Reviewed by: Cicéron et la Commune. Le rhéteur comme modèle civique (Italie, XIIIe–XIVe s.) by Carole Mabboux Laura Refe Carole Mabboux, Cicéron et la Commune. Le rhéteur comme modèle civique (Italie, XIIIe–XIVe s.), Bibliothèque des Écoles françaises d'Athènes et de Rome 400, Roma, IT: École française de Rome, 2022. 525 pp. ISBN: 978-2-7283-1545-1. Il volume nasce dalla rielaborazione di una tesi di dottorato discussa nel 2016. Ad un'utile introduzione (1–16), nella quale sono illustrate le modalità di lettura di Cicerone in età comunale con un accenno allo stato degli studi in questo settore, alle difficoltà di ordine metodologico incontrate nella definizione dell'oggetto della ricerca, alle coordinate seguite nell'impostazione del lavoro, al corpus di fonti analizzate e alle piste battute, seguono cinque parties che sviluppano in profondità gli argomenti di indagine. Tali sezioni, aperte da pagine prefatorie con la funzione di 'bussola' nella fruizione dei contenuti, sono ulteriormente suddivise in capitoli, paragrafi e sottoparagrafi, e presentano snelle note al testo, funzionali più che altro a fornire essenziali rinvii bibliografici. Una conclusione (411–417) fornisce la chiave di lettura del corposo materiale illustrato e commentato; in appendice ("Annexes", 419–438) è pubblicata la trascrizione di tre documenti tratti da codici antichi: Bartolomeo del Regno, introduzione in latino al commento al De officiis; Luigi di Gianfigliazzi, Summa dictaminum rhetoricae in latino; un volgarizzamento anonimo della Rhetorica ad Herennium (inc.: «Nel sesto dì»). Chiude gli "Annexes" una tabella ricapitolativa dei prestiti dall'opera ciceroniana contratti da parte di uno degli autori presi in esame nel Cap. 16, Giovanni da Viterbo. Corredano il volume l'indice dei nomi e delle opere (439–444), l'indice dei manoscritti (445) e la lista dei titoli citati, distinti in fonti primarie e bibliografia secondaria (447–516), grafici, tabelle e illustrazioni a colori e in bianco e nero, inserite all'interno della trattazione e ricapitolate a p. 517. Mabboux ha applicato all'oggetto di studio—la ricezione dell'opera retorica e morale di Cicerone e l'interpretazione della sua biografia nel contesto sociopolitico dell'Italia dei Comuni—un approccio di tipo storico-culturale, affrontando quegli aspetti della fortuna dell'oratore in epoca medievale meno investigati. Il campo di indagine è definito dall'azione esercitata dall'ambiente comunale su formazione, vita, partecipazione politica degli autori presi in considerazione; il periodo cronologico di riferimento, lievemente più ampio di quello indicato nel titolo, va dall'ultimo decennio del XII secolo al primo decennio del XV secolo; il corpus esaminato, principalmente di tipo testuale anche se non mancano incursioni nell'iconografia (limitata, per i manoscritti, a tre fondi per i quali, vedi 186n97), comprende libri de regimine, trattati morali e manuali di eloquenza scritta o orale ed è relativo a tre tematiche: alle norme dell'esercizio politico, all'etica sociale e alla retorica. Considerate l'ampiezza del lavoro e la complessità della sua articolazione, si forniranno sintetiche informazioni per ciascuna sezione al fine di offrire una panoramica delle tematiche affrontate. La prima parte "Du Cicéron médiéval au Cicéron communale: un corpus à redéfinir" (17–83) è dedicata alla trasmissione e alla ricezione dell'opera dell'Arpinate in ambito comunal, il cui studio presenta non poche [End Page 102] difficoltà legate da un lato alla scarsità dei dati a disposizione su copisti, luoghi di produzione, possessori e concrete pratiche di lettura, dall'altro alla proliferazione delle testimonianze manoscritte (l'autrice, per le proprie rilevazioni, isola quasi un migliaio di codici). Sulla base dello studio del corpus ciceroniano medievale superstite, suddiviso in codici anteriori al XIII sec. e codici di XIII-XIV/XV sec., Mabboux traccia un quadro generale dei testi più copiati a seconda dell'epoca e dei loro ambienti di diffusione, e un profilo generale dei fruitori di tale materiale (anonimi e personalità note). Nella seconda parte "Modes de citation, modes d'appropriation: présences et mémoires des textes cicéroniens dans les cultures écrites communales" (85–160), strettamente connessa alla precedente in quanto funzionale a compensare la scarsità di dati desumibili dall'analisi della tradizione manoscritta, l'autrice si concentra sulle modalità di reimpiego di Cicerone...

Reviewed by: Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age by Michelle C. Smith Nancy Myers Michelle C. Smith, Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2021. 234 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8093-3835-1. In her 1863 self-researched and self-published The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work, Virginia Penny points out that "the false opinion that exists in regard to the occupations suitable for women must be changed ere women have free access to all those in which they may engage."1 Penny's research may have expanded her readers' views on women's work in the nineteenth century; however, Michelle C. Smith's Utopian Genderscapes: Rhetorics of Women's Work in the Early Industrial Age illustrates for the contemporary reader the "social, economic, and cultural shifts" and contexts during the antebellum period that effect gendered labor issues today (11). Comprised of five chapters, Utopian Genderscapes presents three rhetorical case studies of intentional communities: Brook Farm (1841–1847) in West Roxbury, Massachusetts; the Harmony Society (1804–1905) settling near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1825; and the Oneida Community (1848–1881) in Oneida, New York (3). These examinations on gendered labor are framed at the beginning of the book with Smith's theoretical lens, historical [End Page 97] context, and rhetorical argument about gendered labor during the antebellum period and at the end of the text with the continuing utopian fallacy of gendered and class labor in our own time as expressed through tropes such as "tidying up," "leaning in," and "having it all" (148–153). Smith's overarching argument claims that "such rhetorics of gendered labor function to increase divides among women and preclude alliances on the basis of gender" (5). She grounds her argument through her clearly articulated and detailed theoretical approach of analyzing the intentional communities as "ecologies of gender" (6–11). This material-feminist rhetorical lens examines each community's practices in its resistance to the larger context of American industrialization and in its reflection of that industrialization as well as the societal and the cultural attitudes about gendered labor. The three case studies, as Smith explains, convey "the networks of bodies, spaces, objects, and discourses that comprised women's work within each community, intervened in larger rhetorics of women's work, and initiated patterns of gendered labor that persist today" (4). In "Domestic Rhetorics," which details the distribution of labor at the transcendentalist community Brook Farm, Smith focuses on women's work to argue that while women branched out into nondomestic labor, men did not venture into traditional housework, thus reinforcing its stigma as representing menial chores. To alleviate the burden of daily living and provide time for other endeavors, the community's middle and upper-class women employed working-class women for housework further associating those tasks with class divisions. "Professional Rhetorics" demonstrates how women, labor, and prestige are not allied. In fact, as is illustrated by Gertrude Rapp in the Harmony Society, the success of one woman's entrepreneurial and rhetorical endeavors becomes a synecdoche for all women working in the silk industry. Unfortunately, many women at that time in the silk industry were laborers working for low wages and in unsafe working conditions, so they were not aligned with Rapp's privilege and whiteness. Focused on the Oneida Community, "Reproductive Rhetorics" illustrates the complex dynamic between an intentional community's mission and its practices resulting both in reinscribing societal norms tied to motherhood, childcare, and housework and in creating new hierarchies of gendered and class labor and authority. In the final chapter, Smith appropriately positions herself as researcher and scholar, as she did in the book's opening, with her clearly articulated argument and analytical method. She expands on her aims in writing history "to restore a sense of possibility" and to make that history relevant for today as a means to imagine what "might yet be otherwise" (27). She validates her aims by drawing connections between each intentional community and current social, cultural, and economic practices and attitudes about housework, professional women supporting the advancement of other women, and the continued tension...

Reviewed by: That Tyrant, Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World by J. E. Lendon Christopher S. van den Berg J. E. Lendon, That Tyrant, Persuasion: How Rhetoric Shaped the Roman World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. 302 pp. ISBN: 978-0-691-22100-7. John Lendon has written a provocative book about the interrelationship of formal rhetoric and the different worlds—physical no less than intellectual—that ancient Romans built for themselves. The arrows of provocation travel from Lendon's quiver in two different scholarly directions: first, at historians seeking to uncover sources, causes, or influences for some staple topics of Roman history; second, at scholars of rhetoric who have in recent decades so eagerly sought to excavate the underlying [End Page 99] socio-cultural backgrounds and impetuses of declamation—not just how rhetoric worked at the technical level but what kind of cultural purchase it had in making men (to use Maud Gleason's notable phrase), and in making them do things. Caesar's assassination, and especially its aftermath, is examined first, with an eye to what the declamatory halls (or their late-Republican precursors) will have misleadingly taught the likes of Brutus and Cassius to expect after the tyrant's death. "Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more" (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, 3.2.1555–1556) might have been patriotic justification enough, certainly for anti-tyrannical Romans. So why didn't this justification prevail? In Shakespeare's famous dramatization it is Antony's superior strategy of "flooding the zone" (to use Steve Bannon's motto) that wins out. By making it hard for others to know anything you can probably get them to do anything. (Antony's "Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt!" could have just as well been the insurrectionist's chant at the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021.) Lendon, rather, lays the blame at the conspirators' own door. The assassins were so mentally fixed in the declaimers' halls that when reality came knocking they couldn't find their way to the exit: "They expected that a literary convention—the evil henchmen vanish and the city returns to normal without any further effort—would apply in the real world. And what really happened is that they got to the end of their script, tried to repeat the ending several times in hope of a better result (those speeches in the Forum), and finally fell off their script into the real world, which was inhabited by Antony and Lepidus and their soldiers" (55–56). Lendon teases out not merely what rhetorical education may have prompted its students to create, but especially which creations were the indirect result of that education. As such the study necessarily and avowedly remains in the realm of speculation, but hopefully fruitful speculation, of the kind that illuminates certain mysteries or perplexing scenarios. In this sense he has little time for recent debates over declamation's acculturative or subversive workings ("we bid farewell to the sociological interpretations of school declamation," 22). Lendon examines the rhetorical shaping of thought and action in three distinct spheres of Roman activity: elite politics (Caesar's assassination); the built world (monumental nymphaea and city walls); the juridical-pedagogical stage (Roman law and declamation). His style is a jaunty mix of the light-hearted, the stern, and the ironic, reminiscent sometimes of Gibbon or Dickens and sometimes of Ronald Syme. The limitations of our own knowledge are crucial to the book's working premises: "we may conjecture that students of rhetoric under the Empire knew what they knew with great force and intensity (more than we are used to, from our systems of education), but what they knew with such vigor is not what we know" (25). This claim makes it possible to explore untrodden paths: "what the members of that class were positively taught by rhetorical education will have stood first in their minds, and been likely in principle to have the greatest historical impact" (25). The book proceeds in several case studies by circling around from effect to cause and back to [End Page 100] effect: first consider an event or practice, then salvage from rhetoric...

