Reviewed by: The War of Words by Kenneth Burke M. Elizabeth Weiser Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 “For it is by the war of words that men are led into battle,” Kenneth Burke asserts in his new book, The War of Words (248). How a man dead these twenty-seven years has come to have a “new” book is not a better story than how prescient is the book, how pointedly this work—written and largely revised by 1950—speaks to our times. Burke’s overarching concern is the impetus to war that he saw all around him in the years immediately following World War II—all in some ways particular to his era. But the rhetoric by which geopolitical forces worked their magic to convince the American public to support their aims—these are universal. Or as Burke writes, “The particulars change from day to day, but the principle they embody recurs constantly, in other particulars” (45). In The War of Words, the editors have uncovered among Burke’s papers his Downward Way, the practical, applied counterpart to his Upward Way [End Page 242] of philosophizing about the universal nature of rhetoric in A Rhetoric of Motives (and its precursor, A Grammar of Motives). After a brief historical introduction from the editors—part context, part explanation of their editing process—the text is Burke’s alone, consisting of two largely completed sections and two sections for which he made substantial notes. As the editors put it, “‘The War of Words’ was designed from the start to be the analytic realization of Burke’s theory of the rhetorical motive. . . .Without The War of Words, [A Rhetoric of Motives] remains incomplete” (30). If Burke’s ultimate purpose in his motivorium trilogy was ad bellum purificandum, “toward the purification of war,” then his optimistic general theory of identification was to be counterbalanced with the shrewder practical analysis of rhetoric in everyday life, the war of words. For various reasons outlined by the editors, this Downward Way was never published, meaning that for some seventy years rhetoricians have been attempting to apply Burke’s theories to the analysis of scenes, acts, and agents in the world around us. It is a tremendously useful addition to the canon, therefore, to find Burke’s own original attempts to do the same. Thus, for instance, while in A Rhetoric of Motives Burke describes identification as identifying our interests with another’s, becoming consubstantial, in War of Words he describes the dangers of identification with a necessarily expansionist nationalism: “It is the deprived persons at home who, impoverished because so much of the national effort is turned to the resources of foreign aggression rather than to the improvement of domestic conditions, it is precisely these victims of nationalistic aggressiveness whose fervor is most readily enlisted through the imagery of sheerly vicarious participation in the power of our nationally subsidized corporations abroad” (251). That he was describing those fervent supporters of a Cold War buildup and not those fervent supporters of Donald Trump serves only to demonstrate the ways in which American exceptionalism relies on similar rhetorical devices in the scene-act ratio that keeps the world on edge. His first section, “The Devices,” then, shows Burke categorizing strategies much as he did with theories in RM, updating and expanding upon classical rhetorical strategies to show how they function in the modern world. The Bland Strategy, Shrewd Simplicity, Undo by Overdoing, Yielding Aggressively, Deflection (“so general an end that nearly all the Logomachy [the War of Words] could be included under it” [68]), Spokesman, Reversal, Say the Opposite, Spiritualization (the unifying achievements and paranoias of “us”), Making the Connection—these ten devices, a multitude of examples, and the theory behind them make up the first 125 pages of The War of Words. That multitude of examples, often confusing for readers of Burke’s longer texts, here in their somewhat condensed form work well. Don’t understand a description of a device? Read an example of it. Don’t understand that example? There are five or ten more, ranging...

Reviewed by: Principal Writings on Rhetoric by Philipp Melanchthon Kees Meerhoff Philipp Melanchthon, Principal Writings on Rhetoric. Edited by William P. Weaver, Stefan Strohm, and Volkhard Wels. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. liv + 594 pp. ISBN 9783110561197 Publication of a brand new, state-of-the-art critical edition of Philip Melanchthon’s (1497–1560) major writings on rhetoric is excellent news for all scholars working in the field of Renaissance rhetoric. The volume under discussion here is the very first of a multi-volume edition of the opera philosophic, that is, of all major writings concerning the arts curriculum, taught according to the highest standards of humanism. Volume II-2 will be supplemented by a volume (II-l) in which the writings on dialectic will be published. This volume will also be of particular interest to students of rhetoric, since Melanchthon—following Valla’s and Agricola’s lead—placed dialectic at the heart of rhetoric. Melanchthon firmly believed in the classical [End Page 118] conception of the enkyklios paideia, so eloquently highlighted by Cicero in his oration Pro Archia, which was, not by accident, one of Melanchthon’s favourite speeches. True to the author’s conception, already expressed in his inaugural lecture (1518), the opera philosophies series will also republish his writings on grammar, classical literature, history, ethics, politics, physics, and mathematics. Moreover, since Melanchthon defended his philosophical conceptions on numerous occasions, either personally or by proxy, the final volume will contain his famous declamations concerning all areas of academic teaching. In short, this major enterprise, undertaken by the director of the Melanchthouhaus in Bretten, Günter Frank, and by church historian Walter Sparn, will supersede the previous editions of Melanchthon’s writings, notably the Bretschneider & Bindseil twenty-eight-volume edition published in the Corpus Rcformatontm over the course of the nineteenth century and the so-called MSA-edition of selected writings directed by R. Stupperich and published from 1951 onward. Volume II-2 contains the three textbooks on rhetoric published by Melanchthon in 1519, 1521, and 1531. These textbooks are supplemented by the republication of H. Zwicker’s earlier edition of the Dispositiones rhetoricae (1553), which first appeared in 1911 and was reprinted in 1968. These Dispositiones offer 160 outlines of speeches on all kind of matters and are thus working examples of declamations written according to the rules of composition proposed in the textbooks. Melanchthon’s writings on homiletics (De officiis conionatoris, etc.) are not included in the volume. But they are discussed through the annotations concerning the sections on preaching one finds in the textbooks from the very start. The volume is co-ordinated by William Weaver. Weaver is the editor of the 1521 Institutiones rhetoricae. Stefan Strohm, assisted by Hartmut Schmid, edited the 1519 De rhetorica libri tres. And Volkhard Wels was responsible for editing the 1531 Elementorum rehtorices libri duo. I shall refer to them as Editor B, A, and C, respectively. All texts are published in Latin, without translation; the introductions and annotations are either in English or in German. The quotations given in the notes are in Greek and in Latin. A modern translation with Greek key words added in brackets, especially for the longer quotations in Greek (of Aristotle, Plutarch, etc.), would have been defensible, if not preferable. Each editor enjoyed maximum scientific freedom in accomplishing his formidable task. And each individual edition offers not only a perfectly established text, but also a rich critical apparatus and a wealth of explanatory notes. The introductions and annotations demonstrate in a definitive way the importance of classical and humanist sources in Melanchthon’s writings. Among his humanist predecessors, Agricola and Erasmus are Melanchthon’s key authors; but, at a certain stage, George of Trebizond also played a remarkable part. Erasmus is the chief source, not only as the author of De copia and similar writings, but also as an interpreter of the Scriptures and as a collector of ancient wisdom in the Adagia. With Agricola, he is the great ancestor, who already conceived of rhetoric in close relationship to exegesis and homiletics and who advocated for an eloquence fuelled by [End Page 119] ancient literature. For Melanchthon as well, rhetoric became a tool for analysing...

Reviewed by: Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion by Ann George Kyle Jensen Ann George. Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion. Columbia: South Carolina University Press, 2018. xvi + 279 pp. ISBN 9781611179316 It is difficult to appreciate the full achievement of Ann George’s Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion unless one has firsthand experience with Kenneth Burke’s extant papers. All archival research is challenging, of course. But Burke’s papers are especially difficult to manage because of the volume and fecundity of his drafting materials. These materials encourage a persistent feeling of insecurity, that hard-won moments of clarity will be run off by new and unexpected variables. I am not surprised that it took George twenty years to track “P&C’s development, theoretical arguments, critical methodologies, and civic pedagogy” (24). Her erudite analysis indicates the time was well spent. George navigates the complicated arguments of Permanence and Change with characteristic precision and grace. In Part I, she addresses the core concepts of Burke’s argument such as piety, perspective by incongruity, metabiology, and the art of living. In Part II, she presents an extended archival account of the book’s production and reception history that complicates prevailing assumptions about Burke’s work as a critic. The two parts are connected by George’s claim that Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change is the originating work of the New Rhetoric. [End Page 116] To make payment on this claim, George emphasizes the value of reading Burke in context. In each chapter, she presents Burke as a writer responding to the problems posed by his historical moment and needing to revise his perspectives as the scene evolved. Because Burke’s interpretation of key events and their resolutions underwent constant revision, critics hoping to understand his arguments must engage with not only his published works but also his extant drafting materials. In between the drafts, we discover a groundbreaking civic pedagogy that will compel new and expert Burke scholars alike. George identifies metabiology as the “ethical grounding for [Burke’s] proposed cultural reorientation.” In doing so, she claims that his insights remain relevant for the contemporary moment (56). George makes this case convincingly, arguing that Burke’s account of human motives “creates the scene and the means that allow Americans to fulfill their deepest human needs, and as they participate in collaborative civic conversations, they instantiate and reaffirm, for themselves and each other, their commitment to democratic values” (224). Forum constraints prevent me from listing the full array of praiseworthy features in George’s book. So, I will focus on what seem to me her most profound contributions. First, George presents perspective by incongruity as a multi-layered concept. There is a reasonable temptation to limit the scope of perspective by incongruity by noting its capacity to denaturalize well established cultural “truths.” But within Burke’s civic pedagogy, perspective by incongruity has “different levels . . . for different situations”: “a freewheeling, outrageous cultural critique by an ‘analyst’/artist/rhetor or an individual who is already alienated from the dominant culture versus the more conciliatory rhetorical means by which piously reluctant audiences can be led to new ways of seeing” (50). Second, when discussing metabiology as purification of war, George presents five different scenes that elucidate the nuances of Burke’s thinking and thus add considerable depth to our understanding of his civic pedagogy. According to George, the purification of war demands that we address simultaneously the interconnections between our biological, cultural, pragmatic, economic, and militaristic assumptions. George’s claim is particularly suggestive because it implies that later works such as A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives evolve from Permanence & Change. Having spent nearly a decade working on the archival histories of A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words, I concur with this assertion. Much of what appears in A Rhetoric of Motives is an extension and/or revision of Burke’s earlier arguments. Finally, George claims that Burke’s civic pedagogy is both m extension and revision of epideictic rhetoric. It extends by examining how particular orientations “train people to accept certain ways of knowing and judging...

