Rhetorica
16 articlesMarch 2023
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Abstract
In memoriamMarc Van Der Poel (1957–2022) Mike Edwards It is with a heavy heart that I write this personal tribute to my dear friend Marc van der Poel, who passed away on 18 December 2022. I do not need to remind readers of Rhetorica of the tremendous service Marc gave to the International Society for the History of Rhetoric over three decades, with repeated stints on Council, his long and distinguished editorship of the journal (2011–2018), and his Vice-Presidency and subsequent Presidency of the Society, which was equally distinguished and also long, being uniquely extended for a year due to the Covid crisis and forced postponement of the 2021 Biennial Conference. He bore the pressures that situation brought with his usual calmness, professionalism, and good humour. Away from ISHR, Marc was a distinguished Professor of Latin. Born on 4 February 1957 in the Dutch town of Geldrop, just east of Eindhoven, Marc read Classics at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University). After graduating in 1979 he studied for a Diplôme d'Études Approfondies at the University of Tours before taking his Masters cum laude at Nijmegen in 1983, with a dissertation on Seneca the Elder. He was already deeply interested in Neo-Latin and went on to study for his doctorate under the supervision of Jan Brouwers and his friend and mentor Pierre Tuynman. Marc was awarded his PhD in 1987, with a thesis (in Dutch) entitled The 'declamatio' among the humanists. Contribution to the study of the functions of rhetoric in the Renaissance. This was the beginning of a long and highly productive career dedicated to the study of the humanists and humanist rhetoric, in particular Rudolf Agricola, which took him immediately to the USA on a Fulbright award and a two-year post at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut. Further research posts followed at Nijmegen and at the Constantijn Huygens Institute in The Hague, accompanied by books in French and English on Agricola, until his appointment as Professor at Nijmegen in 1999. While continuing to research and publish extensively, Marc [End Page 111] was also dedicated to the teaching of Latin language and culture, and on numerous occasions we discussed his heavy teaching load, which he was always determined to carry out to the very best of his not inconsiderable ability. He supervised seven PhD students, while performing the other duties of a Professor, including being Head of Department and Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts. On one of his annual summer visits to Oxford when already in his early nineties, Jerry Murphy asked me if I would help to ensure that his project on Quintilian would come to fruition, should anything happen to him. I was of course deeply honoured and very happy to agree, especially because it afforded me the opportunity to collaborate closely not only with Jerry but also with Marc. He and I spent many happy hours together editing the submissions to the Oxford Handbook of Quintilian, in his home and in mine, and online when the coronavirus struck, with Jerry always eager to contribute by email. While working closely with him, I came to realise at first hand what a tremendous scholar Marc was, as well as his ability to make tough decisions. He saw this major project through to completion in time for Jerry to hold a copy of the volume, and it was a proud moment for both of us on 21 December 2021 when we were able to launch the Handbook at Radboud University, online because of the virus but the two of us together in spite of it. It is a serious loss to scholarship that Marc did not live to finish his edition, with commentary and translation, of Agricola's important work De inventione dialectica. He also recognised, throughout his career, the high importance of accurate bibliographies and was working on one of Agricola for the Oxford Bibliographies Online series. Totally at ease with all six languages of the Society, as well as Greek, Marc was fluent in French and English, which I used to tease him he spoke with an American accent and vocabulary. But he was so much more...
January 2022
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The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline Martin T. Dinter 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 Cultural memory is a strange beast indeed. While there is no doubt that Cicero sculpted his own image during his lifetime, he could hardly have foreseen that as soon as the first century AD he would be defined by his style—i.e., that the style would become the man. The incorporation of Cicero into Roman cultural memory is thus highly selective. Without explicitly buying into the framework of cultural memory studies, Keeline, in the revised version of his 2014 Harvard dissertation, illuminates this process in seven chapters by focusing on Cicero’s early reception. The first four chapters on the reception of Cicero in Roman education are followed by three more specialized sections on Cicero in the works of Seneca the Younger, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. Reception indeed serves as the overarching framework for this monograph, even though Keeline shies away from deconstructing its tenets. We cannot fathom whether or not Roman schoolboys “enjoyed” reading Cicero as much as today’s students, but Keeline employs Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, the commentaries of Asconius, and the Scholia Bobiensia to illustrate how young Romans would have encountered Cicero’s speech Pro Milone in the classroom. The rhetorically focused pedagogical approach—namely, the narrowing of Cicero’s persona and personality in a pedagogical context to a model of eloquence (which strips him of his historical and psychological complexity)—that emerges from this analysis usefully exemplifies the process Keeline expounds in the second chapter. The third chapter highlights the prominence of Cicero’s death in Roman declamation. It proposes that the narrative that Cicero was murdered by Popilius, a former client whom he had previously defended against the charge of parricide, is but an added color of the rhetorician schools. This nevertheless fits neatly with Octavian’s desire to downplay his own role in the proscriptions and shift the blame onto Mark Anthony. Cicero thus does not serve as advocate of Republican freedom but rather as advocate of freedom from Mark Anthony. In addition, the style and content of these declamations left behind traces in the accounts of Cicero’s death by Valerius Maximus and many of the historiographers such as Florus, Velleius Paterculus, and later authors such as Cassius Dio and Appian. In contrast, the chronologically fairly early accounts by Livy and Asinius Pollio still offer a morally more complicated image of both Cicero and the events surrounding his death. In the fourth chapter, Keeline ingeniously examines a group of pseudepigraphic texts that have distilled Cicero to the essence consumed in declamation schools: the Invective against Cicero (Ps.-Sallust) contrasts neatly with the Invective against Sallust (Ps.-Cicero), the Speech delivered the day before Cicero went into exile and the Letter to Octavian (Ps.-Cicero), and a pair of Ps.-Brutus’ letters to Cicero and Atticus (transmitted as Cic. Ad Brut. 1.16 and 1.17). Stylistically faithful, these texts concentrate on major life events such as Cicero’s consulship, his exile, and his speeches against Mark Anthony. [End Page 90] In addition, they provide an inventory of the tropes that formed around Cicero s life and character and subsequently found their way into the historiographical tradition. The book’s second part delves into the oeuvres, of Seneca the Younger (chapter 5), Tacitus (chapter 6), and Pliny the Younger (chapter 7) and analyses how each of them comes to terms with the über-father Cicero. Seneca the Younger adopts neither Cicero’s style nor his philosophy or educational theories. Even in his edifying letters to Lucilius, he only utilises Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus as a foil against which he constructs his own philosophical achievements. While Seneca the Elder engages frequently and substantially with Cicero, in his son’s works Cicero is conspicuous by absence. Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus is steeped in Cicero as Keeline demonstrates by analysing the speeches by Aper...