Reviewed by: Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire by Dana Farah Fields Anna Peterson Dana Farah Fields, Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire, Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies, Abingdon, NY: Routledge, 2021. 236 pp. ISBN: 978-0-429-29217-0. In an ancient context, the term parrhēsia is most often associated with the Athenian democracy of the fifth century BCE, where free or frank speech became a key egalitarian and therefore democratic value. But it also featured prominently in Greek literature of the Roman period (1st-3rd centuries CE), a time when a single man ruled over the Mediterranean world and social hierarchies dominated life on a local level. Although parrhēsia has been a topic of recurrent interest over the past three decades (thanks in large part to the influence of Michel Foucault), later Greek literature has been largely sidelined in discussions of this virtue.1 Dana Fields's Frankness, Greek Culture, and the Roman Empire begins to fill this gap by providing a thought-provoking exploration of how Greek sophists, philosophers, and satirists of the second century CE deployed free and frank speech. Most importantly, Fields's study challenges the prevailing assumption that, after Alexander the Great, the connotations of the term shifted radically from a political right to a personal, ethical virtue. Instead, Fields argues, parrhēsia retained political significance in the second century CE, both in terms of local institutions and, more importantly, in the interpersonal relationships that so often defined politics at this time. Fields's discussion proceeds in six chapters, the first of which lays out the book's approach and establishes Aristophanes, Socrates, Diogenes, and Demosthenes as "icons of frankness" for later practitioners of parrhēsia. Chapter 2 further sets the stage by considering parrhēsia in the classical [End Page 95] period, where it was associated not just with citizenship but with further restrictive statuses, such as categories of social class and gender. Of particular interest in this chapter is Fields's discussion of parrhēsia and slavery, which considers not just the well-worn example of Roman Saturnalia but also Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, an often overlooked work. Following these first two introductory chapters, the next three chapters focus on different addressees of frank speech, specifically kings, cities, and elites. Chapter 3 explores how a speaker might adopt an adversarial style when addressing a king or emperor, a posture that Fields argues benefits both speaker and addressee by showcasing the former's courage and wisdom and the latter's self-control. As is the case with all but the last chapter, Fields does not focus on an individual author but instead draws on a variety of authors and texts. Chapter 3 consequently juxtaposes Dio Chrysostom's Kingship Orations with Philostratus's Apollonius of Tyana and examples of frank speakers culled from Plutarch's Parallel Lives. Dio and Philostratus's Apollonius remain the focus in Chapter 4, where Fields provides first a survey of Dio's civic orations before turning to consider how Apollonius offers frank criticism to cities both orally and through his letters. As Fields argues, Dio and Apollonius "occupy a space somewhere between rhetoric and philosophy" and present themselves as itinerant wise men (131). Dio and his appropriation of previous models (e.g., Socrates, Diogenes, and Demosthenes) is really the star of this chapter, and it is worth noting here that Fields might have also considered Dio's relationship to the tradition of iambic speech, particularly in the First Tarsian and Alexandrian orations, both of which are covered in this chapter. Our surviving sources suggest that urban elites navigated local internal hierarchies through delicately and carefully contrived speech. If the cities of the Greek east were in essence being run by oligarchic governance and through patronage relationships, parrhēsia and the language of friendship reduced the visibility of these social differences. Chapter 5 offers a fascinating read of Plutarch's How to tell a flatterer from a friend alongside Artimedorus's Oneirocriticon, Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, and other texts. Here, Fields challenges the conventional reading that parrhēsia in Plutarch's treatise is apolitical. As she convincingly shows, the text...

Reviewed by: Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology by Suzanne Kesler Rumsey Pamela VanHaitsma Suzanne Kesler Rumsey, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Small Histories during World War II, Letter Writing, and Family History Methodology, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2021. 220 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2090-4. Blessed Are the Peacemakers began with literacy scholar Suzanne Kesler Rumsey's inheritance of her grandmother Miriam's papers, which included a surprising number of letters exchanged with her first husband, Benjamin Kesler, between 1941 and 1946. Rumsey "was shocked to discover what their lives were like … in the midst of World War II" (2). As "one might expect of war-era letters," they were "filled with love and longing, anguish at being apart, uncertainty and anxiety about the war and the country's future." But, in Miriam and Ben's case, the newlyweds were separated because Ben was a member of a historic peace church and conscientious objector. As an alternative to serving in the United States military, he was conscripted into unpaid labor in Civilian Public Service (CPS) camps, leaving Miriam to support the family while she too avoided better-paying jobs that contributed to the War. Working with their letters, Rumsey reconstructs the story, or small-h history, of her grandparents, weaving their narrative into the large-H History of conscientious objectors during WWII. Rumsey demonstrates the importance of small-h histories to the history of rhetoric, models how to develop them through family history methodology (FHM), and illuminates the role of love letters in both this historiographic work and the relationships they record. Rumsey's introduction sets out "three salient themes" that are woven throughout the book: "the value of small histories, the methodology of FHM, and the study of conduit and platform within letter writing" (7). Situating it within the tradition of ars dictaminis, Chapter 1 theorizes these two concepts—conduit and platform—as characterizing the nature of Miriam and Ben's letters. The letters were a conduit, "a vehicle or a means by which they could transmit the intangible," such as love (15). Through "the physical, tangible materiality of the letters," they also "functioned as a platform upon which they built their relationship" (15). The remaining chapters are organized chronologically and can be understood in two parts. The first part tells the story of the couple's early courtship and letter writing leading up to marriage (Chapter 2) and then during their separation only months later as Ben's first CPS placement [End Page 93] began at Sideling Hill in Pennsylvania (Chapters 3–8). Illustrating the FHM she developed, Rumsey moves from "extensive archival digging and secondary source reading" (33) on the broader context of historic peace churches and faith-based nonresistance (Chapter 3), to the specific story recorded in Miriam and Ben's letters. These letters document their "epistolary nesting" when first separated (Chapter 4), the details of Ben's labor at the CPS camp (Chapter 5), and Miriam's work as a young wife left responsible for supporting them (Chapter 6). Here Rumsey demonstrates the power of small-h histories, not only to show what the life of an individual conscientious objector was like, but also to uncover the lesser-known story of CPS women. Subsequent chapters nuance Miriam and Ben's story by identifying moments when the conduit and platform of their letter writing fell short: when dealing with family conflicts about time-sensitive financial matters (Chapter 7) and when coping with separation during their first Thanksgiving and Christmas as newlyweds (Chapter 8). Throughout this part of the book, Rumsey's analysis might be developed further in conversation with scholars who investigate the rhetoric of the specifically romantic subgenre.1 They offer approaches to exploring how norms of gender and sexuality get embedded in and challenged through epistolary rhetoric. Regardless, Rumsey's theory and analysis of conduit and platform will prove useful for any rhetoricians and/or historians working with love letters. The second part of Blessed Are the Peacemakers turns to Ben's next CPS placement at the Rhode Island State Hospital for Mental Diseases, where Miriam was able to join him...

Reviewed by: Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric by Michelle Bolduc Denise Stodola Michelle Bolduc, Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric, Studies and Texts 217. Toronto, CA: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2020. 443 pp. ISBN: 978-0-88844-217-8. Many scholars have worked to uncover the transmission of rhetorical texts over time, which is important but nothing new; however, this book takes a novel and illuminating approach in examining a specific case of the transmission of Cicero diachronically by delineating its transmission from Cicero to Brunetto Latini's translation of Cicero and then to Jean Paulhan's translation of Latini's translation of Cicero, and finally, to Perelman's and Olbrechts-Tyteca's New Rhetoric Project. Significantly, the book posits a close relationship between rhetoric and translation, and does so by exploring the different meanings of the medieval term of translatio and using the notion of translatio as the organizing metaphor overall. Indeed, the work argues that the New Rhetoric Project grew out of this line of transmission and did so through both the literal and metaphorical meanings of the notion of translatio. In order to support these assertions, Bolduc presents us with very thorough and meticulously documented research. She provides an extensive bibliography of seventy-one pages, which is subdivided into two major categories: "Pre-Modern Works (before 1800)" and "Modern Works (after 1800)." Her bibliography includes works in many different languages, and she herself, as indicated in "A Note on Translation," has performed all of the translations unless indicated otherwise in the text. Moreover, each chapter includes numerous notes, each of which is painstakingly thorough. Just as an example, the first chapter contains one hundred twenty-one notes, while the second contains two hundred and sixty-five. In addition to using such high-quality scholarship methods, Bolduc does a good job of organizing her chapters: before launching into the chronology of the transmission in the third chapter, her second chapter conveys the different facets of the word translatio and exactly what that term brings to the discussion of the roots of the New Rhetoric Project. As Bolduc points out, translatio means not only the act of literally putting a text written in one language into a different language, but it also takes on additional types of meanings as generated in the Middle Ages. In fact, in the Middle Ages, translatio also included the metaphorical meaning of the [End Page 446] term. In other words, the term takes on the meaning of transcultural transmission of ideas and a sort of recontextualization of those ideas. Moreover, the act of translating a text includes this kind of transcultural transmission and recontextualization. In showing the chronological movement of the argument she is making, chapters two through five are in chronological order. In the first of these chronological chapters, entitled "Cicero: Rhetoric and Translation for the Roman Republic," Bolduc focuses on Cicero's translation of Greek sources and the manner in which he was integral in the "transfer of knowledge from Greece to Rome" (58). Cicero's translation and translation function to show that Latin, as a language, could transmit knowledge as readily as Greek, that the Romans were legitimate heirs of Greek knowledge, and could ultimately move even beyond what they inherited from the Greeks. Ultimately, however, Cicero's political aims despite, and perhaps because of, his renowned eloquence, led to his execution after the assassination of Julius Caesar. Cicero thus became synonymous with the demise of the Republic itself. This focus on the connection between rhetoric and civic concerns persists throughout the rest of Bolduc's chapters. The focus on the metaphorical meaning of translatio and its application to this line of transmission becomes clearer as the chapters progress. Chapter three is entitled "Bringing Ciceronian Rhetoric to the Florentine comune: Brunetto Latini's Translation of Cicero," and in it Bolduc posits that Latini's translation of Cicero is done as a response to his exile, which occurred for political reasons: he was a leading figure of the Guelph party, which suffered a defeat at Montaperti. As such, La Rettorica was shaped metaphorically by Latini's political context. As Bolduc asserts, "Latini transfers the Roman story of the conspiracy of...

Reviewed by: Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History by Jason Barrett-Fox Lisa Mastrangelo Jason Barrett-Fox, Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2022. 202 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-5828-6. Jason Barrett-Fox's Untimely Women: Radically Recasting Feminist Rhetorical History offers feminist scholars and in particular feminist historians a dense but useful theoretical method for reading and recovering feminist artifacts. In particular, Barrett-Fox is focused on media such as film and book publication. He uses his new method for reading to examine work by the film star and medium Mae West, the silent film scenarist, novella writer, and autobiographer Anita Loos, and Marcet Haldeman-Julius, the writer, editor, and co-owner of socialist publishing company Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company (source of the famous Little Blue Books series). On the surface these seem odd choices since all three have already been "recovered" and there is extensive scholarship about them. However, part of Barrett-Fox's critique of earlier recovery projects is the tendency to recover the women that we recognize most easily from our own vantage points, particularly academic women. His project therefore diverges in order to read West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius through new rhetorical lenses. [End Page 450] Barrett-Fox explicitly builds on early feminist historiography scholars such as Barbara Biesecker, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, Cheryl Glenn, Susan Jarratt, and Carol Mattingly. Noting the strengths and weaknesses of extant models, Barrett-Fox jumps off from these previous models of feminist historiography by using a concept he calls "Medio-Materialist Historiography" or MMH. This concept provides new methods for reading texts from the past, particularly complicated ones, and requires several things from the objects in consideration. Chief among them is the original creator's use of some form of "inscriptional technology" and their "facility with a particular medium" (48). Next, "another facet of a likely candidate would be the quality with which she manipulated her chosen media and how those manipulations coincided with particular messages, critiques, or other, less overt demonstrations of (distributed) rhetorical force" (48). Importantly (and in a deviation from much current rhetorical recovery work), the material creator, in Barrett-Fox's imagining of MMH, need not be intentionally creating feminist material and may instead be responding to the private circumstances (social, historical, economic) of their own lives (31). MMH would allow for researchers to trace not just the materializations of the subject but also the distributions that result. Barrett-Fox begins with a discussion of how works may move between the ontic and the ontological in what he calls "radical inscription: materialized inscription that punctures the membrane separating the ontic from the ontological and, often, the past from the present" (4, emphasis original). With this in place, Barrett-Fox sets up the discussion of MMH and the ways in which it can be used to move beyond previous readings and even previous qualifications for whose work is recoverable. Chapter 1 of the text introduces us briefly to each of the three women under discussion (West, Loos, and Haldeman-Julius) as well as some background of the ways in which these women have been remembered. Barrett-Fox also lays out some further background for the concept of MMH through the discussion of Charles Sanders Peirce, whose 1887 experimentation with telepathy pushed the threshold between existence and knowability, and Georges Méliès's concept of the "cinematic stop trick," which used distortion to create images that were not "real" (much as current cinema does with CGI). Perhaps the most important concept introduced in this first chapter is the idea of cold kairos: the idea that a text or artifact may have been dormant for many years but can now be mediated. This notion is particularly helpful for those of us who routinely encounter historical artifacts and think that they are interesting but need a larger or better framework for thinking about how and why they should be recovered. Through Chapters 2, 3, and 4 (Loos, West, and Haldeman-Julius, respectively), Barrett-Fox introduces new concepts to help bolster an MMH reading of each of his subjects. In Chapter 2, for example, Barrett-Fox introduces the idea of using MMH...

