ideology that implicitly defined "true woman" as white and middle class, and these demarcations of gender, race, and class would persist throughout the nineteenth century. During the...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0004
  8. Examples of comparationes in the Metabaseis collection of MS. Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, plut. 58.24
    Abstract

    The ms. Firenze, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, plut. 58.24 contains a collection of texts extracted from rhetorical works for some of which it is the only witness. Each passage displays a rhetorical figure or a metabasis, but their typology and arrangement within the collection remain unclear. This paper aims at illustrating the ways in which the compiler selected specific comparative formulas by analyzing some marginal notes and the source texts of the related excerpted passages.

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0002
  9. Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE by John O. Ward
    Abstract

    Reviews 429 Society version. A final positive feature is that Chamey is explicit in her expo­ sition. She breaks down her topic of persuasive first-person psalms into a number of complexifying categories that open up the various types of psalms. Her insights into lament—even if it may not best be described as public policy persuasion—are still very helpful, as she finds a useful, typical argumentative pattern in these psalms. For each psalm, Chamey provides not only a translation (Alter's) but also often both a structural and a diagram­ matic outline of the psalm, so that the reader sees the relative "weight" of the various sections, a feature of Chamey's argument. Charney makes much of the difference between the complaint of the psalmist and the proposal made to God, and these can be more readily assessed through these means of presentation. I commend Chamey for this volume, as it makes a serious and persua­ sive attempt to draw upon the categories of ancient and modem rhetoric, without ever becoming simply an exercise in labeling parts so often found in such biblical studies. She provides some interesting insights into the psalms and their rhetoric. Stanley E. Porter McMaster Divinity College John O. Ward, Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400-1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. xviii + 706 pp. There is a small circle of scholars of rhetoric who, at some point during the 1970's or 1980's, enclosed themselves in cramped and dark microfilm rooms, reading and taking copious notes on the 1200 pages of John O. Ward's 1972 Toronto Ph.D. thesis in two volumes, "Artificiosa Eloquentia in the Middle Ages: the study of Cicero's De inventione, the Ad Herennium and Quintilian's De institutione oratoria from the early Middle Ages to the thir­ teenth century, with special reference to the schools of northern France." For those scholars and for others who were able to read the thesis under perhaps more comfortable conditions, encountering this book, which puts the thesis into print for the first time, will be like revisiting a monument they knew in their youth. They will be amazed once again by its magnificent ambition, and (as is the case with monuments revisited) they will discern features that they did not notice or understand before. They will also admire the care and thought with which that monument has been curated, with timely and important additions to the original structure. Those readers will have worked through the original dissertation in order to educate themselves about an aspect of the history of medieval rhetoric that had not yet been narrated and will have followed Ward's career and absorbed some if not all of the approximately thirty substantial articles and chapters on rhetoric that he 430 RHETORICA has written, as well as his 1995 volume for the Typologie series. In this contin­ uous flow of scholarship, he has expounded his increasing knowledge of the medieval and renaissance rhetorical traditions. Now more mature in their understanding, readers acquainted with his thesis will appreciate its richness. But some readers will come to it fresh, without previous knowledge of Ward's bibliography. For those new students of rhetoric, Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages will be a stunning awakening to the profundity of medieval thought about communication. Over the years, Ward has refined or enlarged the insights rendered in his thesis. But even though readers can consult his later narratives of Ciceronian reception in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, there are good reasons for publishing the thesis now. First, it is a treasure house that had never been published integer, even though it has served as a resource for constant reevaluation of evidence: the transmission of texts; glosses and commentaries on the Ciceronian legacy; applications of doctrine; and possible answers to the question "why did the Middle Ages, especially from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, value classical rhetoric so highly?" Second, it is the complete narration of the medieval reception of classical rhetoric to which Ward has devoted his remarkable energies, and it remains the narrative that he was able to...

    doi:10.1353/rht.2019.0007

August 2019

  1. Review: Direct Speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca: Narrative and Rhetorical Functions of the Characters' “Varied” and “Many-Faceted” Words, by Berenice Verhelst
    Abstract

    Book Review| August 01 2019 Review: Direct Speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca: Narrative and Rhetorical Functions of the Characters' “Varied” and “Many-Faceted” Words, by Berenice Verhelst Berenice Verhelst, Direct Speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca: Narrative and Rhetorical Functions of the Characters' “Varied” and “Many-Faceted” Words. (Mnemosyne Supplements 397), Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2017. XI + 330 pp. ISBN: 9789004325890 Luuk Huitink Luuk Huitink Classics Department Leiden University Johan Huizinga Building Doelensteeg 16 2311 VL Leiden The Netherlands l.huitink@hum.leidenuniv.nl Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (3): 321–323. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.3.321 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Luuk Huitink; Review: Direct Speech in Nonnus' Dionysiaca: Narrative and Rhetorical Functions of the Characters' “Varied” and “Many-Faceted” Words, by Berenice Verhelst. Rhetorica 1 August 2019; 37 (3): 321–323. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.3.321 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. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1525/rh.2019.37.3.321