September 2021
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Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo by C. Cody Barteet ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo by C. Cody Barteet Sarah J. Constant C. Cody Barteet, Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo. New York: Routledge, 2019. 180 pp. ISBN: 9781138585652 Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico: The Casa de Montejo is a tale of two cities—the Xui Maya city of Tihó and the Spanish colony of Mérida—ultimately united through a series of cultural campaigns that sought to exert Spanish authority in colonial Mexico. In this book, Barteet expands upon his previous dissertation research on Early Modern Latin American visual culture as well as past historical studies of the Casa de Montejo that “have mainly considered the façade as a reflection of European aesthetics with limited analysis of its iconography” (11). Lucid descriptions, original photographs, and dozens of archival artifacts evidence colonial anxieties in sixteenth-century Yucatán. Architectural Rhetoric strives to provide a bridge between two cognate disciplines: architectural history and rhetorical studies. Notably, Barteet understands the construction of the Casa de Montejo through Henri Lefebvre’s [End Page 466] “spatial triad” and describes how it may be used to explain the tensions that arose between the center and periphery of Mérida (18). Barteet explains how spatial practices (e.g., architectural styles), representations of space (e.g., the grid-planned city), and spaces of representation (e.g., real and imagined spaces) function as part of a causal loop. In this way, Barteet positions the Casa de Montejo as a social space for reading and understanding conflicts between Indigenous peoples, Spanish colonizers, and the Spanish monarchy. Architectural Rhetoric is divided into two main sections: the first “considers the significance of the building to a Hispanic audience,” and the second considers “how the façade and its urban location resonated among the Xiu Maya of Yucatán” (22). Barteet argues that Spanish conqueror Francisco de Montejo intentionally built the Casa de Montejo on the sacrosanct plaza mayor to symbolically diminish the influence of the Spanish monarchy in the New World and to exert his individual authority as governor over the Indigenous peoples. Barteet illustrates how the construction of the Casa de Montejo may be placed within Lefebvre’s imagination of the spatial triad in order to identify exactly how this building defied Spanish monarchical traditions and initiated a struggle for authority in the Yucatanean province. Barteet extends his analysis of the Casa de Montejo beyond the realm of architectural history and into the field of architectural rhetoric, revealing what different examples of iconography in the Casa de Montejo uncover about colonial tensions within and between Yucatán and the transatlantic world. For example, Barteet argues that Herculean imagery in the Plateresque façade exalts Montejo as the protagonist in the ongoing Yucatanean colonization narrative. Later, Barteet examines both the political and social contexts in which Montejo operated as Yucatán’s adelantado, or governor, through an analysis of “multivocal” iconography in the Plateresque façade (93). Barteet introduces a rhetorical text—the requerimiento—an official policy document concerned with the proper treatment of Indigenous peoples that encouraged the colonizers to “establish alliances through peace accords and gift-giving practices in order to foster a climate capable of hosting a successful colony” (92). Here, connections between the virtuous iconography discussed in earlier chapters and the requerimiento arise, strengthening Barteet’s case for an architectural rhetoric, or a connection between what is written in policy texts and what is therefore “declare[d] in stone” (93). In the second half of Architectural Rhetoric, Barteet examines Maya perceptions of the Plateresque façade and its place in the oft-contested city center. Barteet recalls that Mérida’s identity was “neither solely Spanish nor solely Maya” but existed somewhere in between, occupying a sort of “dual identity” (116). Barteet discusses the social and political importance of mapping practices, which may include the mapping of metaphorical or conceptual spaces such as books, art objects, and geographical locations where “two or more cultures engage one another” (116). In the penultimate chapter, a story of a power struggle often defined by dichotomous...
September 2019
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Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400–1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE by John O. Ward ↗
Abstract
Reviews 429 Society version. A final positive feature is that Chamey is explicit in her expo sition. She breaks down her topic of persuasive first-person psalms into a number of complexifying categories that open up the various types of psalms. Her insights into lament—even if it may not best be described as public policy persuasion—are still very helpful, as she finds a useful, typical argumentative pattern in these psalms. For each psalm, Chamey provides not only a translation (Alter's) but also often both a structural and a diagram matic outline of the psalm, so that the reader sees the relative "weight" of the various sections, a feature of Chamey's argument. Charney makes much of the difference between the complaint of the psalmist and the proposal made to God, and these can be more readily assessed through these means of presentation. I commend Chamey for this volume, as it makes a serious and persua sive attempt to draw upon the categories of ancient and modem rhetoric, without ever becoming simply an exercise in labeling parts so often found in such biblical studies. She provides some interesting insights into the psalms and their rhetoric. Stanley E. Porter McMaster Divinity College John O. Ward, Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400-1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2019. xviii + 706 pp. There is a small circle of scholars of rhetoric who, at some point during the 1970's or 1980's, enclosed themselves in cramped and dark microfilm rooms, reading and taking copious notes on the 1200 pages of John O. Ward's 1972 Toronto Ph.D. thesis in two volumes, "Artificiosa Eloquentia in the Middle Ages: the study of Cicero's De inventione, the Ad Herennium and Quintilian's De institutione oratoria from the early Middle Ages to the thir teenth century, with special reference to the schools of northern France." For those scholars and for others who were able to read the thesis under perhaps more comfortable conditions, encountering this book, which puts the thesis into print for the first time, will be like revisiting a monument they knew in their youth. They will be amazed once again by its magnificent ambition, and (as is the case with monuments revisited) they will discern features that they did not notice or understand before. They will also admire the care and thought with which that monument has been curated, with timely and important additions to the original structure. Those readers will have worked through the original dissertation in order to educate themselves about an aspect of the history of medieval rhetoric that had not yet been narrated and will have followed Ward's career and absorbed some if not all of the approximately thirty substantial articles and chapters on rhetoric that he 430 RHETORICA has written, as well as his 1995 volume for the Typologie series. In this contin uous flow of scholarship, he has expounded his increasing knowledge of the medieval and renaissance rhetorical traditions. Now more mature in their understanding, readers acquainted with his thesis will appreciate its richness. But some readers will come to it fresh, without previous knowledge of Ward's bibliography. For those new students of rhetoric, Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages will be a stunning awakening to the profundity of medieval thought about communication. Over the years, Ward has refined or enlarged the insights rendered in his thesis. But even though readers can consult his later narratives of Ciceronian reception in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, there are good reasons for publishing the thesis now. First, it is a treasure house that had never been published integer, even though it has served as a resource for constant reevaluation of evidence: the transmission of texts; glosses and commentaries on the Ciceronian legacy; applications of doctrine; and possible answers to the question "why did the Middle Ages, especially from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, value classical rhetoric so highly?" Second, it is the complete narration of the medieval reception of classical rhetoric to which Ward has devoted his remarkable energies, and it remains the narrative that he was able to...