Reviewed by: The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic by Stephen Howard Browne Tom F. Wright Stephen Howard Browne, The First Inauguration: George Washington and the Invention of the Republic. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020. 229 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08727-6. Nostalgia about early American history typically comes in a few familiar forms. At the more popular end of work on the Revolutionary Period, there is no shortage of longing glances towards the struggles and causes of that era rooted in attraction to seemingly clear-cut ideological certainties. In a different way, intellectual historians might often seem to envy a period in which men of ideas of the quality of Adams and Jefferson led the nation. In a more tragic key, chroniclers of the continent's indigenous histories are rightly elegiac for the moment before entire worlds were destroyed. Stephen Howard Browne's The First Inauguration occupies another distinct category. It is a category that for obvious reasons is flourishing in our particular political moment and is of particular relevance to a Rhetorica audience. We might call this mode that of "public sphere melancholy." His book claims to speak on behalf of "readership concerned with the tenor of political discourse in our own time … [lamenting] the passing of an age when citizens deliberated as citizens, with speeches, not tweets" (4). To that audience he offers an engaging and readable study of the circumstances and significance of George Washington's passage through the USA to delivery of his first speech as president. But this is not an escapist backward glance. For while it expresses a great deal of wistfulness for the world of the Founders, it is an optimistic book, bringing to life the rhetorical world of the early republic in order to offer readers what Browne calls "vital resources for the reanimation of civic life" (2). In a familiar procedure, his book reads an entire era through the lens of a single speech. In this case, the opening address of Washington's presidency, delivered on 30 April 1789. But what is more striking and ultimately more successful about this book is how it casts its gaze more widely, [End Page 448] devoting as much time to the ritual procession of Washington from his home in Virginia through to Manhattan. This tour is a narrative device that allows for a vivid panorama of a slice of the early republic. Browne brings a novelistic verve to this capsule history, evoking the streets, buildings and rooms and the other landscapes through which Washington moved. Memorable instances here include the political microclimates of Philadelphia and Trenton and the free Black community of New York. With clear relish, he also recreates the parades and banquets and toasts that the almost-president was forced to endure and the many speeches he reluctantly delivered. These chapters are aimed at a broad audience, involving plentiful vignettes and asides that will be of use to general readers, even if unnecessary for the book's scholarly readers. Rather than incidental, however, the context makes the case that rhetorical analysis must always be grounded in granular thick description. If only all contexts were as well-sketched as this. By the time the book turns to the rhetorical analysis of the speech itself, a lot of the key concepts have been well-established. Browne has used his account of the journey to set up the live contexts that animated the key term that he will go on to address. The argument turns on Washington's attempt to "invent" the modern republican state through his framing of its stakes and its values. As in Browne's previous works on Edmund Burke and Thomas Jefferson, he is a thoughtful and insightful theoretically informed textual analyst, drawing out the complex themes and salient ideas from what has often been dismissed as a rather forgettable speech. He also offers an interesting survey of the speech's afterlives, examining in turn the anniversary years of 1839, 1889, 1939, 1989. In all of this, the nostalgia for an eloquent and dignified form of statecraft is often justified. However, nostalgia can be as wearisome as any banquet. As the analysis...

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

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran by Bruce McComiskey Robert M Royalty Jr. Bruce McComiskey, Rhetoric and the Dead Sea Scrolls: Purity, Covenant, and Strategy at Qumran. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021. 231 pp. ISBN 978-0-271-09015-3. This book is a detailed rhetorical analysis of six of the sectarian Dead Sea Scrolls discovered at Qumran. Each chapter, focusing on one or two of [End Page 204] the texts, employs a different rhetorical strategy for analysis based on what McComiskey has identified as the "rhetorical ecology" of the text, incorporating the changing material, discursive, and historical elements of the Qumran community rather than only the more static rhetorical situation of each text. The chapters proceed in a roughly historical order. The book achieves its aims of introducing rhetorical scholars to the sectarian scrolls and, with its "case study" approach, religious scholars to new strategies of rhetorical analysis. Key points are the emphasis on rhetorical ecology as an interpretive lens and the argument for hermeneutics/rhetoric in chapter 6. While McComiskey places the diachronic rhetorical development of these texts in the social and political history of the Qumran community, this is a rhetorical, not historical, study. The Introduction argues for the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls not only for Second Temple Jewish history but also for analysis by rhetoricians, given the relative paucity of rhetorical studies of the texts and their evolving rhetorical ecologies. Chapter 1 analyzes the early epistle from the future leader of the Essene Qumran community to the high priests of the Jerusalem Temple called Miqṣat Ma'aśeh ha-Torah, "Some Precepts of the Torah" (4QMMT, following Dead Sea Scroll convention for identifying texts by cave number and site, here Qumran). 4QMMT uses the rhetorics of identification, distinction and persuasion to distinguish the two parties' positions and to try to convince the Temple priests of the validity and urgency of Essene views on the impurity of the Temple. The rhetorical ecology of the text is as important as the rhetorical situation: "only the understanding of texts as situational and ecological will further our understanding of ancient texts such as 4QMMT" (46, McComiskey's italics). The rhetorical ecology of the community shifts dramatically in the next 50 years as the letter does not achieve its persuasive goals. The Essene community, under the leadership of the "Teacher of Righteousness," the putative author of 4QMMT, dissociates from the Jerusalem hierarchy and indeed all non-Essene Jews, founding a desert community outside of Jerusalem by the Dead Sea. Drawing on the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, chapter 2 then analyzes the foundational Rule of the Community (1QS), a performative text using infelicitous speech acts to condemn the Jerusalem authorities and felicitous speech acts to form the Yahad, or congregation, as the Essene community referred to itself. The document ends with a serious of curses, which McComiskey labels as preventing infelicitous speech acts within the initiated community, although he parses the curses, treating the ones for material actions in chapter 4, weakening his analysis. Chapter 3 then analyzes the dissociative rhetoric of the Damascus Document, a text discovered in the Cairo Genizah almost 40 years before copies were found at Qumran, hence called CD. Although the origins and purposes of CD remain less clear than 1QS, the text addresses members of the community who live in "camps" or communities among non-Essene Jews away from Qumran. Using Perelman and Olbrecht-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric on "the dissociation of concepts," McComiskey shows how CD addresses the incoherence of Essenes living among Jews who [End Page 205] are not "real" Jews.1 He shows how CD divides central concepts of Jewish identity, such as humanity, Israelite, remnant, and Essene, into "real" and "apparent." This rhetorical strategy resolves incoherence for "real" Essenes living among "apparent" Israelites. Chapter 4 turns to the central theme of ritual purity at Qumran. McComiskey chooses two texts focusing on purity, the Purification Rules (4QTohorot A, B) and the Temple Scroll (11QT), which he analyzes using material rhetoric, an alternative to representational approaches to models for words. The symbolic material actions of inspiriting...

Reviewed by: Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts by Allison Glazebrook Katherine Backler Allison Glazebrook, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2021. 240pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-2441-7. This book offers a short, focused, thoughtful analysis of how prostitution functions rhetorically in Athenian legal speeches. In each of the five chapters, Glazebrook takes us through a forensic speech in which what she [End Page 209] calls "sexual labor" is at issue and analyses its rhetorical strategies to draw out ways in which Athenians used the figures of "sexual laborers" to articulate and negotiate social values. Each chapter's argument develops the last. The first chapter discusses Lysias 4, a dispute between two men over a prostituted woman they allegedly agreed to "share" but whom one is using exclusively. Glazebrook shows how the speaker repositions the unnamed woman from sex-object to subject, a manipulative influence on his opponent and the trial. The second shows how Isaios 6's portrait of a prostituted woman named Alke suggests the ramifications of her alleged influence by moving her from brothel to tenement-house to household, Peiraieus to Kerameikos to astu, playing on Athenian anxiety about "concepts of oikos and polis and … the roles of enslaved persons, non-Athenians, and even women in these places" (49-50). The third examines the more dramatic (almost panhellenic) mobility of Neaira in Against Neaira, and her more serious supposed threat to the Athenian family, citizen body, and religion. The fourth, on Lysias 3, changes focus to prostituted boys and men, considering how the speaker uses Plataian teenager Theodotos to mark out acceptable and unacceptable expressions of male homosexual desire and behaviour. The fifth, on Aischines's Against Timarchos, uses male prostitution to work through what it means to be a decent, democratic, Athenian citizen—or not. Sexual Labor is refreshingly clearly written. Glazebrook briefly but helpfully explains relevant technical points (for example, on legal processes) and key concepts (like the important but fuzzy ideological distinction between pederasty and prostitution), avoiding over-simplification and acknowledging problems and contradictions. She will offer a variety of scholars' opinions and either pick out the one closest to hers or identify the "bottom line," for example, on what it means to "commit hubris against one's own body" in Aischines 1 (140). The description of Athenian courts (9-13) offers a dynamic, basic introduction to Athenian law but also considers the law-courts as a performance context. The book is useful on terminology, demonstrating that orators use words like pornē, hetaira, and pallakē not so much to denote categories as to evoke a set of connotations to make a point. For example (37), "At two key points [in Lysias 4] … when the speaker accuses the opponent of feigning his injuries and when he asks for the jurors' pity, he refers to [the woman] as pornē (4.9, 19)" which is "both degrading and inaccurate": seemingly she "has been living with the opponent as his personal hetaira or even pallakē (long-term partner)." Further, she argues that the avoidance of the labels pornē and hetaira for Alke in Isaios 6 unmoors her from fixed place-associations (brothel for pornai; oikos for wives and pallakai; symposion for hetairai), allowing her to move within the cityscape, transgressing and disrupting the social order. Glazebrook makes her argument particularly effectively on p. 150 where, through and informing her analysis of Against Timarchus, she shows that as Aeschines "uses kinaidos as a lifestyle and identity for Demosthenes, [he] employs pornos to indicate a lifestyle and personality for Timarchos. His concern is not to show that Timarchos has practiced a profession—no concrete proofs … are offered—but to show that he embodies an identity." [End Page 210] There are some problems. On p. 40, Glazebrook writes that "many of the jurors … may have been familiar with the pornē in the brothel and on the streets, [but] the sex laborer who mixed with citizens at elite symposia … was beyond their immediate circle." This sits awkwardly with her statement on p. 70 that "many Athenians would have experienced [symposia] or at the very least would have been familiar with [their] entertainments and the women...

Reviewed by: The Orator Demades: Classical Greece Reimagined through Rhetoric by Sviatoslav Dmitriev Gunther Martin Sviatoslav Dmitriev, The Orator Demades: Classical Greece Reimagined through Rhetoric. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021. 354 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-751782-6. The sub-title reveals that this book is not a biography of the orator Demades; it does not describe the work, life, and character of a leading politician in the waning days of Athenian independence. One may instead call it an anti-biography in that it undertakes the deconstruction of nearly all existing evidence about Demades's life and rhetoric. Far from being purely negative, it offers a thorough study of the way in which the rhetorical culture from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine Era constructed and moulded its own "Demades," subjecting this phantasmagoria to its own ideas about [End Page 212] the social, moral, and rhetorical qualities of good and bad orators and to its own purposes in propagating these ideas and the concomitant values. Literary sources paint a picture of Demades as a major force in "pro-Macedonian" politics in Athens after the battle of Chaeroneia in 338, i.e., a proponent of a non-confrontational relationship with Philip II and Alexander the Great. The many witticisms ascribed to him show a teller of truth, fearless in the face of monarchs and the democratic mob, making him immensely quotable. While previous biographies of Demades have struggled to distinguish trustworthy information from fanciful anecdotes and to assign the former their historical setting, Dmitriev proposes to cut the Gordian knot by discarding all evidence that is not from Demades's lifetime as fabrication of the later rhetorical educational system, in which progymnasmata and declamations drew on classical (pseudo-)quotes and (often historically impossible) scenarios. His argument is based on an impressive array of material that exposes many of the quotes as stock material ascribed to different characters by different ancient authors, the anecdotes as tropes, for example about corruption, dealing with the masses or flattery. What is left is a small number of references in the Attic orators and epigraphic evidence. One inscription (IG II2 1623, B 166-167), which appears to show Demades's commitment in an operation directed against Macedon in 341/340, is viewed as proof that Demades was by no means a supporter of appeasement or even pro-Macedonian. Dmitriev's scepticism deprives us of many cherished sources, such as Plutarch's Lives of Demades's contemporaries. But if Plutarch was indeed so steeped in the culture of his days that he fell for the inventions of the rhetorical school, so be it: we should be grateful for the purge of misleading material. However, despite the impressive cumulative power of Dmitriev's parallels and his construction of a largely coherent picture of the transformation through rhetorical culture of "Demades," the pendulum swings too far to the side of scepticism (not of the Pyrrhonian kind) when all the later testimonies are discarded as products of a later age. The evidence may be rejected as unreliable, but Dmitriev insists that it is definitely fabrication. Sometimes, however, tropes and clichés may not be pulled out of thin air, and he rarely asks where information may have come from and for which reasons one may have invented biographical snippets (other than the needs of the school room and the self-affirmation of the educated class). Plutarch often drew on contemporary (now lost) sources, not only historians such as Theopompus but also compilations of personal attacks from comedy. The trope of Demades having been a sailor would be in line with Aristophanes's mocking description of Cleon as a tanner. Moreover, in his dismissal of the literary sources, Dmitriev even doubts the authenticity of Hyperides's Against Diondas and both his and Dinarchus's Against Demosthenes. Methodologically problematic is the dismissal of tropes as late because of their "rhetorical tone": that seems to presuppose that the polemicists of the fourth century—i.e., the orators, the "rhetorical" historians, and the comedians—did not adopt a rhetorical tone. (Dmitriev himself, by the way, slams those who accept alleged quotes by Demades on the basis that they sound authentic.) [End Page...