Book Reviews 439 collection. Edward Harris argues that, unlike tragedy, Athenian oratory avoided the excessive expression of emotions and other histrionics because it would distract from the legal issues. Drawing on Aristotle's distinction between poetry and oratory, Harris claims that the numerous examples of emoting in the court were exceptions, rather than examples, of typical court­ room behavior. Jon Hall uses evidence from Cicero's letters and other sour­ ces to argue that judicial proceedings in the Late Republic were far more interactive and even chaotic than their modern British and American coun­ terparts. Because judges were selected publicly and were frequently wellknown politicians, they could use their service on the court to advance their own political interests. The final section, "Language and Style," also contains three chapters. Chris Carey argues that Aeschines uses a series of antitheses to cast Timarchus as feminized, depraved, and anti-democratic. He conflates Timarchus's appearance with his actions, a full-body assault that moves beyond narrative and becomes a reality seen and enacted. In contrast, Aeschines characterizes himself as metrios and a model of sophrosyne, like Solon. Konstantinos Kapparis analyzes the corpus of Apollodoros for perfor­ mance elements, arguing that Apollodoros uses vivid narrative as well as direct and indirect speech to create psychologically complex personae and to bring the action before the mind's eyes of the jurors. Finally, Alessandro Vatri uses syntax analysis to distinguish between Antiphon's forensic speeches, written for delivery, and his Tetralogies, written for publication. While the Tetralogies tend to have the more complex structures expected of a logographic text, the performed texts feature semantic ambiguities that gestures and other paralinguistic features would have clarified. Due to the broad range of topics covered in this book, more questions and ambiguities are raised than answers given. Interestingly, several chap­ ters use similar pieces of evidence to come up with opposite conclusions (Harris and Kremmydas) or to cast light on two sides of the same perfor­ mance context (Clark and Hall). While no doubt many readers will only read selections based on their research interests, the collection as a whole provides a thought-provoking roadmap of the current state of the question and indicates several intriguing avenues of future research. Hilary J. C. Lehmann Knox College Fabio Roscalla, Dalla tribuna al pulpito. Retorica del verosimile. Pavia: Pavia University Press, 2017, 130 pp. ISBN: 9788869520457 Nel corso degli ultimi anni la categoria deWeikos e stata oggetto di un crescente, giustificato, interesse. Il recente libro di Fabio Roscalla (d ora in poi R.), che viene ad arricchire ulteriormente il dibattito relativo alYeikos, si segnala per due tratti peculiari: 1) la serrata analisi testuale dei contesti 440 RHETORICA d'occorrenza del termine; 2) il zcorto circuited che viene proposto tra due ambiti apparentemente molto distanti tra loro, e non solo per ragioni cronologiche : il tribunale attico del V e IV secolo a.C. e l'oratoria cristiana dei primi secoli della nostra era. Per anticipare le conclusioni, si pud senza dubbio affermare che le analisi proposte dall'autore permettono al lettore di farsi un'idea particolarmente approfondita dell'intricato complesso di ques­ tion! sollevato dalla nozione di eikos. Da questo punto di vista, quindi, pur rifuggendo volontariamente dall'intenzione di fornire «una nuova riconsiderazione generate delYeikos» (p. 1), esse vi contribuiscono, sia pure indirettamente , mostrando come questa nozione generate si vada articolando nella dimensione concreta e variegata dei suoi usi. Non essendo naturalmente possibile ripercorrere la minuziosa disamina testuale svolta da R., mi limitero ad evidenziare, per ciascuno dei due capitoli in cui e diviso il libro, uno tra i possibili fili conduttori in grado di rendere conto della ricchezza degli spunti che esso offre. Il primo capitolo e dedicato all'oratoria ateniese e, dopo alcune considerazioni introduttive, prende le mosse da una delle piu note orazioni lisiane, la Contro Eratostene, che ha come oggetto «un evento centrale della recente storia ateniese, su cui il dibattito doveva essere ancora aperto e acceso», cosicche «Eeikos diventa [. . .] in mancanza di testimoni diretti, lo strumento di persuasione privilegiato in possesso dell'oratore» (p. 7). E' quindi particolarmente interessante osservare che in questo contesto la nozione di eikos serve non solo ad indicare una categoria...

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

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

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

324 RHETORICA claim that "Despite his ambivalence with regard to rhetoric, Milton remain­ ed loyal in many respects to the tradition of the rhetoric handbooks, of Wilson, Peacham and Puttenham, on which he and his generation, in educa­ tional terms, were raised" (29), a claim repeated in various ways through­ out. I can think of no reason whatsoever to assume that Milton depended on English vernacular summaries of classical rhetoric unless it be that Lynch is relying on an outdated narrative about English Renaissance rhetoric. In reality, these English vernacular texts were so meagerly published as to make virtually no contribution to early education; neither were these texts included in any university curricula (Green 74-76). This is not to say that Lynch's 27-page bibliography does not already include many of the author­ itative texts for her discussion, yet other texts are missing, such as recent work on Milton and rhetoric by William Pallister and James Egan or Stephen B. Dobranski's magisterial summary of earlier Samson Agonistes criticism. But one might work forever to produce the perfect book. In the one that we have here, Lynch makes some original contributions to various conversations. Historians of rhetoric with an interest in her topics or period may well find in her text some new directions for those conversations. Stephen B. Dobranski, A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: Volume 3, Samson Agonistes, intro. Archie Burnett, ed. P. J. Klemp (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2009). James Egan, "Oratory and Animadversion: Rhetorical Signatures in Milton's Pam­ phlets of 1649," Rhetorica 27 (2009): 189-217. James Egan, "Rhetoric and Poetic in Milton's Polemics of 1659-60," Rhetorica 31 (2013): 73-110. Lawrence D. Green, “Grammatica Movet: Renaissance Grammar Books and Elocutio," in Peter L. Oesterreich and Thomas O. Sloane, eds., Rhetorica Movet: Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour or Heinrich F. Plett (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 73-115. William Pallister, Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Jameela Lares The University of Southern Mississippi L écriture des traités de rhétorique des origines à la Renaissance, textes édités par Sophie Conte et Sandrine Dubel, Ausonius, Scripta Antiqua 87, Bordeaux 2016, 241 pages. ISBN: 9782356131614 Ce livre, qui rassemble 11 contributions, traite un sujet qui est souvent abordé dans les ouvrages sur la rhétorique de manière indirecte ou margi­ nale . 1 écriture des traités de rhétorique, c'est-à-dire leur forme et leur style. Reviews 325 L idée majeure est qu il y a à la fois homologie entre le fond et la forme et contamination de la forme par le fond. Posée au début de Pouvrage avec une citation de Boileau - traducteur et éditeur du Traité du sublime au XVIIe siècle . « Souvent il fait la figure qu'il enseigne et, en parlant du sublime, il est lui-même très sublime », cette idée se décline sur différents plans : la composition des traités, leur mode d énonciation, les métaphores récurren­ tes, la place des citations et des exemples. Sont pris en compte à la fois les traités grecs et les traités latins, l'ordre suivi étant l'ordre chronologique, avec successivement des articles sur la Rhétorique à Alexandre, Démétrios (le Pseudo-Démétrios de Phalère), la Rhétorique à Hérennius, le De oratore de Cicéron, Denys d'Halicarnasse, le Traité du sublime, Quintilien, Fronton, les Progymnasmata d'Aphthonios, Martianus Capella, et enfin, sur un plan un peu différent et en guise d'ouverture finale, des traités de poétique de la Renaissance. Il y a nécessairement des manques, comme Isocrate, Aristote ou les autres traités de Cicéron, mais ces textes sont pris en compte à propos d'autres traités ; et surtout, l'introduction générale y pallie en présentant l'ensemble de la production rhétorique. Notons que la bibliographie, pré­ sentée à la fin de chaque article, est à jour et véritablement multilingue. L'Introduction, due à Sophie Conte, est...