June 2014
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Metamorphoses of Rhetoric. Classical Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century ed. by Otto Fischer, Ann Öhrberg ↗
Abstract
Reviews 319 mate surpassing by the same forces of Renaissance humanism that renewed its cultural lease in the Western world. William P. Weaver Baylor University Otto Fischer and Ann Ôhrberg, eds., Metamorphoses ofRhetoric. Clas sical Rhetoric in the Eighteenth Century. (Studia Rhetorica Upsaliensia 3), Uppsala: Rhetoric at the Department of Literature, Uppsala University, 2011, 213 pp., ISBN: 978-91-980081-0-4. ISSN: 1102-9714 As a result of the critique from grammarians and philosophers of the pre vious centuries, eighteenth century rhetoric can be said to undergo metamor phoses in several ways. Inspired by a new philosophical awareness of man's thought and language combined with an interest in conversational commu nication, works on style and taste came to the fore in all European countries. This volume presents important eighteenth century rhetorical works and their contexts in France, Germany, and Sweden. Two chapters deal with rhetoric's status in France. Marc André Bernier from Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières follows the changes through inventio: "Metamorphoses of the inventio in Eighteenth-Century France from Bernard Lamy to Jean-Francois Marmontel" (pp. 25-43). Here we find in ventio combined with creativity in Marmontel's poetics. This gives way to a cosmological inventio integrating nature, history, and words in an untra ditionally way stressing the infinite possibilities. In "Renouveau de la rhétorique et critique des théories classiques du lan gage" (pp. 45-69) Gabrielle Radica from Université de Picardie-Jules Verne in Amiens uses Etiene Bonnot de Condillac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as examples. With illustrative citations from these two authors she presents the epistemological context for her conclusion: Condillac and Rousseau gave new life to the passions, their language and effect based on "fondements an thropologiques" (p. 64) - not a result of rhetoric as ars, but rather of a natural practice. One gets the impression that these passions, at least in a Condillac's pedagogical context, should always be polite. Regarding the beauty of style, he recommends two properties: "la netteté et le caractère" (p. 53). Anna Cullhed from Uppsala University studies Entwurfeiner Théorie und Literatur der schbnen Wissenschaften by Johann Joachim Eschenburg. Through the changes in the respective editions she follows the evolvement of belletrist rhetoric from the end of the eighteenth into the beginning of the nineteenth century (pp. 71-107). Eschenburg is a well-chosen demonstration of the growing tension between rhetoric and poetics. Interestingly enough, he is acquainted with the Scottish rhetoricians Campbell, Lord Karnes and Blair (p- 94). 320 RHETORICA The last four chapters by three scholars from Uppsala University and a Ph.D-student from Órebro University give an insightful picture of eigh teenth century rhetoric in Sweden. Here lies the book's main contribution to eighteenth century scholarship. Material from Swedish archives and press is made available to the public. Otto Fischer gives an overview of how the critique of rhetorical matters - for example, textbooks used in schools - led to a new return to antique authors (pp. 109-131). From his reading of pub lished as well as unpublished material, he gives a good impression of the inherent tension concerning rhetoric towards 1800: "to rescue eloquence we must do away with rhetoric, at least with rhetoric conceived of as theory and pedagogy." (pp. 120-21) Marie-Christine Skuncke is known within Nordic rhetoric for her book about Gustav Ill's rhetorical and political education. In "Appropriations of Political Rhetoric in Eighteenth-Century Sweden" (pp. 133-51), she returns to Gustav III focusing on his speech from 1772. This crucial speech ended an unruly, though politically free period and restored a powerful monarchy. Skuncke juxtaposes a critical pamphlet from the emerging middle class with the king's speech and find them both eloquent. Stefan Rimm's "Rhetoric, Texts and Tradition in Swedish 18th Century Schools" (pp. 153-72) is related to his dissertation on the subject. Read ers may already have some idea of Apthonius' progymnasmata in Swedish schools from papers at ISHR conferences. Rimm focuses on Vosius' Elementa Rhetorica analyzing several editions. To some degree Rimm underestimates the influence of belletrist rhetoric on school rhetoric at the end of the century, but he rightly warns us against...
January 2014
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The Complete Prose Works of John Milton ed. By Don M. Wolfe, and: Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition by Raphael Lyne, and: Outlaw Rhetoric: Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare’s England by Jenny C. Mann, and: Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion by Lynn Enterline, and: Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by Garry Wills ↗
Abstract
Reviews 91 my own undergraduate teaching, especially Pallister's idea that there are master tropes for heaven, hell, and paradise and Shore's denial that Milton engages in iconoclasm, and I have recommended the full texts to my graduate students. Historians of rhetoric at any institution that regularly teaches Milton or his period would do well to order copies for their libraries and also to consider acquiring copies for themselves. Jameela Lares The University of Southern Mississippi The Complete Prose Works ofJohn Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953-82); Raphael Lyne, Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 267 pp. ISBN 978-1-107-00747-5; Jenny C. Mann, Outlaw Rhetoric: Fig uring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England, Ithaca and Lon don: Cornell University Press, 2012. 249 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-4965-9; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare's Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. 202 pp. ISBN 978-0-8122-4378-9; Garry Wills, Rome and Rhetoric: Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011.186 pp. ISBN 978-0-300-15218-0 Once upon a time (or so the story goes), the study of language and rhetoric in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature was dominated by con siderations of style, and style meant especially figurative language. Since then, a generation or two of critics including Joel Altman, Marion Trousdale, Thomas Sloane, Wayne Rebhorn, Frank Whigham, Victoria Kahn, Lorna Hut son, Peter Mack, and Lynne Magnusson have shown the importance for early modern literature and culture of a richer conception of rhetoric, one which understands rhetoric as a vital contributor to a wide range of intellectual, political, and social processes and agendas. In view of this work, one could be forgiven for suspecting that the prominence of figuration in the latest crop of books on rhetoric and the literature of Shakespeare's England means that literary criticism is doing the time warp again. As we will see, however, this is not quite your grandparents' rhetorical criticism, though the intervening years have changed less than one might have expected. The first of the four books under review here, Raphael Lyne's Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition argues that rhetoric in Shakespeare is a means not only of presentation and persuasion but also of thought. By "rhetoric" Lyne means primarily tropes, or figures of thought. He grounds this argument in recent research in cognitive linguistics, which probes the relationship between language (especially metaphor) and cognitive processes in the brain, and he devotes a chapter to surveying both this work and a wide range 92 RHETORICA of studies that find similar links between rhetoric, literature, and thought. Another chapter argues that early modern rhetoric manuals implicitly tie tropes such as metaphor and synecdoche to mental processes and thus constitute a "proleptic cognitive science" (50). Lyne then illustrates his thesis in chapters on A Midsummer Night's Dream, Qymbeline, Othello, and the Sonnets, concentrating on the thought patterns found in ornate speeches delivered at stressful moments. He reads Dream as a study of how metaphor works, showing the different ways that characters and groups in the play try to make sense of their experience: "Characters think differently and therefore they speak differently" (129). His study of Cymbeline shows how its characters, faced with "secrets, revelations, and impossibilities," "struggle to find the tropes by which to understand their world" (158). Othello depicts a world debased by Iago's ability to transfer his "twisted cognitive patterns" (186) to others, causing "a kind of heuristic short-circuit, where rhetoric becomes self-fulfilling and inward-looking" (163). The Sonnets show that thought can happen outside dramatic characters, while confirming that rhetoric can bring "heuristic failure" (209) as well as success. As this summary suggests, I don't find a distinctive thesis about Shake spearean thought in this book, and in noting the many critics and rhetoricians who have connected literature and rhetoric to thought Lyne undercuts his claim to originality. Possibly Lyne means his contribution to lie less in his conclusions than in his method, for he begins the Dream chapter by claiming to have found "a different way of reading some...