Reviewed by: Los "Principios de Retórica" de Aftonio con anotaciones de Juan de Mal Lara by María Dolores García de Paso Carrasco et al. Raquel Martínez Ballestrín Los "Principios de Retórica" de Aftonio con anotaciones de Juan de Mal Lara. Introducción, edición, traducción y notas, María Dolores García de Paso Carrasco, Trinidad Arcos Pereira, María Elisa Cuyás de Torres, Gregorio Rodríguez Herrera. Madrid, ES: Ediciones Clásicas, 2021. 363 pp. ISBN 978-84-7882-876-0. Los Principios de Retórica de Aftonio constituyen uno de los numerosos manuales en los que quedaron rescatados y expuestos los principios de la retórica clásica para su enseñanza en los ambientes intelectuales y religiosos. En este contexto, la obra de Aftonio fue ampliamente editada, [End Page 202] con constantes traducciones y anotaciones, entre las que destacan las de Lorich, Agrícola y Francisco de Escobar. Se suscribe Juan de Mal Lara a esta tradición, que recoge con especial atención de su maestro Francisco de Escobar, llevando a cabo la edición y anotación de la obra de Aftonio, en la que incluye comentarios a los diferentes ejercicios. Así, en esta obra nos presentan sus editores un cuidado proceso de edición, traducción y estudio de la obra del humanista, con una completa introducción en la que se recoge desde la ubicación biográfica e intelectual del autor hasta la estructuración de los contenidos. En este sentido, es importante referenciar el estudio preliminar que introduce la edición y traducción, en tanto que ofrece al lector un panorama completo de las cuestiones nucleares para la comprensión de la obra: introducen los editores al humanista, presentan su obra, respecto a la que refieren su estructura, objetivos, referencias, desarrollo editorial de las traducciones y comentarios de Aftonio, e, incluso, revisan las máximas educativas sobre las que se asienta el proyecto del intelectual. Este estudio introduce una edición fonética de la obra de Juan de Mal Lara, que los editores toman del ejemplar ubicado en la Biblioteca Nacional de México, aunque lo ofrecen cotejado con los ejemplares encontrados en la Biblioteca Nacional, la Diocesana de Zamora y la de Castilla-La Mancha. Ofrecen en estas páginas la edición de la obra, su traducción y un nutrido corpus de notas en las que se desarrollan tanto explicaciones del contenido como alusiones intertextuales de los diferentes intelectuales que el humanista toma en consideración en la elaboración de sus comentarios. En cuanto a la biografía de Juan de Mal Lara, de esta destaca el contenido autobiográfico que presenta, extraído en su mayor parte de las obras del autor, además de la existencia de biografías elaboradas por coetáneos del humanista. En este sentido, se ofrece en el estudio preliminar una transcripción de la que Pedro Pacheco elabora tan solo veinte años después de su muerte. De este contenido biográfico se destaca su formación intelectual, en la que nombres como el de Francisco de Escobar cuentan con gran presencia e importancia, así como sus producciones, orientadas a las preocupaciones que el autor muestra en torno al estudio de la lengua vernácula y el latín, junto a contenido literario, filosófico y religioso-moral. En el contexto de la producción de Juan de Mal Lara, la elección de la edición de la obra retórica de Aftonio adquiere especial importancia. El Renacimiento constituye un momento de recuperación del pasado grecolatino en el que el estudio de los procesos retóricos para la enseñanza, especialmente vinculada al ámbito escolástico, se revela fundamental. En estos términos, la recuperación de los ejercicios preliminares para el proceso de estudio del discurso pasó por la continua reedición de tratados como los de Aftonio, cuya difusión en el ámbito hispánico estuvo marcada por las ediciones de Agrícola y de Francisco de Escobar. Es en esta tradición, por lo tanto, en la que se enmarca la obra del intelectual...

Reviewed by: The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland by Brian James Stone Conor O'Brien Brian James Stone, The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland, Knowledge Communities. Amsterdam, NL: Amsterdam University Press, 2022. 275 pp. ISBN 978-94-6298-445-5. This is a volume in the history of rhetoric, rather than the history of Ireland. The author's aim, apparent from the first page, is to introduce the [End Page 214] intellectual riches of early medieval Ireland to fellow scholars of the rhetorical arts and to make the case that Irish writings deserve serious attention from historians of rhetoric interested in the development of the discipline in the post-Roman West. The assumed audience of the book knows little about early medieval Ireland or its intellectual history, and indeed may have been seriously misled by the portrayal of Ireland in previous work on early Irish rhetoric which relied on out-dated ideas of the island as some untouched bastion of Celtic culture, removed from the rest of Latin Europe. Stone is well aware that the past decades have seen these Celtic mists blown away from the study of early Irish intellectual history and he sets out to do the same for early Irish rhetoric in this book. Consequently, the first two chapters of the book essentially summarize much of our existing knowledge about Ireland in its late antique and early medieval context and provide an overview of the evidence for education, learning, and scholarly activity in Ireland between the fifth and the ninth centuries. Little here will be new to historians of the early Middle Ages, but clearly such information is a necessary prelude to Stone's rhetorical analysis of particular primary sources that forms the bulk of the text. Nonetheless, I wonder if the historian of rhetoric, coming to this material for the first time, might not have benefitted from an earlier introduction to the social significance of rhetoric and oral communication in early Ireland. Stone actually provides a very clear and useful discussion of precisely this topic in chapter six: his discussion there of the links between native and ecclesiastical learning, of the social functions of the filid (the poet class which provided Ireland's equivalent to the rhetor), of the real impact of the public performance of praise and satire, all that is both lively and insightful. Providing readers with this discussion earlier in the volume would I think have been useful for putting the enumeration of texts read and written in early medieval Ireland (of which much of chapter two consists) into a richer context. Chapters three through six provide a detailed rhetorical analysis of three primary sources: St Patrick's Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, the Hisperica famina, and the Old Irish "Cauldron of Poetry and Learning." Stone identifies rhetorical tropes utilized, suggests sources or analogues in late antique rhetorical writings, and generally provides detailed case studies of how early medieval Irish authors used language to persuade people or reflected on the nature of a rhetorical education. Stone is less successful in contextualising these texts and explaining what rhetorical analysis can tell us about them as historic works. The problems are most obvious in the section on Patrick, whose Letter receives the most attention despite being the least Irish of the texts surveyed (Patrick was neither born nor educated in Ireland and wrote primarily, if not exclusively, for a non-Irish audience). Stone provides a lot of background discussion drawing on the vast literature on Patrick in a manner which manages to be exhausting, but not exhaustive. We have much summary of mid-twentieth-century debates about Patrick's dating, but nothing on Roy Flechner's recent controversial suggestions for Patrick's purposes in going to Ireland. The analysis of the Letter [End Page 215] itself is overall solid and convincing, but its most original claim (namely that Patrick's rhetoric serves an implicit aim of late Roman "frontier management") remains under-developed. Stone has drawn on some recent important developments in the scholarship of late antique Ireland, especially the work of Elva Johnston, but more time reflecting on the implications of his ideas and explaining...

Reviewed by: La confrontation des points de vue dans la dynamique figurale des discours. Énonciation et interprétation by Alain Rabatel Pierre Chiron Alain Rabatel, La confrontation des points de vue dans la dynamique figurale des discours. Énonciation et interprétation. Limoges, FR: Éditions Lambert-Lucas, 2021. 655 pp. ISBN 978-2-359-35305-1. Les découpages disciplinaires pèsent sur les objets de la recherche ainsi que sur les méthodes de ladite recherche. Ces découpages sont invétérés par les parcours universitaires et se répercutent sur l'habitus des chercheurs. Dans le cas de l'Antiquité, le problème est d'autant plus gênant que l'existence même d'une discipline suppose un enseignement institutionnalisé et que des champs entiers du savoir comme la sociologie, la linguistique ou la littérature, sont de création récente. L'un des grands apports de l'anthropologie structurale a été de battre en brèche certaines frontières inconsciemment ou consciemment admises et de faire accepter que la philosophie, l'histoire, le droit, la sociologie, ou encore la littérature, etc. pouvaient conjuguer leurs efforts sur les mêmes objets, des textes par exemple, ou des événements ou des traits de civilisation, dans un processus en quelque sorte scialytique. C'est à cette condition que les différences d'approche—le fait par exemple que l'étude de la langue grecque se soit tardivement séparée de sa matrice, la philosophie, et se soit ou bien intégrée à la rhétorique ou bien dissociée en grammaire descriptive et grammaire scolaire—cessent d'être des obstacles et deviennent des richesses. Une fois reliées au projet qui les sous-tend, les notions échappent non seulement au finalisme d'un "progrès" mais aux jugements condescendants coupés de la dynamique propre des doctrines. Parmi ces frontières, celle qui crée un abîme entre la rhétorique et la linguistique est une des plus persistantes. Les fondateurs de l'ISHR en 1977 ont fait deux choix décisifs en la matière : ils ont adopté une démarche historique et privilégié le versant prescriptif et pratique de l'approche du langage—d'où l'emploi du mot rhétorique—sur sa description ou sa théorie. Les cadres théoriques sont volontiers ceux des époques étudiées et l'étude des usages divers de la parole au cours du temps prévaut sur une description fine et scientifiquement actualisée de l'énoncé/texte obtenu. Les historiens ne cherchent pas tant à donner leur nom à une nouvelle théorie qu'à décrire l'attestation de telle ou telle technique oratoire et d'en mesurer l'effet sur tel ou tel public. Les linguistes, de leur côté, ont longtemps travaillé sur des textes inertes ou le système de la langue comme structure abstraite, plus facile à "scientificiser." [End Page 200] L'opposition entre les deux n'est évidemment pas irréductible. Des rapprochements, de part et d'autre, ont été opérés. C'est ainsi que le projet de donner un classement structural aux figures à l'aide des quatre opérations addition-soustraction-mutation-métathèse est commun à la rhétorique tardive (Phoebammon, vie siècle ap. J.-C.) et aux linguistes du Groupe μ de Liège (1970). Les listes de figures illustrant la "rage taxinomique," selon la formule de Roland Barthes, ont été concurrencées à l'époque impériale romaine par des figures conçues non plus comme des énoncés ponctuels remarquables dans l'absolu mais—dans la théorie hermogénienne des ideai—dotées d'une fonction dans la stratégie expressive ou argumentative d'un texte. Réciproquement, la pragmatique puis l'analyse du discours se sont appliquées à élargir l'analyse linguistique aux autres paramètres, voire aux stratégies, de la communication, mais le clivage reste profond. Dans son livre passionnant, AR fait plus que tendre des ponts entre les deux approches. Il fait de l'interprétation, dans sa dynamique, un des moyens du fonctionnement figural, et ses descriptions sont utiles aussi bien au lecteur qu'au producteur d...