Reviews 437 dianoia (thought) in the Poetics where Aristotle assigns it to his Rhetoric, even though, Bialostosky observes, it occupies, at best, an inferred presence in that work (138). Performing a close and careful rereading of both texts, Bialos­ tosky concludes that Aristotle's assigning of dianoia to the Rhetoric is evidence of what Bakhtin calls a "hidden polemic" Aristotle conducts with a sophisticinspired "poetics of the utterance" that pre-dated both of these works. This line of argument ultimately leads Bialostosky to something of an unexpected reversal. Where he had earlier argued for a separate discipline, or "art of dialogics," he now perceives that art as but one of many that can be "responsive to the predisciplinary scene of action" (146). Drawing upon the architectonics of Bakhtin's early works, Bialostosky now thinks it possi­ ble to "refer our sometimes calcified institutionalized disciplines at least to an imagined, reconstructed common world that preceded them and still underwrites them" (147). Such a world is inaccessible, Bialostosky argues, except through the sorts of "radical inquiries" that "Bakhtin and Heidegger undertook in the 1920s" (147). Such a world is inaccessible so long as we think of disciplines as fixed, able to stay within the boundaries drawn for them. For not only does disciplinarity exceed itself in interdisciplinarity, it also discovers a surplus in its predisciplinary origins. And it is here that Bia­ lostosky sees a particular significance for Bakhtin, whose "dialogic field of discourse [is] broader than the modem disciplines or the ancient ones of rhetoric and dialectic" (82). Heard again as a complete utterance, what questions does Bialostosky's work pose for contemporary inquiry? Does Bakhtin and Voloshinov's inter­ est in intonation, for example, bear any relevance to our interest in sonic rhetorics? Does Bakhtin's regard for the historical significance of the "per­ son-idea" connect to recent investigations into the meanings of embodi­ ment? Is the shift from epistemology to ontology, as posited by the new materialism, reflected in Bialostosky's conception of Bakhtin's architecton­ ics as predisciplinary? These questions cannot be answered here. But if Bakhtin still speaks to us, as I believe he does, then Bialostosky's essays will serve as exemplary models of how to engage Bakhtin with care, insight, and admirable rigor, and collectively, as an invitation for future dialogues. Frank Farmer University of Kansas Cinthia Gannett and John C. Brereton, eds., Traditions of Eloquence: The Jesuits and Modern Rhetorical Studies, New York: Fordham Uni­ versity Press, 2016. 444 pp. ISBN: 9780823264537 This book contributes in welcome and valuable ways to the history of rhetoric, the history of education, and current rhetorical pedagogy. It is an 438 RHETORICA enriching read, with provocative and significant theoretical implications. These essays raise important questions concerning central disciplinary issues and make available to both theorists and teachers richly encompass­ ing and hence highly generative curricular models with wide applicability. I thoroughly enjoyed the time spent perusing these pages and have already begun to draw upon the resources herein to bolster both my own scholar­ ship and teaching. This Jesuit tradition brings into view a rhetorical para­ digm that is truly "transdisciplinary" (xv). As the editors acknowledge, the book provides the "first maps of this huge intellectual geography" (xv). Therefore, I look forward to future scholarship on Jesuit contributions to rhetorical theory and pedagogy. Following the three distinct periods of Jesuit education from its beginnings in the sixteenth-century to the present day, the book is divided into three sections: 1) studies of Jesuit rhetorical instruction from 1540, when Ignatius Loyola and friends founded the Society of Jesus, to 1773, when Jesuit education was suppressed by the pope; 2) studies of Jesuit rhetorical education from 1789, when many Jesuits moved to North Ame­ rica and established colleges and universities, to the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), which marked the end of the rhetoric-centered curricu­ lum in Jesuit institutions; and 3) studies of developments in rhetorical ins­ truction in United States' Jesuit higher education from the 1960s to the present. Although some description of the grammar school classroom appears in several early chapters, the primary emphasis of the book is on higher education. Each section contains a loosely...

Reviews Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 349 pp. ISBN: 9780815634454 Shannon Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 257 pp. ISBN9781611173833 Rhetoric is an ability. So begins the blithe Englishing of Aristotle's defi­ nition of rhetoric. In early translations it appears as a faculty, following the European vernaculars and the Latin translation of Aristotle's dunamis with facultas. Yet even if this translation flattens the complex significance of Aristotle's original sense, it happily brings us within the orbit of pressing problems in our own moment. We may now pose new questions: If rhetoric insists it be thought of as an ability, how might we inflect this idée reçue of the field by thinking through the meaning of rhetoric from a position of disability? This is not a matter of simple inversion. Disability is not the opposite of ability but the suspension of the assumptions of ableism. In this sense, it is like disbelief. We say we are in a 'state of disbelief' precisely when we are presented with incontrovertible evidence that commands assent. Disability rhetoric, then, seeks to illuminate the unreflective assump­ tions and heuristics that we commonly use to make judgments concerning the conditions and abilities of others. In Disability Rhetoric and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, Jay Timothy Dolmage and Shannon Walters offer book-length elaborations of what such a rhetoric might be. The authors do not simply challenge rhetoric about disability or examine disability advocacy rhetorically, although both these aims are crucial to their projects. The authors argue that a thoroughgoing criticism of ableism requires a reexamination of rhetorical history and theory. The classical tradition's inability to think through bodily difference made it narrower than it otherwise might have been. Quintilian asserted that the limits of rhetorical education could be found in the body of the orator, "for assuredly no one can exhibit proper delivery if he lacks a memory for retaining what he has written or ready facility in uttering what he has to speak extempore, or if he has any incurable defect of utterance." Any such "extraordinary deformity of body ... cannot be remedied by any effort of art" (11.3.10). Unable to think of bodily difference as anything but deformity gave ancient rhetorical theory a Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 2, pp. 205-215. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.205. 206 RHETORIC A false sense of order and precision, erected upon the assumption that audience and orator could be treated as positions within a discourse rather than approa­ ched within the complexity of situated and contested embodiment. These books can be taken as complementary projects. Dolmage wishes to extend and reinterpret the repertoire and vocabulary of critical rhetoric. Walters focuses on the inventional strategies of disabled persons and their circles. This is not to say that Dolmage neglects invention or Walters criti­ cism. Disability rhetoric shows the imbrication of criticism and invention, since both rely upon practices of sensitization. We might extract six maxims to serve as guideposts for furthering this critical-inventive program. 1. Modes of communication require invention and shape meaning. The con­ stitution of communication between Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller in the now famous story of their experience at the water pump (Sullivan hand­ spelling 'water' in Keller's palm after running water over her hand, marked by Keller as her entry into language) resulted from a pragmatic awareness of possible channels of meaning-making. Walters argues that many of these possibilities reside within touch and her book serves in part as a collection of examples showing the variety and power of haptic communication. Perhaps even more importantly, a disability rhetoric would attend to the way in which the mode of communication constitutes and affects the meaning of the communication. Rather than appealing to the sensus communis...

Reviews 213 concerned primarily with prescriptive correctness. He traces pedagogies that have used these ideas at various times in western schools, but his biggest con­ tribution is examining theories that challenge this paradigm. For example, feminist stylistics, he contends, challenges the rules of convention. Pointing to the works of Cixous and Kristeva, Ray shows that textual structure and organization should be challenged as points of gendering stylistic choice. The last two chapters are on researching style and teaching style. Ray's chapter on researching style shows that there are still major gaps in the research; for instance, he notes that there have been no ethnographic studies on writing styles to date. Additionally, he describes the use of quantitative methods used to describe style, and data mining to describe stylistic featu­ res of writing. Beyond this, there are opportunities for research in rhetorical analysis, stylistics, and discourse analysis. The concluding chapter argues for better teaching strategies in the classroom. The fear is that teaching style will not liberate a curriculum but rather enslave it to prescriptive grammar study. Ray assuages these fears with suggestions for incorporating style in the classroom to develop writing, including ways in which classical rhetoric informs writing instruction in current theory. He invites interdisciplinary work in the classroom to discuss style from the perspective of various dis­ course communities enabling students to see diverse approaches to compo­ sition. Ray ends the chapter on a hopeful note: "For those teachers who adopt them, these guiding principles bring style out of the shadows of col­ lege writing classes, helping to improve students' writing while also per­ haps increasing their satisfaction in producing academic texts required for their success" (p. 219). A significant issue with Ray's book is that it does not quite live up to its lofty claim that "an in-depth, historical, and theoretical understanding of style helps teachers make writing more satisfying and relevant to stu­ dents" (p. 5). This may be true, but the topic is immense, and this is a rather slim volume. At best, Style is, as the title suggests, an introduction. The chapters do establish a framework for style, but they are not genuinely indepth discussions. However, Brian Ray's Style is an invitation for scholars to fill in those gaps, and I believe this book paves the way helpfully for future research. Robert L. Lively Arizona State University A. Pennacini, Discorsi eloquenti da Ulisse a Obama e oltre, Seconda edizione riveduta e corretta, Alessandria: Edizioni dell Orso, 2017 (I ed., 2015), 592 pp. ISBN 9788862746090. Adriano Pennacini é stato uno dei precursori, nell'universitá italiana, del tentativo di intrecciare lo studio delTantica técnica retorica con gli studi classici e con le nuove discipline della comumcazione. Presidente della 214 RHETORICA International Society for the History of Rhetoric dal 1991 al 1993, ha affidato a un corposo volume un 'eloquente' saggio del suo método di analisi della comunicazione persuasiva, che spazia dalla prima 'retorica' omerica fino a quella del (penúltimo) Presidente degli Stati Uniti d'America e comprende nell'oltre del titolo un esempio della origínale eloquenza di Jorge Bergoglio, papa Francesco. Raccolte di discorsi non mancano nelle biblioteche degli studiosi di retorica. Attingendo alia rinfusa in quella personale (assolutamente parziale e selettiva), posso ricordare: F. Sallustio, Belle parole. I grandi discorsi della storia dalla Bibbia a Paperino, Milano: Bompiani 2004 (anche in questo caso, una diacronicitá quasi esaustiva); G. Pedullá (cur.), Parole al potere. Discorsi politici italiani, Milano: Rizzoli, 2011; C. Ellis, S. Drury Smith (eds.), Say it Plain. A Century of Great African American Speeches, New York-London: The New Press, 2005; C.M. Copeland, Farewell Goodspeed. The Greatest Eulogies of Our Time, New York: Harmony Books, 2003; C. Knorowski (ed.), Gettysburg Replies. The World Respond to Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Guilford, Connecticut: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. Raccolte importanti (e ne ho elencate davvero pochissime fra le tante circolanti nelle varié parti del mondo), che offrono testi accompagnati spesso da riflessioni e inquadramenti generali, ma che difficilmente si prefiggono e realizzano lo scopo che ha avuto in mente Pennacini nel raccogliere discorsi anti­ chi e moderni accompagnati ciascuno da prove di analisi: quello, cioé, di«mostrare la durata...