March 2013
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Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe by Marjorie Curry Woods ↗
Abstract
Reviews 223 original ceremony nt Sancta Maria ad Martyres from language that reflects the architecture of the building, the movements of the presiding Pope (Boni face IV), the clergy, and the dramatization of God s voice in the words of the chant. Mary Carruthers and the contributors to this volume have produced an extraordinary collection of essays, rich and complex with thematic intercon nections and many avenues for further exploration. The overall arrangement illustrates ductus in invention, arrangement, and figurative motifs in the art of rhetoric across disciplinary lines, including composition, oratory, art, archi tecture, music, and liturgical performance. Many of the essays also include excellent visual illustrations. The editing is careful, though one system for translations, provided in the text of some essays and in the endnotes of others, would aid consistency. Nevertheless, readers will find Carruthers7 collection a remarkable resource not only for historical and textual studies, but also for insights into medieval culture, worship, and performance through the art of rhetoric. Elza C. Tiner Lynchburg College Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Text and Context 2), Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. xlii + 367 pp. ISBN 9780814211090. Making a well-timed appearance close to the publications of both Copeland and Sluiter's Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Peter Mack's A History of Renaissance Rhetoric (Oxford Uni versity Press, 2011), Marjorie Curry Woods' new book helps us to imagine what took place in medieval and renaissance classes on the trivium. As her title suggests, Woods concentrates on commentaries written from the thir teenth through the seventeenth centuries on Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, a popular Latin poem extant in over two hundred manuscripts that taught students how to write poetry and prose. By "commentaries," Woods means an assortment of instructive materials from interlinear and marginal manuscript glosses to freestanding explanations, from anonymous interpre tations, such as the Early Commentary that Woods previously edited and translated (New York: Garland, 1985), to the works of well-known intellec tuals teaching in documentable circumstances. Woods inquires insightfully into what these commentaries meant for teaching grammar and rhetoric in western as well as central Europe, in elementary courses as well as in universities. The scope of this book is therefore daunting, but Woods deftly chooses particular commentaries and teachers that best exemplify the Poetria nova s 224 RHETORICA use. For instance, chapter 3 details Pace of Ferrara's humanist elaboration placing the Poetria nova amidst classical authorities and literatures, while chapter 4 emphasizes Dybinus of Prague's Aristotelian rhetorical interpreta tion. As Woods elucidates, such differing constructions show how variously the Poetria nova might function within European curricula: for Pace as an aid to intermediate students in construing literature, for Dybinus as a text for university students analyzing various models of rhetoric, and for others as a guide to dictamen or sermon composition. A reader can learn a substantial amount about intellectual history and educational scenarios from Woods. Such learning is possible because Woods writes in lucid, well-organized prose that appeals to both specialists and those interested more generally in the history of rhetoric and education. For the latter audience, her Preface clearly defines terms such as "accessus" and "lemmata" that will recur in describing the commentaries (xxxviii-xxxix). Further, she opens the book with fifteen plates illustrating the diversity of the commentaries and pro viding exempla for later chapters. Nine of these plates include the famous opening phrase of the Poetria nova ("Papa stupor mundi," or in English trans lation, "Holy Father, wonder of the world") that becomes the subject of so many speculations about Geoffrey's audience and purpose. Along with the manuscript illustrations, Woods provides copious translations of transcrip tions from commentaries. Sometimes the interjection of these visual aids can overwhelm Woods' discussion, for instance in the layout of versions of the Dybinus commentary (190- 208), but Woods' intention is to be generous with manuscript materials over which she has labored long, and indeed many readers would be challenged to assess the divergent points in the commentaries without these explicit side-by-side comparisons. Woods' presentation of manuscript transcriptions also offers doctoral students...
September 2009
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Abstract
Reviews Serena Zweimüller, Lukian, “Rhetorum praeceptor": Einleitung, Text und Kommentar (- Hypomnemata, 176). Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008. 499 pp. ISBN 3-525-25284-6. Numerous publications on the history of rhetoric deal with their subject either in its totality or in certain cultural periods such as classical Antiquity or the Renaissance. By contrast the history of antirhetoric remains a yet unwrit ten desideratum. In spite of its title Samuel Ijsseling's monograph Rhetoric and Philosophy in Conflict (1976) provides only sporadic glimpses of this his tory which begins with Plato and the Sophists, reaches as far as Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, and extends well into the twentieth century. It always, however, emerges in the context of philosophy, especially idealis tic philosophy, and later in the context of German Geistesgeschichte. These contexts have so far been the focus of existing studies of antirhetoric. Com pared with antirhetorical philosophers, Lucian of Samosata (b. ca. 120 AD), prominent representative of the so-called Second Sophistic Age, has been ne glected as a member in the chain of antirhetoricians. First "a pleader (Suidas) and later a travelling lecturer who practised the art of Sophistic rhetoric as far as afield as Gaul" (Oxford Classical Dictionary), Lucian, notorious as an eiron from other works, also displayed enough self-irony as to satirize the new Sophistic fashion in oratory. He engages in this (Menippean) satire in a piece entitled ΡΗΤΟΡΩΝ ΔΙΔΑΣΚΑΛΟΣ (in Latin: Rhetorum praeceptor; in English literally Teacher of Rhetoricians), which is rendered in English by A. M. Harmon in the fourth volume of his Loeb edition of Lucian's works (pp. 133-71) as Λ Professor of Public Speaking. Because no further edition with translation appeared after the one by Harmon, there was an editorial lacuna as well as one of scholarly criticism. Both lacunae have now been filled by the book of Serena Zweimuller, which originated as a 2007 Swiss doctoral dissertation at the University of Zurich. The content of the voluminous work is divided into six parts: 1. an introduction to the rhetorical and literary fashioning of the treatise together with an examination of its philosophical and comical elements on the basis of subtexts and analogous texts; 2. a short summary and structural-rhetorical analysis of Rhetorum praeceptor; 3. an outline of the level of education and the culture of oratorical performance in the age of the Second Sophistic; 4. on Rhetorica, Vol. XXVII, Issue 4, pp. 446-456, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2009 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions w ebsite, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.200A27.4.44b. Reviews 447 pseudo-philosophers and ideal representatives of philosophy, together with parallels in Lucian s motifs of mockery; 5. text and translation; commentary; 6. the reception of Lucian's Rhetorum praeceptor by Willibald Pirckheimer and Desiderius Erasmus in the Renaissance. The Greek text is based on the Oxford edition of M. D. Macleod (Luciani opera. Tomus II (1974, reprinted 1993)), with a few different readings of certain textual variants that are indicated in the apparatus cnticus. As for the editor's German translation, not a single word is devoted to this topic, though the historical translation by the German classicist poet Christoph Martin Wieland (reprinted in the three-volume edition of Jurgen Werner (1981)) would have deserved one. The commentary elucidates both linguistic problems and the historical background of the text. This is often done with reference to the available research literature, as is evident, for instance, in the explanations of the important terms rhetor and sophistes on pp. 172-74. Here the point is justly emphasized that in the period of imperial rule the term sophistes by no means always carried negative connotations, though it could for the purpose of denigrating an opponent. This would, however, have been the right place to insert a digression on the Second Sophistic, since there is no introductory chapter where such a presentation would have been appropriate. Here the author could have made use of valuable studies on the history...