Reviewed by: Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation by Michael Glowasky Rafał Toczko Michael Glowasky, Rhetoric and Scripture in Augustine's Homiletic Strategy. Tracing the Narrative of Christian Maturation, Supplements to Vigilae Christianae: Texts and Studies of Early Christian Life and Language 166. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2021. 195 pp. ISBN 978-90-04-44668-7. Augustine's rhetoric is experiencing a new wave of scholarly interest. Michael Glowasky's PhD monographic thesis is among the growing number of explorations of Augustine's rhetorical practice, unique in focusing solely on Augustine the preacher. The introduction (1-29) first presents the reasons for selecting this subject and reflects on the problems of studying Augustine's sermons as a coherent corpus. Next, he proposes classifying them into three categories based on the audience's "stages of spiritual maturation" (15): catechumens, neophytes and the faithful. This is novel, as scholars usually discern between catechumens and others, because the rules of participation in liturgy differed between them. Glowasky corroborates his decision with passages from two sermons (353 and 392) in which Augustine makes a parallel between the age of innocence of the newly baptised and infants. Glowasky's division of audiences into three categories is crucial for the whole study, constituting the basis for the selection of material and the method of communicating findings. The grouping is simple and elegant. Closing the introduction, Glowasky outlines his method for approaching Augustine's use of rhetoric and scripture in these three groups. First, he redefines the classical concept of narratio, to apply it more broadly as a way of communication that may replace logical argument to "communicate deeper meaning with more persuasive and emotive force" (23). Glowasky assumes that Augustine drew here on a long Latin rhetorical tradition and made use of narratio in two senses. Firstly, narratio is the story God tells the faithful through creation, history and Scripture. Secondly, the Scripture was understood as the narratio of the sermons. Furthermore, he assumes Augustine used a different type of narratio addressing different groups, applying a forensic narratio addressing neophytes, a deliberative type addressing catechumens, and, preaching to the faithful, "draws out more fully the dialectical quality of narratio." Chapter 2 (30-56) explores the notion of narratio more deeply, building on John O'Banion's controversial claim that, for Quintilian, narratio was [End Page 207] "the orator's fundamental art" (341) and was understood as a thought process and way of communicating rather than a part of speech.1 Glowasky believes that Augustine shared this tradition and hence saw narratio as "a ready-made tool to be used to refer to the strategic ordering of temporal events in order to convey an author's particular meaning" (36). Narratio could substitute logical argument and be more persuasive if ordered properly. Glowasky again turns to O'Banion and Kenneth Burke to explain that Augustine treated "narratio primarily as a tool for interpreting Scripture" (41) but, contrary to these two scholars, links this thinking with the prior rhetorical tradition. This tradition seemingly emphasised that narratio proved to be the best tool for conveying meaning. Augustine presented Scripture as a coherent and reliable narratio in De doctrina Christiana and employed it as the narratio of his sermons. Glowasky bases his thesis on O'Banion article on Quintilian. However, Quintilian says various things about narratio throughout his vast work—some contradictory. But the main difficulty is that nothing suggests that Augustine knew the Institutiones well. They were not used as manuals of rhetoric at that time, when teaching was dominated by De inventione and Rhetorica ad Herennium and many books drawing on them, authored by Marius Victorinus, Grillius and other rhetores latini minores. Chapter 3 (57-88) is dedicated to proving the thesis that Augustine's sermons for catechumens seek to persuade them to enter the Catholic Church as the only place where salvation is attainable (57). Glowasky observes how Augustine's technical advice concerning preaching to the catechumens from De catechizandis rudibus shares much with Cicero's view of narratio in judicial oratory. Augustine's two sample speeches from the same book focus on describing the character of the Church through narratio...

Reviewed by: Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self by Adam Ellwanger Ryan McDermott (bio) Adam Ellwanger, Metanoia: Rhetoric, Authenticity, and the Transformation of the Self, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2020. 202 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08593-7. This book moves metanoia and related concepts of transformation and conversion to the center of our theoretical understanding of ethos. Whereas for Aristotle ethos had depended on the audience—did they consider the speaker trustworthy?—now the speaking subject determines how ethos ought to be recognized, and the audience must defer to the subject's self-understanding. As a rhetorical device, Ellwanger shows, metanoia is one of the most important means by which subjects can establish ethos in either of these models. This book's consistent concern is to analyze how, precisely, metanoia is employed in the service of ethos in various contexts and rhetorical and ethical models. At its best, Ellwanger's study adopts a comparative method—what he calls "paratactical rhetorical analysis"—that allows different understandings of metanoia to clarify each other by contrast. Ellwanger also approaches his topic diachronically, telling a story of development or transformation in the practices of metanoia. This narrative gives the book its structure, moving from classical and ancient Jewish sources to early Christianity, then the Protestant Reformation, post-Enlightenment modernity, and what Ellwanger characterizes as the postmodernity of today. Each chapter's narrative section culminates with a theoretical elaboration, which is then worked out in a section of comparative examples. This reviewer found the heuristic, second section of each chapter the more effective. For example, Chapter One compares five different Christian conversion stories (all post-1850), including the Sioux Indian Ohiyesa's memoirs of his transition From the Deep Woods to Civilization, two accounts of conversions in China, and two testimonies from members of the rock band Korn. Ellwanger is able to compare these diverse experiences with impressive conceptual clarity. The major conceptual contrast that runs throughout the book is that between metanoia and epistrophe. When speaking of the contrast, Ellwanger characterizes epistrophe as a 360-degree conversion, a return home. He reserves metanoia for 180-degree conversions, which renounce the past self and result in a rebirth, a replacement of the original subject by a "completely" new subject. In Ellwanger's account, all Christian metanoia "is a substitutive transplanting of identity," and it "locates the substitution at the core of one's being" (95). Modern, secular conversions can also involve renunciation of a previous self, but they lean more heavily on epistrophic unveiling of and return to the original, authentic self. Epistrophic conversion never renounces the real self, but rather the former illusion of self. Theoretically, this contrast harbors considerable explanatory power. It helps make sense of why ethos can reside alternately in audience or speaker. When a speaker seeks to establish ethos by claiming that her previous self is dead and she is now a new (and better) self, she might appeal to the audience to authenticate whether she is indeed new and better. But when a speaker [End Page 93] claims to have discovered and returned to her original, authentic self, she expects the audience to acknowledge her authority to authenticate herself. The contrast between ethoi established by metanoic or epistrophic conversion narratives plays out in fascinating ways in the contrast between Bruce Jenner's coming out as gender-transitioned Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezol's racial transition from identifying as a White woman to identifying as a Black woman. In public responses to each narrative (which unfolded roughly contemporaneously), Ellwanger identifies both metanoic and epistrophic discourses. Each kind was employed by both critics and defenders of the respective claims to identity. The conflict between metanoic and epistrophic understandings of identity transition help account for the intense scrutiny and controversy each story attracted. The weakest part of the book is its narrative of secularization, which frames Christian and modern models of conversion as mutually exclusive. Ellwanger asserts that "in Judeo-Christian thinking metanoia and epistrophe were two fundamentally opposed models of conversion" (100). By contrast, "the definitive feature of modern transformation is a reconciliation of" the two models (p. 143). Likewise, "Christianity is especially...

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies by Brooke Rollins Mario Telò (bio) Brooke Rollins, The Ethics of Persuasion: Derrida's Rhetorical Legacies, Classical Memories/Modern Identities. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2020. 230 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1424-4. There aren't many bold books on ancient Greek rhetoric. When I say "rhetoric," I mean specifically the corpus of speeches of the orators of the fifth and fourth centuries bce, and by "bold" I mean scholarship that does not treat these texts simply as historical documents or stylistic paradigms but as complex literary constructions that invite theoretically engaged approaches. I can think, for example, of Victoria Wohl's Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which focuses on how the very idea of the law—conceptualized as a self-styled notion of authority—affects the arguments of judicial oratory. We should be grateful to Brooke Rollins for having produced another big, bold book on a body of work that most often receives the empiricist and historicist treatment prevalent in the field of classical studies. This book has left me with the uplifting impression that, inspired by Rollins, more work in a similar vein will soon follow and that the world of fourth-century bce orators can finally gain the attention of those outside of classics. Rollins stages a compelling encounter between Gorgias, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato, on the one hand, and Derrida on the other, engaging with the philosopher's late period, in the 1990s, when he produced a rich set of ethically and politically oriented writings. This orientation has always been central to the project of deconstruction. Rollins relays Derrida's formulation: "the thinking of the political has always been a thinking of différance and the thinking of différance always a thinking of the political" (9). Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the Derrida we see here is more Levinasian than Heideggerian; it is a Derrida deeply attentive to the implications of alterity for hospitality, friendship, and democracy. [End Page 95] Rollins is interested precisely in how the interruptive force of alterity is thematized by oratory's constitutive reliance on the address—to judges in a courtroom, to an assembly, and to listeners gathered for a specific occasion or implied, abstract, "ghostly" readers. Her main goal is to show that "when the trace of the other interrupts identity, persuasive instrumentalism implodes" (5). This implosion is not simply the failure of the speech's argumentation, its surrender to the inevitable powers of indeterminacy. The emphasis is, rather, on the ethical affirmation that derives from the unsettling of identity brought about by the projection toward an other that is the address. As Rollins put it, "We encounter no controlling, autonomous speaking subjects here, but beings constituted (and so interrupted) in an encounter with difference" (6). The claim to authority, to a kind of indivisible, closed-off truth, is contradicted by the very opening to the outside (the speaking to) that is intrinsic to the conception of a speech. In this perspective, the speech becomes "a nontotalizable encounter, in which responsibility, negotiation and decision are owed to the other" (6). Persuasion, the alleged primary function of speech-writing, is thus complicated by an ex-cess, an ethical responsibility, emerging from "the unsettling moment of rapprochement with the unassimilable other" (37). In this way, persuasion can be regarded "not as a traditional communicative transaction, but as a possibility given only by way of our ongoing responsibility to and for the nonpresent other" (41). It becomes the staging of an aporetic moment, the opportunity for "a response in which both self and other are transformed" (45). In the chapter on Gorgias, Rollins focuses on the much-discussed Encomium of Helen, pushing against the apparent takeaway of the speech, an affirmation of logocentrism, of the affective power of logos. As Rollins observes, "Helen is marked, engraved, written by what is radically other to her" (61). The upshot is that "the subject is nothing but the effect of affirming the other's unwilled address" (63) and so is the all-encompassing, fetishized logos, another, albeit depersonalized, Über-subject, at...

Reviewed by: Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI by Libanios, and: Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations by Libanius Fabrizio Petorella (bio) Libanios, Discours. Livres XXXIV, XXXV & XXXVI, texte établi et traduit par Catherine Bry, Collection des universités de France Série grecque—Collection Budé 550. Paris, FR: Les Belles Lettres, 2020. 278 pp. EAN: 978-2-251-00637-6. Libanius, Libanius: Ten Mythological and Historical Declamations, ed., intro., trans. and notes, Robert J. Penella. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 420 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-48137-3. Our knowledge of Late Antique rhetorical school practice has been recently enriched by several studies focused on Libanius' works: in the last decades, the Antiochean rhetor has been the subject of key monographs and academic articles on upper-class education in the Later Empire and [End Page 104] many of his writings have been edited and translated into modern languages.1 The two volumes discussed here are part of this upsurge of interest in Libanius's teaching activity. Furthermore, they are meant to lay the foundations for future studies aimed at contributing to the debate on Late Antique paideia. Antiochean school life is at the core of the orations edited and translated by Catherine Bry. Her volume, which is the result of her doctoral research at the École Pratique des Hautes Études of Paris, opens with a brief introduction clarifying why the three Libanian speeches she takes up deserve to be analyzed together: composed in the second half of the 380s, they all stem from problems related to Libanius's role as a teacher. Thus, Orations 34, 35, and 36 provide a vivid testimony about the teaching of Greek rhetoric in the Eastern Empire and the issues that even a renowned sophist might face. These initial remarks are followed by an extremely accurate section devoted to philological aspects. Even though Bry acknowledges the importance of the last edition of the three speeches (published by Richard Foerster in 1906), she considers that work too distant from modern philological conventions.2 As a result of a rigorous re-examination of the whole manuscript tradition, she integrates the descriptions of the sources given by Foerster, Jean Martin, and Pierre-Louis Malosse with her personal observations, thus offering a detailed presentation of all witnesses and a stemma codicum for each of the three orations.3 In this well-ordered preliminary phase, Bry demonstrates a scrupulously honest approach, enabling the reader to access and—if (s)he wishes—to question her philological work. After a list of abbreviations and a bibliography (significantly divided into a section specifically devoted to the edition of the three speeches and a general bibliography), comes the core of the volume. Every oration is preceded by a brief and clear introduction, where the reader finds information on the date and circumstances in which Libanius originally delivered his speech and on the audience he intended to address, as well as a rhetorical analysis of the following text and a list of its previous editions and translations. [End Page 105] In contrast to Foerster, Bry opts for positive apparatuses and avoids mentioning orthographical variants, unless they have some morphological (and, consequently, semantic) value. This approach (which does not prevent her from quoting the conjectures of previous editors when necessary) has the merit of making her edition a very practical tool for the study of the three orations and their textual history. The translation heads in the same direction. It is clear and original and allows the reader to easily grasp the main aspects of Libanius' oratorical performances, accurately transposed into a modern language. In these respects, the volume shows clearly how scholarly accuracy and readability can be combined, thus producing an edition that can be appreciated on several levels. To complete this picture, Bry's commentary is agile, but exhaustive. Her explanatory notes reveal once more a strong interest in the context in which the orations were originally performed and in their rhetorical features. Libanius' words are analyzed in relation to Late Antique rhetorical theories and to their application at school (see, for example, the entry concerning the role of memorization in the learning process at pp. 43–44, n. 55). Particular attention is...