370 RHETORICA Graban finds that she is unable to delineate Gougar's affiliations as stable and permanent because her relationships with other suffragists and politicians evolved throughout her life. And lastly, class-consciousness as the organizing topoi allows Graban to "complicate the language surrounding ... the middle class lens [typically used] to view social uplift in Gougar's work" (p. 154). In her final chapter, Graban presents more textual examples of irony through a critical frame—one from Golda Meir, prime minster of Israel, one from Madeline Albright, American diplomat, and another from Barbara Jordan, investigator of the Watergate Scandal. Although some might think Graban falls into the trap of "tokenism," whereby examples of a few stand in for all women, she works against it as she selects archives based on their ironic potential and qualities. Furthermore these archives are situated panhistorically so as not to essentialize women or their writings as representative of a specific place or time. In addition to alleged "tokenism," some might find fault with the scant textual evidence taken from Anne Askew's archive in chapter one. Yet, these critics should keep in mind the erasure of women's rhetoric throughout the Renaissance and employ their critical imagination to reconsider the potential for the evidence that does exist.2 It is also important to note that Graban not only examines textual evidence, she also employs "historical residue" as evidence—residue that includes: organizing topoi, intersecting contexts, and the positioning of audiences. Graban's scholarship resets the terms of scholarly engagement for those working in the field of rhetoric and history by resituating irony and using it to destabilize historical narratives and the ways in which these nar­ ratives are remembered. Tiffany Kinney, University of Utah, Salt Lake City Laurent Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. xiv, 166 pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-1133-2 In 1993 Pernot's highly acclaimed, two-volume work, La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain appeared. In 2012 at the meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, with ISHR sponsorship, Pernot conducted a three-day seminar on epideictic for twenty participants (among whom was the current reviewer). Using the format of the seminar but drawing content from his earlier book, Pernot has now produced a concise but 2 J. J. Royster and G. Kirsch, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 72-73. ' Reviews 371 example-packed history, analytical summary, and contextualizing assessment of the theoretical treatises and actual speeches of ancient Greco-Roman epideictic rhetoric. Two questions drive the presentation: (1) How was it that epi­ deictic, originally the minor player in the famous trio of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic, acquired the far-and-away dominant role of the three in the Imperial age? and (2), What, in fact, was that role? Through an impressive breadth and depth of reading and a precise deployment of select ancient sour­ ces, Pernot shows how "every encomium is at once a literary work, a moral problem, and a social rite" (ix). In Chapter 1, "The Unstoppable Rise of Epideictic" (1-28), Pernot surveys the meager evidence for epideictic texts from Classical Greece to Republican Rome (1-9). Epideictic was, in those centuries, something of a sidecar to the normally stand-alone two wheels of deliberative and judicial oratory. Yet, as the chapter title suggests, the epideictic sidecar will "tri­ umph" (9) in the Imperial period, and the path of that triumph is delineated in the rest of the chapter (9-23). The conclusion? The Imperial period, for the whole of that Greco-Roman world—especially in Greek—"was the begin­ ning of a new rhetorical world order, in which oratory served no longer to rip apart an adversary or to cow an assembly, but to spread honeyed praise and trumpet meritorious conduct with previously unparalleled frequency and variety" (28). Chapter 2, "The Grammar of Praise," (29-65) surveys the methods and means of epideictic in light of the teaching texts that survive, drawing espe­ cially from Menander Rhetor, but Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle are also quoted and even Aelius...

Although scholars have historically minimized the relationship between medieval grammatical and rhetorical traditions and Chaucer's poetics, Proserpina's angry speech in the Merchant's Tale represents the intersection of medieval classroom grammar exercises, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's theory of delivery, and poetics. Proserpina's angry speech reveals that her rhetoric is calculated to subvert the masculine power structures that surround her. Such a focus on Chaucer's depiction of women's persuasive tactics helps to highlight Chaucer's deep engagement with rhetoric beginning in the 1380's. Moreover, this investigation asks for increased attention to the overlap between classroom grammatical traditions, rhetorical theory, and medieval poetics.

Although scholars have historically minimized the relationship between medieval grammatical and rhetorical traditions and Chaucer’s poetics, Proserpina’s angry speech in the Merchant’s Tale represents the intersection of medieval classroom grammar exercises, Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s theory of delivery, and poetics. Proserpina’s angry speech reveals that her rhetoric is calculated to subvert the masculine power structures that surround her. Such a focus on Chaucer’s depiction of women’s persuasive tactics helps to highlight Chaucer’s deep engagement with rhetoric beginning in the 1380’s. Moreover, this investigation asks for increased attention to the overlap between classroom grammatical traditions, rhetorical theory, and medieval poetics.

216 RHETORICA del fratello di Guizzardo, i Flores veritatis gramatice di Bertoluccio (sopra ricordato), conservata anche in altri due manoscritti (e attribuita a Gentile da Cingoli in un altro ms.). Lo studio di quest'opera che, secondo il giudizio di Gian Carlo Alessio, è "un manuale costruito coi modelli della grammatica speculativa", sarebbe molto intéressante perché potrebbe costituire il legame tra la tradizione di riflessione grammaticale, importata probabilmente tra i maestri delle arti e medicina di Bologna da Gentile da Cingoli (il maestro di Angelo di Arezzo), e la tradizione di insegnamento della grammatica e della retorica (dictamen) di ámbito giuridico-notarile che convivevano a Bologna, non sempre in buoni rapporti. COSTANTINO MARMO, BOLOGNA Matthew Kempshall, Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400-1500, Manchester University Press, 2012, x + 627 pp. ISBN 9780719070310 Peter Van Nuffelen, Orosius and the Rhetoric of History, Oxford University Press, 2012, viii + 252 pp. ISBN 9780199655274 In recent years, scholarly attitudes towards writers of history in the late antique and medieval period have undergone a fundamental series of trans­ formations. It is no longer sufficient to describe these individuals as mere imi­ tators of a glorious classical historiographical tradition, using tools that they only barely understood with limited success. Nor can they be unreflectively dismissed simply as polemicists and moralizers, subject to the particular pressures that attended an overly-literal reception of Biblical themes and models. The two books under review here add further fuel to a revisionist reading of medieval historiography by focusing upon the ways in which authors could strategically utilize techniques of argumentation and presenta­ tion drawn from the training in rhetoric and grammar that underpinned the literary culture of the period. Matthew Kempshall's Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400-1500 is a magisterial, synthetic introduction to the subject, aimed principally at students and scholars new to the field and encompassing some 550 pages of elegantly written, exhaustively supported argumentation. In his Orosius and the Rhetoric ofHistory, meanwhile, Peter Van Nuffelen offers a collection of carefully drawn interpretative vignettes which seek to engage scholars of both historiography and Christian literature of the period, and, in the process, to redirect the focus of Orosian scholarship by placing him within the context of secular, as well as Christian, historiography of the fifth and sixth centuries. Both projects are, therefore, explicitly rehabilitative in nature: Kempshall's to demonstrate that medieval historiography was neither crude nor credulous nor conceptually unsophisticated" (536), and Van Nuffelen's to deliver Orosius from the accusation that he was an unimaginative, unintelligent theologian who fundamentally misunderstood the works of his patron, Augustine of Reviews 217 Hippo. Both authors go about their projects by emphasizing the close and enduring relationship between the writing of history and the practices, concerns, and techniques of classical rhetoric. In particular, both acknowledge and build upon existing arguments about the extensive and substantial influ­ ence of manuals of rhetoric (particularly Cicero, Quintilian, and the pseudoCiceronian Rhetonoi iid Hei'eniiiimi) on the education that authors of the period received. For Kempshall, the pervasiveness of classical rhetoric in medieval thought and literature should not be understood as a black mark against the veracity, reliability, or integrity of practitioners of the period. On the contrary, the principles of deliberative, judicial, and demonstrative rhetoric provided the writers of history with the tools that thev needed in order to fulfill the tripartite objective of history: to teach, to move, and to please. After first outlining the immense diversity of texts that are collected together under the rubric of medi­ eval historiography and the fundamental forms and objectives of the three types of classical rhetoric that authors of those texts might be expected to be familiar with, Kempshall proceeds to explore in detail the principles and tech­ niques of classical rhetoric, and the texts and contexts in which they can be found in historical writing of the period. In the process, he also questions and begins upon a deconstruction of the tendency to identify the 12th and 15th centuries as w atershed moments in the history of medieval historiographv . While he agrees that the intellectual and cultural developments of those centuries do mark significant points in the dev elopment of medieval...