September 2007
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Abstract
Reviews Heinrich E Plett, Rhetoric uud Renaissance Culture. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. 581pp. scholars. Most of us excel in one or two areas, but he has contributed valuable work in four different fields: historical and theoretical studies of came to general attention with a substantial monograph (based on his 1969 Bonn doctoral dissertation), Rhctorik dcr Affekte. Enylische Vkirkuuysdsthetik im of the importance given to moving the feelings in English Renaissance rhetoric, an understudied topic at that time, remains worth reading and might have become trulv influential had it appeared in English. Professor Plett had already published a student text, Einfidiruug iu die rhetorische Fextanalyse (Hamburg, 1971), which moved from rhetorical criticism into general linguistics, a mo\ e which he consolidated in Textwissenschaft und Textanalyse. Senuotik, Empiustik, Rhctorik (Heidelberg, 1975), subsequently translated into Rumanian (1983). Plett's latest work on rhetorical theory is Systematische Rhctorik: Konzcpt uud Analysen (Munich, 2000), which attempts a svstematization of rhetorical figures using modern linguistic terminology. In 1977 Plett produced the first of several volumes collecting essays bv himself and other scholars, Rhctorik. Kritischc Positional zum Stand dcr Forschuny (Munich). In consecutive vears he published complementary vol umes deriv ing from conferences held at the Zentrum fiir Rhetorik- und Renaissance-Studien that he had founded at the University of Essen, each containing 18 essavs in German, French, and English: Renaissance-Rhetorik. Renaissance Rhetoric (Berlin, New York, 1993; see my review in Renais sance Quarterly, 49 [1996]: 438-40), and Renaissance-Poetik. Renaissance poetics (Berlin, 1994). Another conference he organized produced a volume called Die Aktualitdt der Rhetorik (Munich, 1996). Having been so active in providing a forum for other scholars' work, it was only fitting that his colleagues re paid his good deeds with one of the best Rhetoric Festschriften of recent years, Rhetorica Movet: studies in historical and modern rhetoric in honor ofEieinrich F Plett, ed. P. L. Oesterreicher and T. O. Sloane (Leiden, 1999). Heinrich Plett's work has always been marked by a wide reading and the diligent use of primary and secondary sources, an important compoRhetorica , Vol. XXV, issue 4, pp. 435-448, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . G2007 by The international Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2007.25.4.435. 436 RHETORICA nent of scholarship which resulted in his producing a wide-ranging primary and secondary bibliography, Englische Rhetorik und Poetik 1479-1660. Eine systematische Bibliographie (Opladen, 1985; see my review, Wolfenbütteler Renais sance Mitteilungen, 13 [1989]: 75-80). A decade later Plett issued a corrected and enlarged edition, English Renaissance Rhetoric and Poetics. A Systematic Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources (Leiden, 1995; see my review, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 5 [1998]: 260-65). Professor Plett describes the volume under review, Rhetoric and Renais sance Culture, as "the result of more than thirty years' work on Renaissance rhetoric" (p. vii). It is systematically organized (the chapters are labelled "AF "), beginning with an overview of the "Scope and Genres of Renaissance Rhetoric" (pp. 11-84). Then comes the longest chapter, “Poetica Rhetorica. Rhetorical Poetics in the Renaissance" (pp. 85-294), divided into the five stages of composition (inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, actio). The survey widens to take in rhetoric's relationship with the visual arts and with music, in a chapter awkwardly titled "Intermedial Rhetoric" (pp. 295-412). Chap ter D, “Poeta Orator: Shakespeare as Orator Poet" (pp. 413-498) consists of five parts, four of which the author has translated from essays published in German between 1981 and 1995. Chapter E, "Iconography of Rhetoric and Eloquence" (pp. 499-552), is profusely illustrated (the volume as a whole con tains 94 plates), and is followed by two detailed indices, of names and sub jects. The volume is handsomely designed and printed, with a commendably high degree of accuracy. Although the over-all structure is clear, there is an unfortunate degree of overlapping between sections, and the same quotations reappear several times over, often with the...
June 2006
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Reviews Jurgen Frohlich: Bernhnrd Hirsclwelders Briefrhetorik (Cgm 3607). Untersuchung und Edition. Deutsche Literatur von den Anfangen bis 1700: 42 (Bern u. a.: Peter Lang, 2003). Als "Bernhard Hirschvelders Briefrhetorik" bezeichnet Jurgen Frohlich in seiner Essener Dissertation eine Sammlung von Texten aus dem Bereich der mittelalterlichen Brieflehre (Ars dictandi / Ars dictaminis) in der Handschrift Cgm 3607 der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek in München. Im einzelnen handelt es sich um eine deutschsprachige Ars dictandi mit dem lateinischen Titel Modus epistolandl (foil. lr-31v), nachgetragene Musterbriefe und -urkunden (foil. 32r-34v), eine deutsche Synonyma-Sammlung (foil. 35r54v ) sowie eine Sammlung von teilweise sehr umfangreichen Briefformeln (foil. 55r-68v). Der in der zweiten Halfte des 15. Jahrhunderts in Straubing, Nordlingen und Niirnberg als deutscher Schulmeister und Schreiber nachweisbare Bernhard Hirschvelder nennt sich in einer Vorrede auf fol. 36r als Urheber des folgenden Traktats (gemeint ist offenbar die SynonymaSammlung ): Obwohl nur ein schlecfit ainfeltiger lay habe er sich vorgenommen , einen prauchlidien und vasst nutzlich kleinen tractatzu componieren ("einen brauchbaren und sehr nutzlichen Traktat zusammenzustellen"). Dais Bernhard Hirschvelder der Autor auch der anderen Texte der Handschrift oder zumindest ihr Schreiber war, laBt sich nicht mit Sicherheit sagen; ob bei den sehr konventionalisierten und in engen Traditionslinien stehenden Texten iiberhaupt von Autorschaft im engeren Sinn die Rede sein kann und mufi, ist ohnehin fraglich. Jurgen Frohlich jedenfalls suggeriert mit seinem Buchtitel die Urheberschaft Hirschvelders, ohne dafiir eine Begriindung liefern zu konnen, die fiber die bisherige Forschungslage hinausgeht. Nicht sehr gliicklich gewahlt ist die Bezeichnung "Bnefrhetorik" im Titel der Arbeit. Zwar werden Brieflehren (Artes dictandi) im Mittelalter als "Rhetoriken " bezeichnet, aber das Spezifische der mittelalterlichen Ars dictaminis wird man weder verstehen, wenn man von der auf die mundliche Rede ausgerichteten antiken Rhetorik her denkt (deren Begriffe und Kategorien die Ars dictaminis freilich adaptierend ubernimmt), noch wenn man einen weiten , modernen Rhetorikbegriff zugrunde legt, der "Rhetorisches" medienunabhangig in jeder auf Wirkung ausgerichteten sprachlichen AuBerung erkennt; auch eine literarische Rhetorik ist nicht gemeint. Insofern sich die Rhetorica, Vol. XXIV, Issue 3, pp. 325-333, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2006 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. 326 RHETORICA mittelalterliche Ars dictaminis mit dem Brief - vor allem mit dem offiziellen Brief als Instrument von Herrschaft und Verwaltung sowie dem Geschaftsbrief - befafit, reflektiert sie Bedingungen, Moglichkeiten und Erfordernisse schriftgebundener Kommunikation an einem Gegenstand, bei dem die Funktion von Schrift als Substitut mundlicher Rede noch mit einiger Deutlichkeit erkennbar ist. Damit versteht sich die Ars dictandi mindestens auch als Lehre von der Ubertragung mundlicher in schriftliche Kommunikation (und unterscheidet sich insofern durch den Aspekt des Medienwechsels grundsatzlich von der antiken Rhetorik, was Frohlich in dem entsprechenden Kapitel allerdings nicht ausreichend reflektiert, S. 23-28). Solche Ubertragungen waren in der von Mundlichkeit gepragten mittelalterlichen Welt brisant und erforderten deshalb verlaBliche Regeln. Nicht umsonst nehmen in mittelalterlichen Artes dictandi Begrufiungsformeln (snlutationes) breiten Raum ein: Es handelt sich dabei um die Versprachlichung \ron Ritualen, in denen ublicherweise soziale Hierarchien verdeutlicht und stabilisiert werden (Kniefall, Verbeugung, Reihenfolge der BegruBung u. a.). In deutschsprachigen Ar tes dictandi, die ab dem 15. Jahrhundert aufkommen und denen der Modus epistolandi im Cgm 3607 zuzurechnen ist, nehmen Fragen der sprachlichen und kommunikativen Umsetzung \'on sozialen Hierarchieverhaltnissen den bei weitem breitesten Raum ein. Frohlichs Buch bietet neben einigen einleitenden Kapiteln (S. 15-88) einen weitgehend seitengetreuen Abdruck der 68 Blatter umfassenden Handschrift (S. 97-223) sowie einen Stellenkommentar ("Anmerkungen zum Editionsteil ", S. 227-258), dessen Erklarungsdichte und -tiefe fur den Benutzer jedoch nur schwer nachzuvollziehen sind. Nirgends wird gesagt, was der Leser in diesem Anmerkungsteil erwarten darf und was Frcihlich systema tised dokumentieren will. Tatsachlich steht bier in hunter Mischung zusammen , was iiblicherweise auf einen Lesartenapparat, eine editionsgeschichtliche Forschungsdok ' .........................................erten Kommentar verteilt sem soille. Aber in alien drei Bereichen bleiben die Anmerkungen vóllig unzureichend: So werden etwa Personen- oder Geschlechternamen ge- ^ legenthch erlàutert (z. B. S. 231, Anm. 66), in den meisten Fallen aber bleiben sie unkommentiert. Nicht nur fur Datierungsfragen ist es aber unabdingbar, daBjede erwàhnte Person historisch identifiziert und entsprechend...