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

Reviewed by: Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World by Stuart M. McManus Don Paul Abbott (bio) Stuart M. McManus, Empire of Eloquence: The Classical Rhetorical Tradition in Colonial Latin America and the Iberian World. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press, 2021. 300 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-83016-4. The title of Stuart McManus's book might lead readers to expect a history of rhetoric in the Americas. That expectation would be perhaps misleading, for the "empire of eloquence" extends far beyond the New World and encompasses all the territories that were under the direct control or indirect influence of the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies. It was a realm that included portions of Europe, North and South America, Africa, and Asia. It was, like a later empire, a vast domain upon which the sun never set. It was also a polity of remarkable duration, beginning in the sixteenth century and continuing well into the nineteenth. Most importantly for readers of Rhetorica this empire was also a place where "neo-Roman public speaking was the archetypal ordering mode in Iberian urban settings, and a powerful tool for spreading ideas, building political consensus, bolstering religion and articulating standards of public behavior that could take place in Latin, European vernaculars and indigenous languages" (5). [End Page 97] The immense geographical and chronological scope this empire requires a correspondingly comprehensive research endeavor. And so, the author helpfully includes a map of some of his extensive research travels. The inclusion of this map leads to the inevitable question: where in the world is Stuart McManus? The answer, it seems, is that while preparing this book he might have been found in any number of far-flung archives and libraries. The result of McManus' scholarly travels is a study that is, in his words, both "meta-geographical" and "polycentic." He contends that "the early modern Hispanic monarchy, and arguably the Iberian world as a whole, cannot usefully described only in terms of a series of bilateral relationships between the crown and subject territories" (197). Accordingly, McManus traces the interconnections between the practice of rhetoric in the various colonies, enclaves, dependencies, allies, and outposts that made up the Iberian world. And despite the great diversity of that world, its rhetorical culture exhibited remarkable consistency and continuity. Most notably, "the early modern Iberian world saw an unprecedented flowering of epideictic oratory" (40). The Empire of Eloquence is, therefore, a cultural and intellectual history constructed around the oration and, in particular, the epideictic oration—sermons, academic discourses, civic celebrations, and funeral orations. This work is, therefore, a history of oratory rather than a history of rhetoric (in the sense of the rhetorical theory and precepts found in the handbooks and treatises of the early modern period). This is not to say these handbooks and treatises are neglected—they are not—but simply that they are ancillary to the story of the oration. Indeed, one of the strengths of McManus' book is that it analyses an impressive variety of neglected, and mostly unpublished, speeches. These are important artifacts that have been often overlooked by scholars in favor published, and thus more accessible, rhetorical treatises and textbooks. This intellectual history is comprised of a series of case studies which typically examine either individual orators or a particular variety of epideictic oratory. An example of the latter is the study of the epideictic oratory following the death of Philip IV in 1665. The Spanish King's death prompted commemorations (exequias) which included funeral oratory as well as poetry, ephemeral architecture, and other memorial forms. McManus studies 42 exequias between 1665 and 1667 which were celebrated from "the Philippines to Flanders and from Mexico to Milan" (51). The content of funeral orations reveals a remarkable similarity despite their wide geographical distribution. These encomia were, of course, speeches praising Philip's virtues, most notably justice and religious devotion. But they also emphasize that Philip's virtues should be embraced and emulated by the citizens and authorities who inhabited the empire, thereby strengthening its political and social structures. Thus, these funeral orations were, according to McManus, a form of "virtue politics" that served both to honor the...

Reviewed by: Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age by Nathan R. Johnson, and: Excavating the Memory Palace: Arts of Visualization from the Agora to the Computer by Seth Long David Marshall (bio) Nathan R. Johnson, Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 2020. 205 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8173-2060-7. Seth Long, Excavating the Memory Palace: Arts of Visualization from the Agora to the Computer. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. 243 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-69514-3. Is memory the sleeping giant of the five parts of classical rhetoric? Some rhetoricians have been skeptical of the entire art of memory enterprise, denying essentially that there are any artificial means of training natural capacities for memory. But many have been believers, and there are vivid arguments asserting how memory as the fourth of those classical parts underwrites and illuminates each of the others. Memory is invention by another name, because the treasure house of previous performances is also a store of potential recombinations. In the most famous of the ancient mnemonic exercises, practitioners were asked to use a familiar architectural form—a sequence of rooms in a home they knew well, for instance—as a background and storage facility for items they wished to remember, and in the emphasis on sequencing there is a logic and practice of arrangement. (Cicero relayed an origin story for this topos about the Greek poet Simonides: during a performance at a dinner, he was called away; while he was away, the roof collapsed killing those within, mangling their bodies beyond recognition; but Simonides was able to identify the dead because he recalled where each guest had been sitting—and the inference was that visualizing figures against a ground is the secret of memorization.) When it comes to the work of symbolizing items to be set against this imagined background, moreover, we are certainly in the domain of style and trope. In the example that Pseudo-Cicero made famous (Rhet. Her., 3.20.33–34), we are asked to picture a scene in which a ram's testicles hang from the fourth finger of a man's hand. The goal of such imagining is to more securely recall facts that are relevant to a legal case we are memorizing—namely, the facts of an inheritance (Romans made purses from scrotums) and the availability of witnesses (testicle and testimony share an etymology). And, as for delivery, the deep paradox of memory is that organizing and practicing the passage of things from the present into the past is in fact one of the keys to performing in the moment: it is as if the artisan of a well-constructed and vividly-appointed memory palace is like an acrobat with every potential move memorized and at-hand equidistant as it were from the here and now of performance. There is thus a lot to say about the rhetorical dimensions of memory, and taken together the two books reviewed here, Nathan Johnson's Architects of Memory and Seth Long's Excavating the Memory Palace, make wide-ranging use of memory's rhetorical histories to make claims about contemporary mnemonic practices and possibilities. Nathan Johnson makes a pitch for the significance of the material infrastructures of memory work, and he anchors this pitch in histories of [End Page 100] the different cultures of Library Science and Information Studies after World War II in the United States. Johnson organizes his attention around two significant figures and their respective institutional contexts: Dorothy Crosland, a librarian at Georgia Tech from 1925 (and head librarian from 1953–1971), and Robert S. Taylor, who wrote the influential work The Making of a Library (1970) and who, within a year of his appointment as Dean in 1973, changed the name of the School of Library Science at Syracuse University to the School of Information Studies. Johnson does note the different trajectories that each of these individuals represents. In his narrative, Crosland represents a library sciences profession that women dominated and that was often coded as a "feminine" form of labor, and Taylor represents the rise of...

Reviewed by: The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk by Samuel McCormick Daniel M. Gross (bio) Samuel McCormick, The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 326 pp. ISBN: 978-0-226-67763-7. Implicitly McCormick's book addresses a question that is urgent in the US academic context, where current rhetoric and communication practices are in fact much studied: Why study history at all? At best, so the skeptic might offer, historical work provides some interesting background to the pressing problems of today. At worst, historical work exacerbates some of those same problems around rhetorical power by simply by spending too much time on received traditions. (I've long admired Malea Powell's sly and self-consuming conference paper title "Aristotle Is Not My Father.") At the same time a set of distinct answers to this history question has been brewing at The University of Chicago Press, thanks in large part to the late editor extraordinaire Douglas Mitchell, who had himself learned about rhetoric from the late century Chicago scene, and Richard McKeon in particular. The series Mitchell started at Chicago "Rhetoric and Communication" has published different types of concept-oriented histories by scholars including Nancy Struever, John Durham Peters, Debra Hawhee, David Marshall, and now Samuel McCormick. Taken together, this group of scholars shows how rhetoric and communication can't be studied adequately without some strong historical version of conceptual work, because that is how the very [End Page 90] things we wish to study appear as such in the first place. In what follows I discuss how McCormick's book makes the case elegantly. First of all, why for McCormick "conceptual history," especially as it would apply to "everyday talk" counterintuitively? Shouldn't we study everyday talk by recording and coding ordinary speakers in face-to-face settings? No doubt, replies McCormick, such grounded study of the first type gets at something sociological (2). But how can we study the very concept of everyday talk as it has shifted significantly online for instance, showing up as "chat," which can't be the same thing? For that sort of study, historical work on the concept is essential, because that is the only way we know what our object of study is in the first place. It is not "conversation," which McCormick calls an interpersonal modality, that achieved its highest art and greatest conceptual clarity in the Enlightenment. At the same time, it is not public sphere discourse legitimated by (again Enlightenment) institutions of oratory and journalism (291). Instead, McCormick argues with a nod to paradox, "everyday talk" is a distinct concept that rises with modernity and its industrializing momentum (4), what Kierkegaard first identifies as snak. This is where McCormick must demonstrate—and he does so beautifully—why we turn to Kierkegaard at this point of inquiry, and not only to his rich archive of wagging tongues, noise and nonsense, cliché and bombast, wordplay and witticism, tangent, reprise, gossip, gimcrack, diversion, duplicity, tedious anecdote, absurd abstraction, abrupt interjection, and endless logorrhea (44). Methodologically, McCormick's powerful point is that snak is the concept that names this verbal efflorescence, and Kierkegaard's work is where the concept appears in its sharpest and critical form. If we studied for instance only Gert Westephaler's fictional talk, or the philosophical talk of Hegel's Danish parrots (44), we would lose track of the concept snak altogether, and thus we would not really understand what we were talking about ourselves: an irony that McCormick has to dance with throughout this substantial section steeped in Kierkegaard's first language Danish, and in his vast corpus that we no longer know how to handle academically. One outstanding virtue of McCormick's book is that it will teach a new generation of scholars what Kierkegaard did besides anticipate existentialism. The next section of the book, a book that runs 326 pages in total, picks up the work of Martin Heidegger, who was himself a keen reader of Kierkegaard. Now focusing on the 1920s, which were for Heidegger both a period of tremendous intellectual ferment that includes his 1924 lecture course on Aristotle's Rhetoric and...

Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck Amy J. Lueck. A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886. Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3742-2 Jason Maxwell Jason Maxwell University at Buffalo, SUNY Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (4): 415–417. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.415 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jason Maxwell; Review: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, by Amy J. Lueck. Rhetorica 1 November 2022; 40 (4): 415–417. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.415 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada, by Javier Espino Martín Javier Espino Martín. De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada. Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Clásicos 62. Ciudad de México, MX: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 2019. 305 pp. ISBN 978-607-30-2747-2 Genaro Valencia Constantino Genaro Valencia Constantino Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (4): 412–415. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.412 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Genaro Valencia Constantino; Review: De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada, by Javier Espino Martín. Rhetorica 1 November 2022; 40 (4): 412–415. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.4.412 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886 by Amy J. Lueck Jason Maxwell Amy J. Lueck. A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886. Writing Research, Pedagogy, and Policy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN 978-0-8093-3742-2 Historians of composition have long understood their work as a necessary corrective to reductive accounts of English Studies that focus solely on literary studies and critical theory. In their efforts to provide a more capacious understanding of the discipline, however, compositionists have themselves produced significant exclusions, offering a rather limited understanding of the history of college writing. As Amy J. Lueck explains, the field of Rhetoric and Composition, perhaps in an effort to fortify its standing within the research university, has tended to overlook the role that high schools have played in shaping college writing pedagogy. In A Shared History: Writing in the High School, College, and University, 1856–1886, Lueck does not merely seek to document points of overlap and contestation between high school and college writing curriculum. Instead, her work aims to call into question the very boundaries between designations like “high school” and “college.” These boundaries, Lueck maintains, are responsible for producing a standardized academic hierarchy that limits the range of pedagogical possibilities within any given level of the system. For instance, high school becomes conceived as little more than a preparatory vehicle for college, and its curriculum becomes defined negatively—that is, high school is understood as not providing college-level instruction. History has shown that this reification and subordination proves detrimental for both high schools and colleges. While we take these distinctions for granted today, Lueck turns to the nineteenth century, a point when the current academic system had not yet solidified (in this regard, her work shares much with Laurence Veysey’s [End Page 415] landmark The Emergence of the American University [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965], which similarly documents a period of intense fluidity and contestation). Prior to the establishment of research universities, which precipitated the creation of our broader contemporary hierarchy, the middle of the century boasted a landscape populated by a wide array of educational institutions whose relations to one another were anything but clear. Consider the name “high school.” While the term might suggest an institution that serves as a capstone to the “lower” primary schools, it just as easily might be read as belonging under the banner of “higher learning” that we usually reserve for colleges and universities. Much of the ambiguity surrounding various schools’ status and function can be attributed to the larger conversation about the role of education in American life during this time. For example, many were calling into question the hegemony of the traditional college’s “classical curriculum,” which privileged learning languages like Greek and Latin in order to produce distinguished gentlemen. Critics of this curriculum suggested replacing it with a “modem curriculum” that would better prepare students for the practical concerns of work and citizenship. Because the transition to this modern curriculum was uneven at best, many high schools adopted it long before their college counterparts, making them an attractive option for many in the community. Indeed, practically-oriented high schools were not merely viable alternatives to classically-minded colleges. They also constituted sites of pedagogical innovation that colleges and universities would later draw upon in their own reform efforts. Lueck grounds her analysis in A Shared History by studying the developments of a number of schools in Louisville, Kentucky during the second half of the 1800s. She dives into the archival record and finds a range of institutions, instructors, and students that challenge long-held assumptions about the educational system and the kinds of work students are expected to produce at any given site within that system. Admitting that it would be impossible to produce a comprehensive account of the changes unfolding during this time, Lueck argues that the city nevertheless engaged meaningfully with almost every larger educational trend of the era, and several educators who worked in Louisville went on to have an impact shaping educational policy at the national level. Moreover, her...