Reviews 317 Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric 1380-1620 (OxfordWarburg Studies), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. 345 pp ISBN: 978-0-19-959728-4 In A bdistoi i/ of Renaissance Rhetoric 2380—1620, Peter Mack expertly describes the fortunes of Renaissance rhetoric within its academic and textual settings. Rhetoric in the Renaissance was a school subject, mostly covered in the grammar schools, with secondary importance in the universities, and thousands of rhetorical textbooks from the period survive as testimony to its ascendancy within the liberal arts curriculum. With a dizzying command of technical detail, Mack has delved into this large and complex textual record and emerged with a synthesis that will be required reading for students of the subject. Beginning with a description of the most significant ancient treatises on rhetoric, followed by a chapter on the contributions of key fifteenth-century Italians (and one notable Cretan, George of Trebizond), Mack proceeds to a series of four chapters focused on teachers whose textbooks had an extraordinary impact on the theory and teaching of rhetoric in the sixteenth century: Rudolph Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Ramus. The chapter on Melanchthon, the "dominant figure" of the years 1519-45 (p. 104), is filled out with sections on his chief students and followers. The chapter on Ramus (and his associate Omer Talon) gives a useful overview of the controversy and key combatants surrounding his polarizing reforms. With helpful tables outlining the contents of their principle writings on rhetoric, Mack charts their innovative and (again in the case of Ramus) agonistic adaptations of the classical program. The first half of the book is therefore devoted to the big players in the book market for Renaissance rhetoric - those whose work best adapted the classical program to the educational needs and occasions of the humanist school. Indeed, for much of the period that Mack describes, Renaissance rhetoric was a symbiosis of two types of books on rhetoric: classical (Ciceronian) treatises and humanist manuals. For most of the sixteenth century, there is a strong correlation between the numbers of editions of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (still generally attributed to Cicero in the period) and the most popular humanist treatises (pp. 30-2). Mack explains the apparent symbiosis by noting the frequent use of humanist treatises as a preliminary study, a prologue to the study of a full-length classical treatise. But after decades of steady demand, humanist manuals and classical treatises alike suffer steep declines in production after the 1560s. The cause of the sudden decline is not clear, though Mack offers a number of suggestions: the rising fortunes of Talon's rhetoric, which was not coupled to full-length treatises; new syntheses of classical and humanist rhetoric, such as found in the popular De arte rhetorica libri tres (1562) of the Jesuit educator Cyprian Soarez; the scholastic revival of the late-sixteenth century; or even the efficiency of the second-hand book market to meet continuing demand for humanist and classical rhetorics. 318 RHETORICA Renaissance rhetoric was equally tied up with the fortunes of the liberal arts, especially logic or dialectic. It is one of the virtues of HRR 1380— 1620 that it provides through the main part of the narrative a parallel account of the fortunes of both humanist rhetoric and dialectic. Melanchthon described his textbooks on rhetoric and dialectic as companion pieces, and even Ramus, who notoriously drew a sharp distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, distributing four of the five classical offices of rhetoric between them, insisted on the necessity and complementarity of both (pp. 142-5). Both rhetoric and dialectic were combined in a very influential method of critical reading, one of the uses of Renaissance rhetoric to which Mack is especially attentive. The parallel fortunes of rhetoric and dialectic in northern Europe that Mack tells in the first half of the book are complemented, in the second half, by a chapter on the fortunes of rhetoric in southern Europe in the sixteenth-century (chapter 8), and chapters on the contemporary fortunes of specialized rhetorical treatises: manuals of tropes and figures (chapter 10), letter-writing manuals (chapter 11), preaching manuals and legal di­ alectics (chapter 12), and vernacular rhetorics (chapter 13). In...

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

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

Reviews 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...

Reviews 439 century (p. 517). Can we also conclude that classical early modern philos­ ophy did contain a (hidden) philosophy or philosophies of rhetoric in the sense of attempts to justify rhetoric? This question is important, especially with respect to Descartes and Spinoza. The answer must be negative. The results clearly show that rhetoric does not contribute to the meaning of signs in the work of these authors. Only Bacon, who grew up under nearly ideal circumstances with respect to humanist education and rhetoric, arrives at something like a philosophical theory of rhetoric. To a much lesser extend, this can still be said with respect to Hobbes, who is much more than Bacon a critic of rhetoric, but still in search of an new rhetoric. In Descartes and Spinoza we still find rhetorical education and many reflections on rhetoric (it is one of the great merits of this book to have shown this). At the same time they were convinced that rhetoric constrains the expressive power of language. The conclusion must be that the way the early modern thinkers distinguish between res and verbiuu prevents them from providing a pow­ erful theory of meaning which is the cornerstone of a philosophy of rhetoric. Not a prejudice against rhetoric, but the idea that language only provides a deficient expression of thought proves to be inconsistent with the very idea of a philosophy of rhetoric. In Descartes and Spinoza these effects are enforced by the rationalist assumption that thought is a sphere of reality to which the mind has access independently of linguistic expressions. This book thus proves to be a strong contribution to the literature. Rothkamm enables us to see the real limitations of early modern rationalism with respect to rhetoric much clearer than before. Temilo van Zantwijk Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena Christopher D. Johnson, Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought. Cambridge: Harvard Studies in Comparative Lit­ erature, 2010. 695 pp. ISBN: 9780674053335 According to Christopher Johnson the hyperbole is the "most infamous of tropes, whose name most literary criticism does not praise, and whose existence the history of philosophy largely ignores" (1). As a result of this neglect "no full-scale defense has been made of the Baroque's most Baroque figure. This book aims to remedy that lack" (16). And what a remedy it is. To say that this is a study on a grand scale is certainly not hyperbolic. In nearly 700 pages Johnson "moves from the history of rhetoric to the extravagances of lyric and then through the impossibilities of drama and the aporias of philosophy" (521). The grand scope of Hyperboles is made necessary by the protean role of hyperbole in discourse: "as a discursive figure integral to the success of classical and Renaissance epic, Shakespearian tragedy, Pascalian apology, as 440 RHETORICA well as the viability of the Cartesian method, it can be narrative, dialogic, or structural" (8). Thus hyperbole is no mere figure of speech but rather, says Johnson, following the lead of Kenneth Burke, it is "a 'master trope,' one that vies with metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony for our attention (3). Indeed, Burke's approach to the four "master tropes" in A Grammar of Motives might serve as a preview of Johnson's method in Hyperboles. Say Burke: "my primary concern with them here will not be with their purely figurative usage, but with their role in the discovery and description of 'the truth.' It is an evanescent moment that we shall deal with—for not only does the dividing line between tne figurative and the literal usages shift, but also the four trope shift into one another" (Grammar ofMotives, 503). The hyperbole, now rechristened a "master trope" supersedes the merely figurative. It is more than a stylistic device, so much more that at times it is difficult to say what a hyperbole is—or what it is not. It is a figurative element, to be sure, but hyperbole is also an argumentative tech­ nique, an inventional device, a philosophical critique, and ultimately a world view. In establishing the hyperbole a "master trope" Johnson begins with an examination of the place of hyperbole in the rhetorical theory of Aristotle...