September 2003
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Abstract
310 RHETORICA especially troubling for colonial discourse analysis, which is given a cursory treatment in Chapter Four but could have been developed in more depth and usefully applied in all of the examples. The last point draws attention to the fact that Schuetz does not develop an overarching thesis for her study in her brief introduction, and offers no separate conclusion. It is thus never clear what might hold these eleven very different chapters together beyond their interest as examples of governmentIndian relations or as examples of the diversity of rhetorical theories. The individual chapters consist mainly of summaries of the relevant history for the particular case study; surprisingly, there is little actual analysis. The conclusions to the individual chapters will likely seem obvious both to scholars actively engaged in American Indian studies and to American Indian peoples who live in the aftermath and ongoing legacies of these histories. The explanatory, theoretical, and activist potential of rhetorical analysis for these cases is left largely untapped. Chadwick Allen Ohio State University Jeffrey M. Suderman, Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001. 293 pages. Readers of Rhetorica are not the audience Jeffrey Suderman targeted in writing Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century. Suderman writes that he was motivated to undertake this study to correct the imbalance of Campbell's modern reputation—as the author of the Philosophy of Rhetoric—and his contemporary reputation, which rested more on his Dissertation on Miracles and on his translation of the Gospels. Furthermore, Suderman claims that historians of the Enlightenment have devoted too much attention to atypical figures, especially skeptics such as Hume, Voltaire, and Gibbon, to the neglect of representative figures, such as Campbell. As a result, today Campbell is known "only to a few specialists" in rhetoric who read the Philosophy ofRhetoric "without a broader appreciation of his life and thought" (4-5). In contrast, Suderman would reconstruct the George Campbell that eighteenth-century audiences knew, and ... find what was representative in his thought" (6). To me, Suderman's seems a wrong-headed approach to Campbell, whose work (except for the Philosophy of Rhetoric) is as unremarkable as it is representative, but his perverse accounting of Campbell's achievement does not much compromise the usefulness of a book that is a model of a scholarship. Suderman divides his book into three parts: a biographical section (968 ); a section on the "Enlightened Campbell," which examines the origins of Campbell's thought in eighteenth century empiricism (69-178); and a section Reviews 311 on the "Religious Campbell," which examines Campbell as a biblical scholar and Christian polemicist. In appendices, Suderman lists all of Campbell's extant letters, each identified by library and manuscript number, and the manuscripts Suderman used in his study, some of which were not previously identified. Future Campbell scholars owe him thanks. The picture of Campbell that emerges from Suderman's biographical chapters is not substantially different from what we could piece together from Lloyd Bitzer's Introduction to his edition of the Philosophy of Rhetoric and from Lewis Ulman's work on the Aberdeen Philosophical Society. But Suderman adds more details to make this the most complete and reliable biography we have. Section II groups together the Philosophy of Rhetoric, the Dissertation on Miracles, and the Lectures on Ecclesiastical History as constituting Campbell's program to establish Christianity on rational grounds. Suderman therefore reads the Philosophy of Rhetoric in order to derive Campbell's philosophy of mind, concluding that Campbell's faculty of psychology and his discussion of evidence support the conclusion that belief in God and Christian morality can be rationally justified on empirical grounds. Scholars of rhetoric will find of particular interest Suderman's analysis of memory and his stress on the importance of the argument from design as the guarantor of the reliability of our reasoned conclusions. In Section III, "Revealed Knowledge: the Religious Campbell," Sud erman attempts to delineate Campbell's theology, discusses Campbell's en gagement with his Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, and Dissenting critics, and examines his translation of the Gospels. Suderman identifies Campbell's the ology as "mitigated" Calvinism (205). My conclusion...
June 2002
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Reviews 301 tions, and its clear articulation of the antifoundationalist position, will make this book a valuable resource for scholars and students alike. Bruce McComiskey The University ofAlabama at Birmingham Bruce McComiskey, Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric, (Carbon dale:, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), xiii + 156 pp. Contributing to the conversation about rereading/rewriting the his tory of rhetoric, Bruce McComiskey's Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric clearly summarizes the raging and wide-ranging debates regarding the use value of revisiting the Sophists; compellingly argues for a historiographical methodology, which he terms "neosophistic appropriation"; re-reads Gor gias on his own terms, rather than Plato's; and, finally, attempts to realize his own methodology by rethinking Gorgias's (potential) contribution to "contemporary pedagogical and political ends" (p. 1). Recapping the seminal arguments of the past several decades regarding scholarly attempts to redeem the Sophists from their Platonic condemna tion and to reclaim their practices and theories, McComiskey's summary will surely find an appropriate home in graduate seminars on the history of rhetoric. Working with and against Edward Schiappa's criticism of particu lar neosophistic research (but curiously neglecting John Poulakos's response to same), McComiskey offers "neosophistic appropriation" as a corrective to Schiappa's (via Richard Rorty) methodological taxonomy of "histori cal reconstruction" and "rational reconstruction." Although McComiskey agrees with Schiappa that we "must maintain a clear distinction between the goals and methods of historical scholarship that interprets ancient doc trines and 'neo'historical scholarship that appropriates ancient doctrines for contemporary purposes" (p. 8), he argues, in contrast, that "neosophistic appropriation" is methodologically distinct from rational reconstructive ap proaches insofar as "neosophistic appropriation" writers "search the past for contributions to modern theoretical problems and problematics" (p. 10). "Although," McComiskey further argues, "all neosophists engage in the critical act of appropriation, not all neosophists appropriate ancient doctrines in the same way" (p. 11). Identifying three different approaches, McComiskey ultimately values and identifies with the third. The first approach "appropriate [s] Plato's characterization...either valuing Plato's misrepresentations or disparaging them" (p. 11). The second approach "put[s] aside Plato's mis representations of sophistic doctrines, appropriating doctrines instead from actual sophistic texts and historical interpretations of them in order to find common threads among the 'older sophists' and contemporary composition and rhetorical theorists" (p. 11). And the third approach, although similar to the second in purpose, attempts to "understand the unique contributions 302 RHETORICA of individual sophists...to contemporary rhetorical theory and composition, (p. 11, emphasis added). Claiming that the "more specific the appropria tion, the stronger the resulting neosophistic rhetoric," McComiskey turns his attention to a reappropriation of the Sophist Gorgias. Part One of Gorgias and the New Sophistic Rhetoric provides a provoca tive rereading of Gorgias's On Non-Existence, the Encomium ofHelen, and the Defense of Palamedes, arguing that, read together, they constitute a "holis tic statement about communal and ethical uses of logos, a statement that runs counter to Plato's (mis)representation of it in his dialogue the Gor gias" (p. 12). Chapter 1, then, argues compellingly that Plato misrepresents Gorgias's theory of rhetoric as foundational, specifically as based on a foun dational epistemology. For example, as McComiskey points out, Gorgias, in the Palemedes, uses a form of the Greek eido to express the concept of knowl edge, which "implies an understanding that is derived empirically from a situation"; whereas Plato's use of episteme "implies an understanding that exists prior to any given situation in which it might be applied" (pp. 24-5). Hence, McComiskey's rereading of the specific Sophist, Gorgias, and the specific sophistic text, exemplifies a "strong," neosophistic approach. This rereading allows us to see how Plato's misappropriation of Gorgias serves to make "Gorgias's rhetorical method based on kairos, or the right moment, seem absurd" (p. 12). McComiskey's similar approaches to the Helen and the Palemedes "provide the epistemological, rather than foundational, grounding for a nascent theory of rhetoric, complete with its negative and positive uses" (p. 12). That is, we, appropriating Gorgias, do not need an epistemological foundation to practice rhetoric. We can read/reappropriate, he argues, the Helen to see where rhetoric...