Reviewed by: De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada by Javier Espino Martín Genaro Valencia Constantino Javier Espino Martín. De la “agudeza” al “gusto.” Cicerón, entre el Barroco y la cultura ilustrada. Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Clásicos 62. Ciudad de México, MX: UNAM, Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, 2019. 305 pp. ISBN 978-607-30-2747-2. Este libro es un verdadero desafío conceptual y un profundo estudio sobre la retórica ciceroniana en diversos horizontes culturales y estéticos de la temprana Modernidad; valiéndose de la propuesta hermenéutica que ha desarrollado en los últimos años en torno a la “estética de la recepción”—con base principalmente en Jauss e Iser—, Javier Espino entrega una investigación muy bien documentada, razonada y original acerca de los mecanismos literarios que hicieron de Cicerón un multiforme estandarte para ideologías educativas y movimientos políticos y religiosos varios. Esta obra, ingeniosa y de buen gusto, requiere una lectura atenta debido a la complejidad de todo el engranaje textual que el autor despliega con el fin de trazar los rasgos que caracterizan el pensamiento retórico del arpíñate, apropiado y manipulado en la estética del Barroco y la Ilustración. El autor se propone explicar los tres grandes escenarios históricos y estéticos en que se entendía de una manera particular la retórica y el lenguaje de Cicerón: en primer lugar, “una retórica artificiosa, basada en un tipo de escritura abstrusa y compleja”, que sería la barroco-jesuítica; en segundo, “una retórica ordenadora y clarificadora de ideas”, que evolucionó gracias al racionalismo ilustrado; y por último, “una retórica como referente de un gusto estético tanto literario como artístico”, de matriz sensista, empirista y prerromántica (11). Para lograr tal cometido, Espino inicia el periplo de su investigación exponiendo detalladamente los conceptos ingenium y decorum acordes con la teoría retórica de Cicerón, por medio de un repaso sucinto desde la propia antigüedad griega con Gorgias, Platón y Aristóteles, entre otros más, para establecer algunos fundamentos retóricos y poéticos, hasta las teorías de los romanos Cicerón y Quintiliano en torno al par de conceptos que son clave en la recepción posterior, al ser adoptados más tarde por la tradición medieval escolástica y la renacentista. En este punto, se hace, para todo el estudio, una esencial distinción entre modus rhetoricus y modus philosophicus: el primero “se liga a una forma de entender el lenguaje y la expresión humana más creativos e imaginativos” y el segundo “se asocia a una forma más filosófica y lógica de entender el entramado lingüístico humano” (15). [End Page 412] Estas dos nociones son la base para concebir la articulación hermenéutica entre los textos y el hilo conductor del libro. Resulta indispensable, como marco teórico del cual proceder, el apartado consagrado a la polémica del ciceronianismo (33–41), pues constituye la discusión propiciada y propulsada por no pocos pensadores de diversas latitudes principalmente entre los siglos XV y XVI, sobre cómo plantear un lenguaje adecuado no sólo para transmitir el pensamiento antiguo, sino para influir a partir de él de una forma determinante en el escenario político, social y religioso europeo. Dos son las propuestas que se pueden destacar en el ciceronianismo.· una en la que Erasmo de Roterdam figura como el mayor exponente y que consiste en un eclecticismo retórico, sin implicar un menosprecio de Cicerón, sino un empleo razonado del arpíñate, a más de otros tantos autores posibles de la antigüedad clásica, tardía, cristiana y medieval, en vista de amoldarse con la doctrina cristiana antiprotestante y sin filtraciones de doctrinas paganizantes; la segunda es realzada por Julio César Escalígero, quien aconsejaba, además de un acertado eclecticismo, una apropiación, habilitada para sus propios tiempos y condiciones, de los ideales políticos, éticos y sociales de Cicer...

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells; Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book by Pauline Reid; The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by David Wiles Susan Wells. Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge. RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 211 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08467-1.Pauline Reid. Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 283 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0069-6.David Wiles. The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-49887-6. Timothy Barr Timothy Barr Northeastern University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (3): 325–330. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.325 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 Timothy Barr; Review: Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells; Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book by Pauline Reid; The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by David Wiles. Rhetorica 1 August 2022; 40 (3): 325–330. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.325 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature, by Carol A. Newsom Carol A. Newsom. Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature. Forschungen zum Alten Testament 130. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019. 382 pp. ISBN 978-3-16-157723-9. Davida Charney Davida Charney University of Texas at Austin Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (3): 322–324. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.322 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 Davida Charney; Review: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Approaches to Text, Tradition and Social Construction in Biblical and Second Temple Literature, by Carol A. Newsom. Rhetorica 1 August 2022; 40 (3): 322–324. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.322 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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

Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 Sara C. VanderHaagen Sara C. VanderHaagen University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 213–215. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.213 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 Sara C. VanderHaagen; Review: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 213–215. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.213 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry, by Irene Peirano Garrison Irene Peirano Garrison. Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 295 pp. ISBN 978-1-316-21935-5 Michele Kennerly Michele Kennerly Penn State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 211–213. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.211 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 Michele Kennerly; Review: Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry, by Irene Peirano Garrison. Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 211–213. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.211 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| May 01 2022 Review: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. 232 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-2038-6 Sarah Walden Sarah Walden Baylor University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (2): 209–211. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.209 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 Sarah Walden; Review: Lives, Letters, and Quilts: Women and Everyday Rhetorics of Resistance, by Vanessa Kraemer Sohan. Rhetorica 1 May 2022; 40 (2): 209–211. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.2.209 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

Reviewed by: Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry by Irene Peirano Garrison Michele Kennerly Irene Peirano Garrison. Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 295 pp. ISBN 978-1-316-21935-5 In our free-verse universe, poetry only seems unbound; every so often, it is invoked precisely because it cannot shake common knowledge of its traditional formal and affective structures. For instance, in the 1980s, New York governor Mario Cuomo distinguished courtship from leadership with his quip “you campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton used the line against Barack Obama, attempting to call into question his ability to pivot from charming to commanding. In 2020, then California senator Kamala Harris, interviewed while seeking her party’s nomination for the presidency, explained that policy proposals have “to be relevant,” not “a beautiful sonnet,” suggesting form can come at the expense of function. These examples show how orators operating in a tricky rhetorical culture use poetry and prose to differentiate modes of influence. They are part of a lengthy lineage. In Persuasion, Rhetoric and Roman Poetry, classicist Irene Peirano Garrison makes what is not the first case but what may be the fullest that distinctions posited between ancient poetry and oratory, verse and talk, poetics and rhetoric, are not fixed and absolute but strategic and contested. What is at stake in the making of those distinctions? That is an important question to ask of any time period, but Peirano Garrison s focus on Rome’s early imperial period sets her up to oppose what for a long time was prevailing scholarly opinion: that, during that period, the purity of poetry was adulterated by rhetoric, with Ovid being the first faulty filter. Peirano Garrison challenges the logic (and imagery) of that opinion, arguing that the very assumption that poetry and rhetoric were ever self-evidently [End Page 211] discrete and separate is not supported by the ancient evidence. To make her case, Peirano Garrison partitions that evidence into three sections: 1) Poetry in Rhetoric; 2) Oratory in Epic; 3) “Rhetoricizing” Poetry. A short introduction offers operative definitions of a few key terms. The first part begins with the chapter “Poetry and Rhetoric and Poetry in Rhetoric,” in which Peirano Garrison stretches from Gorgias to Derrida to take the long view of purported disassociations, connections, and interrelations between the two verbal arts. Pinpointing imperial Rome, she identifies eloquentia and facundia as terms for capacities of powerful and fluent speech that accommodate both orators and poets. It is precisely because they share in those capacities that orators and poets pursue and argue about who does what better under their respective constraints. The remainder of the chapter spotlights pleasure (voluptas), showiness (ostentatio), and enhancement (ornatus), since debates about the closeness of poetry and oratory tend to bunch around those concepts. The second chapter, “Poetry and the Poetic in Seneca the Elder’s Controuersiae and Suasoriaeseeks to understand and then correct the misguided view—in Seneca’s time and now, to the degree that anyone still clings to it—that the popularity of declamation in the early imperial period indexes its broken (that is, poeticized) rhetorical culture. Garrison focuses on how Seneca, himself from Spain, vaunts a Spanish orator (Porcius Latro) over an ostensibly eastern orator (Arellius Fuscus), because Latro instructs in what an uncorrupt, properly Roman oratorical style should sound like. Whereas Fuscus’s concoctions are bad imitations of good poets, Latro’s controlled persuasions render him so exemplary a speaker that Ovid and Vergil emulate him in their verse (74). “The Orator and the Poet in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria,” the final chapter in this section, ranges across the Institutio but dwells on book-rolls 8, 9, 10, and 12, since it is there that Quintilian most explicitly erects boundaries between poetry and oratory, even while he quotes and borrows extensively from Vergil to specify an orator’s unique training and trajectory. In this first part of the book, readers may notice Peirano Garrison’s unflagged (and frequent) use of the word “prose” in her discussions and translations. It seems important, even helpful, to her...

Reviewed by: Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement, by Bjørn F. Stillion Southard Sara C. VanderHaagen Bjørn F. Stillion Southard. Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement. Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 176 pp. ISBN 978-1-4968-2383-0 While often dismissed as a straightforward failure, arguments advocating the removal of free Black Americans to Africa are rhetorically significant: they continued for more than fifty years, engaged white and Black Americans alike, and powerfully shaped understandings of Blackness and Black communities into the twentieth century. As I have found when [End Page 213] teaching courses on the African American rhetorical tradition, the shadow of this discourse lurks in the words of speakers from Sojourner Truth to Marcus Garvey. Its presence—much less its rationale—can be difficult to explain. Bjørn F. Stillion Southard’s excellent book helps to address that challenge by offering a rich, complex analysis of this persistent occurrence of “peculiar rhetoric.” Beginning with speeches given at the founding of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816, the first chapter examines what Stillion Southard calls the “peculiar argumentation” of colonization’s founding advocates. These speakers’ arguments in favor of colonization were shaped (or, more accurately, misshaped) by their effort to appeal to two diametrically opposed audiences: southern slaveholders and northern abolitionists. Attempts to meet such a strange rhetorical task left key ideas in what Stillion Southard terms “jangling relation” (33) to one another and opened the ACS to critiques from all sides. Although the ACS treated free Black Americans as “objects of the scheme, not subjects to be addressed” (25), as the author astutely notes, it is not difficult to imagine that they would have had strong opinions about the proposal. Chapter two explores a response to the founding of the ACS whose authorship was attributed to the “Free People of the District of Columbia.” Because the authorship of this text cannot be clearly identified, Stillion Southard focuses instead on its “peculiar voice” in order to demonstrate that it is “hermeneutically diasporic; it both belongs to and flees from familiar interpretive frames” (42). The analysis deftly deploys familiar rhetorical concepts, such as polysemy, in unfamiliar ways in order to draw out the text’s three voices: serious, ironic, and signifying. Each of these three voices suggests a different set of authors and distinct purposes vis-à-vis colonization. While the analysis provides solid evidence for all three voices, I found the discussion of signifying most insightful and potentially productive for scholars seeking to understand and amplify Black voices from the past. The concept of signifying used by Stillion Southard, while departing slightly from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s variation, “signifyin’,” reveals a compelling insight: “Being black and subversive was much more difficult in public discourse than being white and ironic” (57). Further evidence of that insight appears in chapters three and four, which focus on texts produced by Black colonists. Chapter three examines the “negotiation of blackness, power, and material conditions” (66) in free Black landowner Louis Sheridan’s correspondence with the ACS and his eventual emigration to Liberia. Adapting Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s concept of planning in the face of “exclusionary forces” (66), Stillion Southard demonstrates how colonization discourse created limited possibilities for free Blacks who sought to emigrate and reveals the inventive ways in which these individuals rhetorically negotiated their severely constrained subjectivity in the face of limitations. This analysis effectively engages both Afro-Pessimist and Black optimist thought, which compellingly illustrates Sheridan’s own journey from optimism to pessimism as a result of his “peculiar planning for emigration. The focus on Black subjectivity is critical here, [End Page 214] as it helps to show how one individual Black person experienced and responded to the peculiar machinations of a colonization scheme that treated him as “neither slave nor free” (71). Chapter four turns to a more empowered settler colonist, Hilary Teage. Just before the Republic of Liberia declared independence in 1847, Teage gave two speeches that constituted “settler colonist civic identity” by outlining, respectively, their “peculiar obligation to debate” and their “peculiar obligation to commemorate” (89; emphasis in original...

Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016, by Tammy R. Vigil Tammy R. Vigil, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780700627486 Sara Hillin Sara Hillin Lamar University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 100–102. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.100 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Sara Hillin; Review: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992–2016, by Tammy R. Vigil. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 100–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.100 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach, by Alessandro Vatri Alessandro Vatri, Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 344 pp. ISBN: 978019879590 Vasiliki Zali-Schiel Vasiliki Zali-Schiel University of Liverpool Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 96–98. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.96 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 Vasiliki Zali-Schiel; Review: Orality and Performance in Classical Attic Prose: A Linguistic Approach, by Alessandro Vatri. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 96–98. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.96 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics, by Michele Kennerly Michele Kennerly, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. 242 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 David L. Marshall David L. Marshall University of Pittsburgh Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 91–94. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.91 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 David L. Marshall; Review: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics, by Michele Kennerly. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 91–94. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.91 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, by Steele Nowlin Steele Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. 274 pp. ISBN: 9780814213100 Denise Stodola Denise Stodola Kettering University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 98–100. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.98 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 Denise Stodola; Review: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, by Steele Nowlin. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 98–100. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.98 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend, by T. J. Keeline T. J. Keeline, The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 388 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 Martin T. Dinter Martin T. Dinter King’s College London Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 90–91. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.90 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 Martin T. Dinter; Review: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend, by T. J. Keeline. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 90–91. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.90 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire, by Susan Jarratt Susan Jarratt, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 200 pp. Anna Peterson Anna Peterson Penn State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 103–105. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.103 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 Anna Peterson; Review: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire, by Susan Jarratt. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 103–105. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.103 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics, by Olga V. Solovieva Olga V. Solovieva, Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 328 pp. ISBN: 9780810136007 Mark Clavier Mark Clavier Brecon Cathedral Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (1): 88–89. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.88 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 Mark Clavier; Review: Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics, by Olga V. Solovieva. Rhetorica 1 February 2022; 40 (1): 88–89. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.1.88 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. © 2022 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.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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

Reviewed by: Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire by Susan Jarratt Anna Peterson Susan Jarratt, Chain of Gold: Greek Rhetoric in the Roman Empire. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 200 pp. Coined by Philostratus in the early third century CE, the label “Second Sophistic” (c. 50-250 CE) is increasingly recognized as an imperfect periodic designation. Does it refer exclusively to the tradition of epideictic rhetoric as described by Philostratus? Or can it be expanded to include the full range of Greek literary production during the first three centuries CE? At its core the term reflects feelings of belatedness and nostalgia, such that the common narrative of the period has become one in which an elite Hellenic identity was defined above all by paideia (“education” or “culture”). While this rooting of an elite Greek identity in the classical past is well recognized as a response to Roman hegemony,1 recent scholarship has begun to expand on this conventional view, pointing to elements of continuity both with earlier Hellenistic literature and the literature of the fourth century CE.2 Jarratt’s monograph Chain of Gold consequently sets a tall task for itself in once again addressing the cultural politics of the Second Sophistic. It is an ambitious and thought-provoking work, even if in the end it does not completely succeed in what it sets out to do. At its core, it argues for a reappraisal of the “second sophistic habit of dwelling in the past” as something that was not “monologic and static” but “varied and dynamic” and that offered the writers and performers of the period “a politically protected way of ‘talking back’ to empire.” (17) For Jarratt, the obsession with the past that has come to define this period of Greek literature is not a simple matter of nostalgia but rather of critical memory, one that allowed the authors of this period to reimagine and keep alive a deliberative civic space. Jarratt’s aim in this book is not at its core an entirely new idea. That said, what makes her work so thought provoking is her desire to locate “a colonial counterdiscourse” in a broad range of works (38). Moreover, she is certainly correct that too often classicists have been overly hesitant about reading the literature of the period through the lens of postcolonial theory (3). In addition to an introductory chapter outlining the monograph’s methodology, Chain of Gold develops this argument across six case studies, covering respectively Dio Chyrsostom’s Euboean Discourse (Chapter 2), Aelius Aristides’ Roman Oration (Chapter 3), Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana [End Page 103] (Chapter 4) and Imagines (Chapter 5), Heliodorus’ Aithiopika (Chapter 6), and Libanius’ To Those Who Call Him Tiresome (Chapter 7). Generally speaking, this is a nice mixture of well-trod and often overlooked texts. Her strongest chapters are those which connect what she calls rhetorical vision to the post-colonial concerns outlined in the monograph’s first chapter. For example, her discussion in Chapter 3 of Aristides’ Roman Oration explores how “the ‘ sophist . . . draws on the resources of [Homeric] epic to enhance his powers of visualization,” providing his audience not only “a phantasm of [Rome’s] imperium but also a techne of viewing” (47). Likewise, Chapter 5 reads Philostratus’ Imagines—an intriguing collection of descriptions of works of art—as an exploration in rhetorical vision that pushes the limits of ekphrasis. Treating the text as a museum of sorts, Jarratt acts as curator, bringing out how the text handles reoccurring images of youth, women, and different ethnicities, among others. This is Jarratt’s most successful chapter, in part thanks to the inclusion of an appendix, which maps out the paintings in relation to one another. In a few instances, however, Jarratt does not make full use of the ancient evidence. The clearest example of this comes in her discussion of Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean Discourse (Or. 7). In this speech, Dio professes that he will narrate a personal experience, relating how, after being shipwrecked in Euboea, he was taken in by a huntsman, who recounted his own troubled participation in local politics. The huntsman’s tale then prompts Dio to expound on...

Reviewed by: Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016 by Tammy R. Vigil Sara Hillin Tammy R. Vigil, Moms in Chief: The Rhetoric of Republican Motherhood and the Spouses of Presidential Nominees, 1992—2016. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2019. 272 pp. ISBN: 9780700627486 In a thoroughly researched and timely study of women’s participation in American political life, Tammy R. Vigil explores how partners of presidential nominees have navigated the thorny territory of public and private spaces, often battling the media’s representation of their roles as wives, mothers, and public political figures in their own right. The text concerns itself in part with how presidential nominees’ partners offer insights into “the expectations of presidential partners” despite the fact that, as Vigil acknowledges, there are no established guidelines for evaluating the work of [End Page 100] the (almost always) women who fulfill that role (2). Though the book gives special emphasis to the years between 1992 (hailed as the Year of the Woman) and 2016, Vigil begins with a rich historical discussion of presidential wives’ involvement in their husbands’ campaigns, mentioning, for example, how Louisa Adams “used open house receptions to court potential supporters for her husband’s bid for the presidency” (5). Such examples, which involve women facilitating a salon type of discourse, echo suggestions from rhetoricians such as Christine de Pizan, who championed women’s ability to use influence as a rhetorical tool. Vigil’s ethos in this historical and rhetorical analysis is firmly established in the introductory chapter, where she takes readers as far back as 1808, noting that evidence of smear campaigns against presidential candidates’ wives may have begun with women such as Dolley Madison, who was in 1808 “accused of having had an affair with incumbent president Thomas Jefferson” (3). Vigil’s sharp attention to the fact that some sort of media presence has, almost from the beginning, either helped or hampered presidential nominees’ spouses, provides a corrective to any notion that such interference is a more recent phenomenon. Vigil spends much of the introductory and first chapters exploring the evolution of women’s involvement in political life, noting how, although women “were initially conceived of as apolitical beings” (34), they were actively involved in all facets of decision making in certain “public roles customarily closed to them” during men’s absence through the American Revolution (22). Noting the restrictive view of women’s ability to “function outside the home” (17) promulgated by influential writers such as David Hume, Vigil illustrates how women were indeed more than capable of rising to the challenge of political participation as more opportunities became available to them. Vigil also notes how nineteenth-century ideologies about women began to shift and how changing beliefs regarding the necessity of women’s public participation—as evidenced by texts such as John Stuart Mill’s 1869 On the Subjection of Women (23)—allowed women to go to work outside the home and, therefore, move more fluidly between the public and private sphere (24). The first chapter also introduces a concept that anchors much of the discussion of political wives/mothers in the rest of the text: republican motherhood, which Vigil notes was a “rhetorical strategy” (28) to push the notion of an “ideal female patriot” (27). The republican mother, Vigil notes, was a concept that left women “duty-bound to protect and cultivate the home” but also encouraged debates concerning “women’s appropriate concerns and actions outside the home” (28). The essential historical groundwork laid in the introductory and first chapters allows readers to much more fully appreciate both the political opportunities that have opened up for women since and the challenges that those opportunities have presented. The subsequent chapters of Moms in Chief explore more specifically how various presidential nominees’ partners have been seen to either adhere to or deviate from the republican motherhood framework. The second chapter concerns itself with Barbara Bush and Hillary Rodham Clinton, two seemingly [End Page 101] diametrically opposed figures when discussed from the terministic screen of republican motherhood. If the ideal republican mother was, as Vigil notes, “other-centric, self-sacrificing, primarily concerned with domesticity, and...

Reviewed by: Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics by Michele Kennerly David L. Marshall Michele Kennerly, Editorial Bodies: Perfection and Rejection in Ancient Rhetoric and Poetics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2018. 242 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 There exists a set of topoi still alive—undead—within ancient, medieval, and early modem historiographies of rhetoric that circles “the loss of politics” as the crucial fact when it comes to narrating the coming into being and passing away of rhetoric. Politics itself as an object of such attachment may take several forms, but it is the beginning and sine qua non of rhetorical [End Page 91] application. In her disciplined yet frequently humorous Editorial Bodies, Michele Kennerly boils the politics-as-lost-object topoi down to the bone: “oratory flourishes in democracies only, the Hellenistic age [for example] was undemocratic, ergo there were no speeches worth preserving” (56). Kennerly tilts at the politics-as-lost-object topoi (and contests this characterization of the Hellenic) from a refreshing and subtle angle—that of editing, revision, what she terms “ corpus-care” (15). For her, turning to the curation of texts with rhetorical attention is not the reluctant decision of a culture that has lost its opportunities to speak and decide together in public. As Kennerly puts it, “rather than being indicators of political decline or decadence, polished and published prose and verse point to contestation over what sort of words best sustain communal life,” and, in this way, “writing is no less democratic or republican than speaking: the two verbal forms live parallel lives” (209). Hers is also a re-reading of the early histories of both Greek and Roman rhetoric showing how concern for the written record was always at issue alongside concern for the oral performance. Kennerly’s approach yields instructive angles on a series of authors. We encounter what she calls “Horace’s meticulous file,” his editorial metaphor of choice for smoothing stylistic burrs. But Kennerly pushes against “a prevailing view on Horace’s strictures on the stilus-, that he ‘made a virtue out of a political necessity’”—“the ‘necessity’ being the need to watch one’s words as the imperial period gained force” (109). In her reading, Ovid is someone who “displays his editorial body” cultivating thereby “the image of a man trying to correct his mistakes” (134), and this leads to “the (cultivated) shabbiness of his corpora,” which for Kennerly “accords with their tristis situation” (139). Political exile means disheveled self-consuming textual performance. In reference to Quintilian, editing implies compilation and overview stemming from care, and “the enmbased lexical family is the progenitor of ‘curative’ and ‘curation,’ both of which apply to Quintilian’s labors: he sees what ails various oratorical corpora and means to cure them through his curation of rhetoric’s traditions and orations” (164). Editing, reworking, compiling, creating a summative edition—all these should be understood in terms of established rhetorical topoi. Just so, in Quintilian, compiling is also a form of ethopoetic exercise, and such processes become “habituation hexis (Greek, lit. ‘having’)” rendered sometimes, as we know, “in Latin as facilitas (ease)” (162). Always, Kennerly is attentive to the embodiments of writing and editing. In Latin, she relays, the “edowords”—at the root of “edit” and its variants—were themselves richly enmeshed in a slew of metaphors “from giving birth, to uttering words, to presenting something for inspection, to displaying it publicly, to publishing it” and did not denote “prepublic textual activities” (2). And the terms ancient Romans did use for textual revision drew on a range of artisan prototypes: “they dragged away, cut out, pressed, smoothed, polished, hammered, filed, and shaved” (2). On the Greek side, “gluing” was an important metaphor domain because it had pertinent literal applications too: “writers would glue papyrus patches atop errors to hide them or to insert emendations on top of them” (29). Again, [End Page 92] Kennerly is quick to note that “turning the stilus” was “idiomatic for rubbing out with the flat end of the stilus something written into a wax tablet with the pointed end” (79). It should thus come as no surprise that, although this work is ancient in...