Reviews 325 much wider rhetorical practice or whether the Sophists offered any notable contribution to these fields. T.'s book is a worthy summary of Sophistic argumentation based on a painstaking analysis of a wide selection of available texts and lucid compar­ isons with modern parallels. Unfortunately, it does not consistently address the thorny (and possibly unresolvable) methodological question of what strategies and why we could call genuinely Sophistic, so he occasionaly seems to read Aristotelian or Platonic concepts back into sophistic texts. Sometimes the line of argument is not easy to follow due to the dense pre­ sentation of facts and the book also suffers from some irritating mistakes both in the English and the Greek spelling (e.g. pp. 35, 48 or 169). However, as a rich and perceptive reappraisal of primary evidence, the study will likely to provoke strong response and stimulate further studies on the Sophists not only in classical and modern rhetoric, but in philosophy as well. Gabor Tahin Burnham, England Pseudo-Dionigi di Alicarnasso, I discorsi figurati I e II (Ars Rhet. VIII e IX Us.-RadJ. Introduzione, Traduzione e Commento a cura di Stefano Dentice di Accadia, Pisa-Roma: Fabrizio Serra Editore (AION. Quaderni 14, 2010), 184 pp., ISBN 978-88-6227-220-9 Accompagnata da un'ampia Introduzione (pp. 11-50) e dal Commento (pp. 129-178), Stefano Dentice di Accadia (D.A.) propone nella collana AION. Quaderni (n. 14) la prima traduzione intégrale in italiano dei Discorsifigurati I e II (Ars Rhet. VIII e IX Us.-Rad. ) di ps.-Dionigi di Alicarnasso, basata sul testo edito, agli inizi del secolo scorso, da Usener e Radermacher (da cui D.A. si discosta in alcuni luoghi, come H vede dalla Tavola delle divergenze a p. 51), con un'ulteriore lettura del Parisinus Graecus 1741 e del suo apógrafo, il Guelferbytanus 14. L'idea di tradurre i due scritti nasce nell'àmbito degli studi di ricostruzione dell'esegesi omerica antica; l'impostazione del lavoro tende infatti a privilegiare l'aspetto della critica letteraria omerica rispetto a quello retorico. I due trattati, che analizzano una particolare técnica oratoria conosciu*a nell'antichità col nome di λόγοι ¿σχηματισμένοι, ossia un discorso in cui il pensiero non viene espresso in maniera diretta, ma in forma mascherata (come si legge nella definizione di Zoilo riportata da Febammone III, 44, 1-3 Spengel), rappresentano un unicum nella letteratura antica perché sono i soli scritti monografici nei quali la teoría è spiegata attraverso 1 analisi di esempi letterari tratti da autori greci (Omero, di cui si analizzano molti passi deïVIliade, Demostene, Euripide e Tucidide). I due trattati a e b costituiscono i capitoli VIII e IX di una Τέχνη ρητορική erróneamente attribuita a Dionigi di Alicarnasso, sulla cui paternité e datazione c'è ancora grande incertezza (si 326 RHETORICA tende a ritenere i due trattati composti tra la fine del I sec. e la prima meta del III sec. d.C., cf. Introd., p. 14 n. 19), un'opera che consiste in una raccolta di testi di retorica e di critica letteraria scollegati per lo piü tra loro, frutto di una collezione arbitraria di diversa provenienza. Potrebbe trattarsi, considerato 10 stile frettoloso e spesso inelegante delle due monografie, di testi scolastici, verosímilmente appunti dettati a vari allievi in momenti diversi (ipotesi contestata da M. Heath, Pseudo-Dionysios Art ofRhetoric 8-11: Figured Speech, Declamation and Criticism, «AJP» 124/1 [2003], pp. 81-105). D.A. non esclude che i due trattati possano essere opera del medesimo autore, né che si possano individuare mani diverse da un'opera all'altra o anche all'interno di uno stesso trattato (Introd., p. 15). L'lntroduzione si compone di un parágrafo (1) relativo alia storia della teoría antica del discorso e della causa figurati, di un parágrafo (2) dedicato all'importanza dei due trattati nel panorama del genere letterario in cui sono inquadrati, con l'illustrazione dei tre σχήματα (il parlare con tatto e decoro [μετ’ εύπρεπείας], il parlare 'per obliquo' [κατά πλάγιον], il parlare 'per contrario' [κατά τό εναντίον]) e un utile e dettagliato sunto (pp. 16-21), e di un parágrafo (3) che traccia uno status tpiaestionis degli studi sull'argomento. Nel penúltimo par...

100 RHETORICA his audiences. He was also more interested in practical politics than Mon­ taigne, as registered in his careful representations of the rivalries and tempo­ rary alliances in the Henry VI and Henry IV plays, and later in the not wholly risible representation of the plebeians in Coriolanus, which he sets against the hero's uncompromising denunciations of popular rule. Shakespeare's larger interest in representing the nation leads Mack to focus on Falstaff as common man-appetitive, exploitative, cowardly, defiant, and comradely according to circumstances—the human embodiment of copia. For his part, the later Montaigne more soberly celebrates the sensual as well as the moral and intellectual Socrates: "(B) The most beautiful lives to my taste are those which conform to the common measure, (C) human and ordinate, without miracles though and (B) without rapture" (De I'experience, quoted p. 135). he final chapter, "Ethical issues in Montaigne and Shakespeare" is best described as Peter Mack's commonplace book. Here he addresses such topics as Death, Revenge, Sex and Marriage, Fathers and Children, and compares Montaigne's ruminations on these matters to Shakespeare's. Even seasoned hands will be struck not only by the resemblance of the ideas voiced by the two writers but also by the similarly multiple perspectives each idea elicits, further proof that the grammar school habit of arguing in utramque partem was, as Jonson might say, "turned to blood." Despite some local disappointments, Mack's book achieves the end of all good scholarship and criticism: it makes us want to get back to Montaigne and Shakespeare with newly inquisitive eyes. Joel B. Altman University of California, Berkelei/ Patricia Roberts-Miller, Fanatical Schemes: Proslaven/ Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus, Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2009. x + 286 pp. Cloth $38.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-1642-6. Paper $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-5653-8. Patricia Roberts-Miller's Fanatical Schemes is a capacious study of pro­ slavery thought in the south from 1835 through the coming of Civil War in 1861, though she sometimes glances backwards as far as the ancient world and forward to the Second World War and even occasionally the contempo­ rary United States. It also deals with psychological theory and fiction. Thus, this expansive book covers a lot of time and intellectual ground. There are many lines of argument running through this wide-ranging volume; the pri­ mary thrust is how proslavery rhetoric - often expressed in oratory, though often in print - shaped the course our nation traveled toward Civil War. "The tragedy of consensus" part of the subtitle is that proslavery rhetoric went too far and that led to the South's extremism and ultimate downfall. RobertsMiller presents one of the most comprehensive monographs in recent years Reviews 101 on the role of arguments and ideology in the coming war. Where historians have focused on the threat to the slave economy, the breakdown of the two party system, and the threat that slave labor posed to Northern free labor, Roberts-Miller argues that proslavery rhetoric explains (and even shaped) the movement towards war. (236) The book is set in motion by the abolitionist literature controversy of 1835, in which abolitionists used the US mails to distribute - or attempt to distribute - anti-slavery literature in the South. Vigilante groups and bon fires seem to have taken care of some, perhaps most, of the literature. However, many historians (and people at the time, too), blamed the abolitionists and that episode for starting the shift towards proslavery radicalism. RobertsMiller establishes three key points early on: proslavery rhetoric was welldeveloped before 1835; proslavery advocates silenced antislavery advocates by blaming them for inciting slave rebellion; and South Carolina was the center (or perhaps origin is a better phrase) of much of the proslavery advocacy. To stop criticism proslavery advocates thus harnessed fear that any criticism of slavery might lead to rebellion. That led to a cycle of silencing of dissenters, which made possible - perhaps even likely - more extreme rhetoric. Roberts-Miller develops this argument by first showing the ways that proslavery advocates stifled dissenting opinions - sometimes through threats of violence - which in turn led them to overestimate their support. (31) Then...

102 RHETORICA authoritarians generally, wanted things their way, without acknowledging the criticism, flaws, or consequences of that way or how they got it." (234) Some more nuance is in order. Historians are well aware that proslavery thought ante-dated the abolitionist literature crisis of 1835, though the ampli­ tude of proslavery thought certainly increased after Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 and became substantially more strident post 1835. Another instance is Roberts-Miller's argument that many proslavery advocates portrayed slav­ ery as anti-modern (65-67). Those tropes are certainly in the proslavery lit­ erature and historians still frequently set up the old South as a place of pre-modern values against the market-oriented North. However, much of the movement (and also the rhetoric) was about how slavery was consistent with progress. Fanatical Schemes is difficult reading. It is dense. The discussion of secondary literature sometimes seems distant from the topic under study. For instance, juxtaposed are references to Orwell and proslavery thought (41, 219), the Nazis and slavery (218-19), and histories of Native Americans and contemporary debate over the Confederate flag (46). However, for those who are interested in the power of rhetoric and the contours of conservative thought, this volume will repay well the time spent with it. Roberts-Miller relocates ideas and words to the center of historv in this J study of how slavery was discussed. The big question one has is how do the ideas expressed here relate to reality? That is, even if the proslavery arguments had been more moderate, would the path of our nation towards proslavery actions - like secession - have been different? Did words cause war? Or is the discussion of proslavery thought more a dependent variable than an independent one? As we try to answer these questions, this important book may help re-ignite the scholarly study of proslaverv thought and the power of words and ideas. Alfred L. Brophy University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Jeanne Nuechterlein, Translating Nature into Art; Holbein, the Refor­ mation, and Renaissance Rhetoric, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011, 242 pp. ISBN:978-0-271-03692-2 In the main, the terms and syntax of early sixteenth-century criticism of art are those of classical rhetoric. Most certainly, rhetorical analysis can illumine any visual or verbal persuasive event, regardless of self-conscious authorial intent or training. And early sixteenth-century Basel was the shared context of Erasmian (and Melancthonian) rhetorical publications as well as of Holbein's early (pre-England) work. Nuechterlein very usefully explores the context and considers the parallel tactics in Erasmian rhetorical theory and practice and Holbeinian visual rhetoric. She observes that Holbein "il- Reviews 103 lustrated , or drew marginal comments" on, Myconius' copy of Praise of Folly, suggesting he read it (67). There is as well an ingenious, useful dis­ cussion of the classical anecdotes Holbein selects for the “political rhetoric" of his decorative program (now lost) of the Basel Council chamber; she also notes possible linkages of the scenes to contemporary political scandal. Still, noting that Holbein s dev otion to variety as aesthetic value resonates with Erasmus s case for the virtue of copiousness, she correctly emphasizes a source of Holbeinian variety as current artisanal practice. Nuechterlein has amassed a great deal of rhetorical information—the available theory and expressive practices—but what rhetorical use does she make of her facts? Her primary, dominating rhetorical strategy is to dichotomize: opposing Holbein's “descriptive" art to the “inventive": phys­ ical to spiritual, body to mind, objective to subjective, observation of reality to “artistic", imaginative inv ention. But are not the "descriptive" portraits “inventive"? Could not a case be made that they are powerfully innovative? True, she asserts that Holbein achiev es a “middle ground" between descrip­ tive/ inv entiv e modes; but this does not do justice to the portraits' delivery of persons simmering with intent. There is the “Young Man, Age 32", alive to the possibility of engaging the viewer; and Holbein's portrait places Thomas More as oligarch, a man of power we know as intent on the cruel repression of heretics, a repression justified in his strenuous Humanist rhetoric. On the other...