March 1999
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Reviews 233 plutôt: parce que rhéteur) en musicien: les idées sont des thèmes, les sujets sont des instruments. Pierre-Louis Malosse Stephen D. O'Leary, Arguing the Apocalypse: A Theory of Millennial Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, ix + 314 pp. Endings, like beginnings, have always fascinated us; thus, speculative accounts of the world's beginning (etiologies) and its ending (eschatologies) have engendered controversial philosophies and gripping narratives. As we approach the end of a millenium, eschatological speculation can only be expected to increase; and thus, Arguing the Apocalypse is a timely contribution to rhetorical history and rhetorical theory. It is also broadly interdisciplinary, carefully researched, and intelligently written. The book's author, Stephen O'Leary, studied comparative religion at Harvard before going on to graduate work in Communication Studies at Northwestern; this book is a revision of his dissertation, and it is marked by the influence of both its director (argumentation theorist Tom Goodnight) and one of its readers (Bernard McGinn, a historian of medieval theology). With a few exceptions, the author has purged his book of the stylistic residues of the much despised "dissertation" genre. Nevertheless, as in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, the first ninety pages will test the readers' mettle; only if they are able to wade through the complexities of the theory will they earn their just reward: two rhetorical histories that are fascinating (and at times, even "page-turners"). Yet there are those first ninety pages. Chapter 1 begins by defining apocalypse—a subset of eschatological discourse that "makes manifest a vision of ultimate destiny, rendering immediate to human audiences the ultimate End of the cosmos in the Last Judgment" (pp. 5-6). Given the powerful appeal of such discourse through the ages, the author suspects that rhetorical theory will be useful in showing how it has shaped human 234 RHETORICA thought and action within particular cultural milieux. Chapter 2 sets out three important topoi of apocalyptic discourse: time, evil, and authority. These topoi are ripe for rhetorical analysis, since they involve not only the intellect but the whole person. O'Leary provides thumbnail sketches of the typical accounts of these three topoi, suggesting that apocalyptic discourse attempts to address certain aporiae that have been left by such accounts. In chapter 3, O'Leary develops the dramatic frames of comedy and tragedy, through which he will view various apocalyptic movements. Traditional Christian eschatology, he argues, accented the comic frame by emphasizing God's complete sovereignty in bringing about the end of time; the divine plan is inscrutible, and we can neither predict the end nor bring it about. But this view still acknowledged an identifiable end, in which evil and time would be no more; and this created the rhetorical space for a "tragic" apocalyptic eschatology, in which God brings the world to a catastrophic close (an event that will be survived only by those who know what to look for, and when to look). "Once an audience has accepted the eschatological argument that evil will be both eliminated and justified in the Last Judgment...their experience of evil will create a hope and expectation for this Judgment that still requires satisfaction" (p. 81). Thus, in apocalyptic rhetoric, "the evils of the present day are pyramided into a structure of cosmic significance" (p. 83). This arouses ever more eager anticipation of the consummation of history. Apocalyptic rhetoric thus tends to be enormously persuasive in the short term. While often blithely dismissed as the ranting of fanatics, it has mobilized thousands, indeed millions, of adherents—a claim that O'Leary will demonstrate in the historical sketches that fill most of the remainder of the book. The next four chapters examine two of the most important apocalyptic movements in the United States. Chapter 4 chronicles William Miller's rise from obscure farmer, to sought-after lecturer, to religious figurehead, to discredited prophet; the chapter also shows why Millerism should be analyzed as a rhetorical movement. In chapter 5, O'Leary examines the particular forms of Millerite argument, showing why they were found persuasive by certain auditors. Chapter 6 jumps ahead some more than a century, examining the more...
June 1998
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Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen. A Study in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics by Kristoffel Demoen ↗
Abstract
Reviews 329 communicating what he had to say to his various audiences. For this reason Anderson is also right in insisting on the use of ancient rhetorical theory and practice in the original languages. I would add that further help may be gained from the commentaries of the fathers of the Church and those later writers who were more familiar with rhetoric than most of use are, e.g. Melanchthon or the Jesuits, and also from modem rhetoric. In addition to a select bibliography and full indices, there is a useful, select glossary of Greek rhetorical terms (pp. 259-302 and 303-14). This is a most welcome contribution to the debate which has suffered a great deal from various kinds of confusion, a book itself well-planned and clearly argued, offering a good deal of help to those who are interested in this controversial subject. It is important because it also raises some general questions as regards the possibilities and limits of rhetorical criticism, and while I disagree with the author on a number of points, I do not hesitate to recommend it to the critical reader. C. Joachim Classen Kristoffel Demoen, Pagan and Biblical Exempla in Gregory Nazianzen. A Study in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics, coll. Corpus Christianorum, Lingua Patrum, 2 (Tumhout: Brepols, 1996) 498 PP· Cet ouvrage a parfaitement sa place dans la collection prestigieuse du Corpus Christianorum, non seulement parce qu'il y côtoie l'admirable Corpus Nazianzenum, mais parce qu'il fait progresser de façon décisive la connaissance des oeuvres de Grégoire de Nazianze et de sa manière de composer. Il comporte deux grands ensembles, un exposé constitué de deux parties, et un répertoire (p. 325-458). Il s'agit d'une analyse rhétorique de Vexemplum, qui va donc au delà du procédé stylistique, pour l'étudier comme moyen de persuasion. Cela implique une enquête sur la tradition rhétorique dont Grégoire est tributaire, ainsi que l'examen des jugements explicites et sous-jacents portés sur les 330 RHETORICA vecteurs des deux courants culturels que fait se rencontrer "le Théologien", l'hellénisme et ses (xûôoi, le christianisme et la Bible. Le livre est issu d'une Dissertation doctorale présentée à l'Université de Gent (Gand) en février 1993. L'introduction part de l'attitude ambiguë de Grégoire à l'égard de la tradition classique, pour esquisser une idée qui prendra toute sa force au terme de l'ouvrage: voulant rivaliser avec les écrivains non chrétiens, Grégoire sépare l'hellénisme de la religion; cette conception restrictive lui donne le moyen de reconquérir l'hellénisme (après la tentative anti-chrétienne de l'empereur Julien); K. Demoen illustre cette reconquête par l'usage rhétorique d'exemples pris dans la mythologie, dans l'histoire et dans la Bible. Les éléments de l'étude sont de nature narrative. Les sources, du côté grec, sont la mythologie, les légendes, l'histoire, les fables et, par ailleurs, les récits bibliques (épisodes historiques de l'Ancien Testament, paraboles du Nouveau Testament). Ne sont retenues que les "histoires" qui ont une fonction exemplaire. Dès le début est proposée une définition du παράδειγμα, distingué de μεταφορά, παραβολή, γνώμη, σύγκρισις, définition élaborée à l'aide des théories antiques analysées dans le premier chapitre (p. 33-50): "l'évocation d'une histoire (de la Bible ou de la tradition païenne) qui s'est réellement produite ou qui n'est pas arrivée, dont la matière ressemble ou est liée au sujet traité, qui est associée implicitement ou explicitement à ce sujet comme argument (preuve ou modèle) ou comme ornement, et qui prend la forme d'une narration, de la mention d'un nom, ou d'une allusion" (p. 25). Le corpus est fait principalement des poèmes de Grégoire, très hétérogènes, les oeuvres en prose intervenant surtout à titre d'illustration ou de confirmation. L'entreprise se situe (p. 26) dans la perspective érudite de la Συναγωγή; kai; έξήγησις de Cosmas de Jérusalem, scholiaste du VIIIe si...