Reviews 97 catharsis and his writing vividly about his "gasping-gagging-gulping" and other persistent ailments. Hawhee's suggestive conclusion raps up her argument by focusing on Burke's famous formulation of the motion/action opposition in the eighties. Not the least of Hawhee's many accomplishments in Moving Bodies is her complication of this distinction, which she demonstrates is much more than a simple metaphysical opposition. Rather, the binary of nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action serves Burke as the basis of a "multidirectional theory" that, while positing an irreducible distinction between body and language, nonetheless shows the two terms to be parallel and complementary in the extreme (p. 166). Again and again in Moving Bodies, Hawhee chronicles how Burke worked rhetorically through the body in different discursive fields. Burke thought literally about the body and its causal relation to language, and he thought figuratively with the body in his descriptions and explana­ tions of cultural production and reception. Indeed, within Hawhee's inci­ sive rhetorical biography, the static/moving and functional/dysfunctional body emerges as the very condition of possibility for understanding Kenneth Burke as a theorv-proving, symbol-using animal. Moving Bodies deserves praise not onlv for its full-bodied picture of Burke as language thinker but also for its proposal of an alternative materialist model for doing rhetorical history. Steven Mailloux Loyola Marymount University Peter Mack, Reading and Rhetoric in Montaigne and Shakespeare, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010. 210 pp. Peter Mack sets himself an ambitious task in this short impressive book: to compare the ways Montaigne and Shakespeare composed essay and speech, respectively, following intellectual habits and practices acquired in their humanist grammar school education-and to explain why knowing this makes a difference. He begins by reviewing the reading and composition training of the schools—topical analysis from Agricola, culling of sentences, proverbs, and figures from Erasmus to furnish copious words and matter; learning the progymnasmata from Aphthonius to build complex verbal structures—then goes on to demonstrate how this training gave the writer a formal grammar by which to register the movements of a thinking mind. Thus an artificial method of reading and writing enabled the mimesis of natural human discourse. Mack adroitly showcases this insight through a close reading of De I inconstance de nos actions, whose very theme signals Montaigne's manner of stating a position—his own or his author s—then responding defensively or critically with historical and poetic examples, 98 RHETORICA contemporary anecdotes, Latin verses, and personal reflections, each of which subtly modifies its predecessor. He is Montaigne still, but becomes much more legible as we recognize the tools he's using to form his judgment. When he cited other men's words, Montaigne wrote, they were no longer theirs but his. In Chapter 2, "Montaigne's Use of His Reading," Mack shows in fine detail how Montaigne manipulates his sources to elaborate themes, strengthen them, and fashion oppositions that open them to fresh consideration. Sometimes he will wrest a line slyly from its context, as in Que philosopher c'est apprendre à mourir, where he quotes Ovid's "When I die I would like it to be in the middle of my work" to reinforce the wish that death might come amidst ordinary toil; in Amores 2.10.36, the work is sexual. In De la vanité, he quotes Horace at length on exercising moderation so as to owe little to Fortune, then drains that stance of self-satisfaction by warning, "But watch out for the snag! Hundreds founder within the harbour." More powerfully still, in Des coches he uses material from Lôpez de Gômara's Histoiregénéralle des Indes occidentales to turn its boastful message of conquest into a critique of European cruelty in the New World. In Chapter 3, "Montaigne's logic of fragment and sequence," Mack walks us through the temporal accretions and logical structures of two early essays, Book I's Des menteurs and Par diverse moyens on arrive a pareille fin, then focuses on the intellectual and emotional logic of a section of the longer De la vanité of Book III. Diagramming all three essays, he provides us with...

Reviews 437 Alberico di Montecassino, Brcviarimn de dictamine. Edizione critica a cura di Filippo Bognini, Edizione Nazionale dei Testi mediolatini XXL Serie I, 12. Firenze: Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2008. ix-cc + 199 pp. ISBN 8884502659 Il volume curato da Bognini (B.) viene a colmare una profonda lacuna presente negli studi reíativi ad Alberico di Montecassino e al genere medievale dell ars ictamnu. Si tratta, infatti, della prima edizione critica intégrale del Breviarium de dictamine, un composite manuale sull'arte di scrivere epistole , che rappresenta 1'opera di spicco di Alberico di Montecassino, moñaco attivo nell XI secolo a Montecassino, dove svolse l'attività di maestro di grammatica e retorica e diede v ita a una variegata produzione. Nonostante i vari tentativi di edizione precedenti, a tutt'oggi mancava un testo del genere. Il volume si compone di una prima parte teórica, i Prole­ gomena (pp. XJ-CC), che include le seguenti sezioni: Introduzione (pp. XIII— XXXV), Le fonti (pp. XXXVII-LXXIX), La tradizione manoscrítta (pp. LXXXI), L'anahsi delle relazione fra i manoscritti del corpus (pp. CIXI-CLXV), Bibliografía e Abbreviaziom (pp. CLXVII-CXCIV), Nota al testo (pp. CXCV-CC), e una seconda parte comprendente il testo critico (pp. 3-85), le note di commente relative (pp. 87-170) e gli indici (pp. 173-99). B. dedica il primo capitolo dell'introduzione (pp. XIII-XVIII) alia storia delle edizioni del Breviarium, sottolineando come in realtà non esista nessun lavoro plenamente soddisfacente, in quanto tutti i tentativi precedenti di edi­ zione o si sono limitati a fornire una sola parte del manuale (come hanno fatto L. Rockinger, Briefsteller iindformelbiiclier des eilften bis vierzehntenjahrhunderts (I. München: Franz, 1863), 29-46; H. H. Davis, "The 'De rithmis' of Alberic of Monte Cassino: A Critical Edition," Mediaeval Studies 28 (1966): 198-227; P. E Gehl, Monastic Rhetoric and Grammar in the Age ofDesiderius. The Works ofAlbe­ ric ofMontecassino (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976), e E J. Worstbrock, "Die Anfànge der mittelalterlichen Ars dictandi," Friihmittelalterliche Studien 23 (1989): 1-42) oppure non hanno tenuto conte di tutti i testimoni esistenti (è il caso di P. C. Groll, Das Enchiridion de prosis et de rithmis des Alberich von Montecassino und die Anonymi Ars dictandi (Freiburg im Br.: Albert-Ludwigs Universitat, 1963)). Nel secondo capitolo dell'introduzione (pp. XVIII-XXIV) vengono invece forniti un profilo biográfico di Alberico e una rassegna della sua produzione complessiva. II terzo capitolo, Genesi e tradizione del «Bre­ viarium» o «Enchiridion» (pp. XXIV-XXXIII), discute inizialmente il núcleo problemático costituito dal titolo dell'opera: sovvertendo in parte quella che è la denominazione usuale, B. ritiene che la definizione di Breviarium sia da restringere solo ai primi sei capitoli, senza pero proporre un titolo al­ ternativo da attribuire a tutto il trattato. Meritevole è, sicuramente, la presa d'atto dell'incompletezza del titolo adottato dalla tradizione precedente, ma, limitandosi poi ad adottare quella invalsa di Breviarium de dictamine, B. sembra lasciare la questione sostanzialmente insoluta. II resto del capitolo è dedicate alla storia del testo, alie fasi di formazione del trattato e alla sua circolazione in ámbito italiano e straniero. L'ultimo capitolo dell'introduzione 438 RHETORICA (pp. XXXIII-XXXV) ha come oggetto la fortuna del Breviarium e l'annessa questione dell'identificazione di Alberico come fondatore della tradizione delYars dictaminis, tesi per cui B. propende nettamente, ricollegandosi aile posizioni di predecessori quali J. J. Murphy ("Alberic of Monte Cassino: Father of the Medieval Ars dictaminis'' The American Benedictine Review 22 (1971): 129-46) e Worstbrock (pp. 1-32 dell'articolo citato sopra). La seconda sezione dei Prolegomena è occupata da uno studio accurato e scrupoloso delle fonti del trattato (pp. XXXVII-LXXIX), che si dispiega in due momenti principali: il primo dedicato alLindividuazione della loro natura (pp. XXXVII-LXXIII), il secondo ai modi in cui ciascuna di esse compare nel testo di Alberico. L'autore nconosce e discute quattro varietà principali di fonti: la Bibbia (pp. XXXVII-LI); le fonti pagane (pp. LI-LV); la letteratura cristiana (pp. LV-LVIII), la letteratura latina medievale fino all'XI secolo (Boezio, Gregorio, Isidoro, pp. LVIII-LX) e la letteratura dei "moderni" (Pier Damiani, Guaiferio e Alfano, pp...