January 1997
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Ars Poetriae: Rhetorical and Grammatical Invention at the Margins of Literacy by William M. Purcell ↗
Abstract
Reviews William M. Purcell, Ars Poetriae: Rhetorical and Grammatical Invention at the Margins of Literacy, Studies in Rhetoric/ Communication (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 193 pp. In the context of the evolution from oral to written discourse in the classical and medieval periods of western Europe, Purcell discusses six texts on the art of versification, or artes poetriae: 1) Matthew of Vendome, Ars versificatoria; 2) Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria nova and Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi; 3) John of Garland, De arte prosayca, metrica , et rithmica (Parisiana poetria); 4) Gervasius of Melkley, Ars poetica; and 5) Eberhard the German, Laborintus. Composed in the twelfth and thir teenth centuries, these texts are revolutionary in their adaptation of rhetoric and grammar to poetry, which in that period was usually read aloud or recited. The book offers a useful introduction to material which may be difficult for most undergraduate students to obtain or to under stand; however, the critical framework into which Purcell places these texts needs justification, as it is part of a growing debate on the history of orality and literacy. The book is divided into two parts. Part I, consisting of two chapters, establishes the two main assumptions of the theoretical framework into which Purcell has placed the six treatises on poetic composition. The first assumption sets up a diachronic dichotomy between orality and literacy, from the Greek tradition to the invention of the printing press. Purcell argues that rhetoric in classical Greece and Rome was a discipline designed for oral delivery. Grammar was a written activity, developed for analysis and correction of text. As the societies of the Middle Ages pro gressed in literacy, grammar was increasingly applied to written material. Thus, Purcell sets up an oral-literate time spectrum. He treats the ancient Greek and late medieval periods as two poles, the former primarily oral and the latter increasingly text-based or literate. Citing Paul Prill, Purcell asserts that the arts of poetry of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries stand at the cusp of the shift from orality to literacy. The second major assumption of Purcell's theoretical framework is that grammar and rhetoric exchanged functions along the oral-literate time spectrum. In the classical period, rhetorical theory was used as a system of composition for oral delivery, while grammar was a system to correct and to analyze written text. By the time the arts of poetry were composed, these roles had begun to be reversed: "Ultimately, with the advent of the printing press, the text became the thing in and of itself, moving away 107 108 RHETORICA from the oral end of the spectrum and toward the literate end. At the same time, rhetoric—a more orally focused technology—moved toward the literate, and grammar—a more literally focused technology—moved toward the oral. The tension created by the rhetorical/grammatical move ment is reflected in the theoretical treatises in the artes poetriae themselves" (p. 5). Part II consists of five chapters, arranged chronologically, on the artes poetriae which illustrate the developments in the matrix of orality, literacy, grammar, and rhetoric which Purcell has set up in the first section of his book. Purcell provides excellent summaries of these treatises by giving an overview of their sections on invention, arrangement, and style. Less attention is given to invention and arrangement, as the author's primary interest is the overlapping of grammar and rhetoric in the domain of style, a unique contribution of poetic theory in the Middle Ages. Purcell's study of figures in the artes poetriae shows how the medieval tradition leads to the systematic relation of style to stasis theory in Renaissance rhetoric. This is the most valuable contribution of the book. Purcell argues that these treatises are not simply extensions or adapta tions of classical rhetoric, but that they establish a unique genre of rhetori cal theory at a time when orality and literacy coexisted. To demonstrate this point, he observes that the existing editions of the texts can be mis leading in causing readers to assume a debt to the classical sources. For example, the Faral edition and the Nims translation of Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria Nova...
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Sir Walter Raleigh’s Speech from the Scaffold: A Translation of the 1619 Dutch Edition, and Comparison with English Texts by John Parker, Carol A. Johnson ↗
Abstract
112 RHETORICA On the whole, while his critical assumptions need to be supplemented with recent scholarship on orality, literacy, and the history of education, Purcell's work is useful because it summarizes material which is not easily available to most undergraduate students. His discussion of the content of the poetic manuals will be helpful to those who are not familiar with Latin, or whose libraries do not contain the printed editions of the texts, some of which are out of print or only available in microfilm (e.g., Catherine Yodice Giles' Ph.D. dissertation, the only English translation of Gervasius of Melkle/s Ars poética; Traugott Lawler's edition and translation of John of Garland's Parisiana poetria; and Evelyn Carlson's translation of Eberhard the German's Laborintus, her 1930 M.A. thesis). The appendix of figures, with definitions, is especially useful, along with the bibliography of sources relat ing to the poetic treatises. In a subsequent edition, the author might consid er including a chart comparing the classical definitions of these figures with those in the medieval poetic manuals, to illustrate how the medieval manu als depart from the classical tradition, a point which Purcell emphasizes. However, undergraduate students who seek broad outlines and neat categories for material must be cautioned, just as Purcell shows, that mate rial frequently resists tidy schematization; that principles of grammar and rhetoric overlap in figurative language; and that medieval poetics adapts and transcends classical theory in a variety of ways. Illustrations of how this theory operates in poetic texts and cultural contexts, and in relation to various views of language change and interaction, are needed to support the critical assumptions in this book. William Purcell has made an impor tant beginning in an area which has long been overlooked in the history of composition and literary criticism: medieval poetics, a field in which the criteria for measuring orality and literacy await further study. Elza C. Tiner John Parker and Carol A. Johnson, Sir Walter Raleigh's Speech from the Scaffold: A Translation of the 1619 Dutch Edition, and Comparison with English Texts (Minneapolis, MN: Associates of the James Ford Bell Library, 1995), ii + 79 pp. Sir Walter Raleigh's speech from the scaffold, October 29,1618, in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, has lived long as an "exit" speech of con siderable historic importance, especially familiar to students of British public address. It was included in David Brewer's older anthology and in Reviews 113 the excellent An Historical Anthology of Select British Speeches.1 Scholars of the history of rhetoric do not need to be told that one of the initial steps in their explorations is to answer the question, "What did that orator really say?" Whose version, manuscript or printed, was the closest to the event, and how reliable are the available versions? We remember how Thucydides dealt with the problem in the fifth century BCE: "With references to the speeches in this history, . . . some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one's memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the vari ous occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said."2 So what did Pericles and others really say? Only when the step of description is accomplished as well as possi ble, can the rhetorical critic with the greatest meaningfulness enter into sound analysis and insightful evaluation. With painstaking and thorough scholarship, Parker and Johnson dig deeply into their chosen terrain. They construct a succinct and wellwritten sketch (pp. 1-11) of the man and his role in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart eras. "Entrepreneur, politician, poet, historian, explorer, colonizer" (p. 1), Raleigh was a central figure in his time, a time when "the line between dissent and treason was not always apparent" (p. 5). Parker, Curator Emeritus of the James Ford Bell Library, and Johnson, Assistant Professor in the University Library, enter into a microscopic, forty-three-page comparison of the eight available printed versions of the...