218 RHETORICA Nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 158 pp. ISBN 9780226777481 This book is not easy to characterize. In Rhetoric, Modality, Moder­ nity Nancy Struever shapes over a decade of methodological reflection on Hobbes, Vico, Peirce, and Heidegger into a bold historical argument about the limits of philosophy and our most basic modes of being. Methodologi­ cally Struever is closest to C. S. Peirce on beliefs that generate habits of action and Bernard Williams on the limits of philosophy, but ultimately her project exceeds both because it mobilizes rhetoric first, and thus it narrates from the margins with utterly novel results for our understanding of rhetorical topics, inquiry modes, politics, and history. Within the field of rhetorical studies per se Struever's work is polemic in so far as it argues the contempo­ rary historiography of rhetoric is "the location of speculative vigor" rather than the practice (p. 98). In terms of rhetoric and philosophy the work of Michel Meyer is probably closest, though Struever's historical erudition dis­ tinguishes her work along with uncommon familiarity in Anglo-American, French, German, and Italian scholarship. Though she wastes no time rehears­ ing the standard intellectual biographies or reviewing the marginal literature, Struever builds crucial elements of her argument from the ground up, defin­ ing her terms carefully and summarizing periodically'. When Struever tells us "any study of modality must attempt to deal with rhetorical operations; any rhetorician must refine his definitions of modalitv" (p. 73) we must take her seriously indeed. Struever gives us a fresh Hobbes and Vico, now central to the modern project understood in terms of new styles of inquiry, while at the same time explaining why Hobbes and Vico have been marginalized in a tradition of political philosophy that starts from the presuppositions of moral rectitude. On Struever's polemic reading, Hobbes and Vico "could challenge, from within the Anglophone, or Western, discussion, the begged questions of the hegemonous terms and propositions: an exasperating hegemony that seems planetary" (p. 66). Discreet references to "tolerance, complexity" (p. 67) distinguish her treatment of these "pessimistic" figures—especially Hobbes—from the Straussian trajectory most recently articulated in Brian Garsten's Saving Persuasion: A Defense of Rhetoric and Judgnieiit, but more could be said. Along the way Struever takes a stab at theoretical debates around agency, showing cleverly with Hobbes how "will" is procedural and how the "impersonal" does not mean without personality (pp. 42, 54). Starting with Hobbes' crucial bridge concept "natural logic" (p. 33) Struever articulates the relationship between life science, rhetoric (as social science broadly understood), and modality (typically associated with ab­ stract domains of logic, mathematics, grammar theory). But how is Struever's life science (p. 15) distinguished from the Lebensphilosophie ridiculed by Heidegger in his rhetoric lectures that provide Struever a critical touch­ stone (Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophic: Marburger Vorlesun^ Som­ mer Semester 1924)7 Struever offers a nice explanation when she shows how Reviews 219 the animal account for Hobbes "reveals another, possible world of great explanatory value; its force trumps, its plots encompass narratives of Hu­ manistic capacity" (p. 18). In other words the human/non-human is topical (among other things), not just a matter of some extra-physical vitalis. We get another intriguing formulation when Struever writes "the web of political life is an emotional, but also a problematic, uncertain texture" (p. 19) sug­ gesting how a vibrant life science would make room for political possibility undeterred by the human/nonhuman divide. Thus Struever clearly moves beyond statistics and philosophical modality insofar as the field is subject to evaluation: "Possibility as realized in time, fills time: gives it significance and pathos in the accounts of the direction and force of civil movements" (p. 71). Fields of possibility are subject to "the essential rhetorical task of praise and blame" (p. 73) which is to say epideictic. And with this turn to epideictic rhetoric we are reminded of a traditional claim critiqued by Jeffrey Walker in Rhetoric and Poetics in Antiquity: prag­ matic discourse or what can be seen as civic oratory is the primary form of rhetoric in its preconceptual state, before it emerges into history...

Book Review| February 01 2011 Review: Between Grammar and Rhetoric: Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature (Mnemosyne Supplements 301), by Casper C. de Jonge Casper C. de JongeBetween Grammar and Rhetoric: Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature (Mnemosyne Supplements 301), Leiden: Brill, 2008. xiii + 456 pp. ISBN 9789004166776. Rhetorica (2011) 29 (1): 108–111. https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.1.108 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 Review: Between Grammar and Rhetoric: Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature (Mnemosyne Supplements 301), by Casper C. de Jonge. Rhetorica 1 February 2011; 29 (1): 108–111. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/RH.2011.29.1.108 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. © 2011 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

108 RHETORICA thinkers? No wonder Kirby opines “Quot lectores, tot Platones": There are as many Platos as there are readers of him. McCoy's reading of various dialogues is "partial" both in the sense of partisan and less-than-the-whole. But so are all readings of Plato. To disagree with McCoy over particulars strikes me as simply reflecting the fact that her Plato is not my Plato. I suspect many readers may be persuaded that the most consistent means by which Plato distinguishes sophists from philosophers is by their moral purpose without accepting that Plato's account is true (something McCoy does not claim), and perhaps insisting that the most compelling reading of certain dialogues requires us to accept that Plato did, in fact, try to distinguish the two on other grounds, including by method and doctrine. It is to McCoy's credit that she demonstrates familiarity with a broader body of literature than most philosophers who deal with Plato. Readers of Rhetorica will appreciate McCoy's account as a healthy counterpart to the long tradition ofbooks by philosophers that take every opportunity to equate sophists and rhetoric to the detriment of both. Her book should encourage historians of rhetoric who have not examined certain dialogues as part of the canon of rhetorical theory to include a greater variety of Plato's texts. Lastly, by portraying Plato as a sophisticated rhetor, McCoy facilitates a more candid assessment of what she describes as his most consistent theme. After all, if one does not believe in the forms (that is, if one is not a Platonist), then the only difference between sophist and philosopher is the latter's authentic concern for other people. The fact that Plato's rhetoric privileges Socrates in this regard no longer seems a compelling reason for us to do the same. Edward Schiappa University ofMinnesota Casper C. de Jonge, Between Grammar and Rhetoric: Dionysius of Hali­ carnassus on Language, Linguistics and Literature (Mnemosyne Supple­ ments 301), Leiden: Brill, 2008. xiii + 456 pp. ISBN 9789004166776 Dionysius of Halicarnassus was a Greek intellectual active in Rome in the last decades of the first century bce. Not all of his writings have survived, but those that do include (as well a lengthy work on Roman history) a substantial and interesting corpus of literary and rhetorical criticism, including studies of the classical orators and Thucydides, and a treatise on style (On Composition). Modern scholarship has often treated him with scant respect, but he has begun to be taken more seriously in recent decades. Building on that work, and contributing a distinctive anci original approach of his own, de Jonge has achieved a remarkable further advance in our understanding. His focus is on Dionysius' integration of ideas from the whole range of language disciplines—philology, technical grammar, philosophy Reviews 109 and rhetoric; metrics and musical theory also make appearances, though they are less central to de Jonge's enquiry. After an introductory chapter, de Jonge examines Dionysius' general conception of the nature of language; his treatment of the grammatical theory of the parts of speech, and his critical application of this theory; the theory of natural word-order; similarities and differences between poetry and prose; and Dionysius' use of experimental alterations to word order (metathesis, or "transposition") as a tool of practical criticism. One of the study's aims is to use Dionysius as a source for the state of the language disciplines in the late first century (for the most part known only from sparse fragments), and in particular to illustrate the close connections between these disciplines. But in reconstructing the intellectual context of Dionysius' work, de Jonge prudently resists the temptations (traditionally irresistible to classicists) of Quellenforschung: "instead of assigning partic­ ular passages from Dionysius' works to specific 'sources', I will point to the possible connections between Dionysius' discourse and that of earlier and contemporary scholars of various backgrounds" (pp. 7-8). This restraint does not preclude good observations on specific influences: in particular, there is a powerful argument for the view that Dionysius had read, and been influenced by, Cicero (p. 15, pp. 215-16). A second methodological commitment is the adoption of an "external rather than an...

Reviews 225 aggiornata bibliografía, offrono un panorama orgánico e articolato della straordinaria vitalita della forma declamazione e della sua adattabilitá ai contesti storici e cultuiali piú vari. 1 risultati della ricerca, innovativi e propositi\i, confeimano la finalitá dei seminari, di esplorare la complessitá di un filone di studi particolarmente fertile e ricco di spunti. Graziana Brescia Università di Foggia Delphine Reguig-Naya, Le Corps des Idées: Pensées et Poétiques du Langage dans l'Augustinisme de Port-Royal. Arnauld, Nicole, Pascal, Mme de La Fayette, Racine. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007. 836 pp. Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language, and Early-Modern Philosophy. Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 361 pp. Alberto Bordogna, Gli Idoli del Foro: Retorica e Mito nel Pensiero di Giambattista Vico. Rome: Aracne, 2007. 171 pp. Recently, a number of books have appeared that restate more precisely the terms of the debate that enveloped rhetoric in the period of its occlusion between approximately 1650 and 1800. For decades historians of rhetoric have been conscious of the broad and virulent attack on rhetoric, both as practice and as theory, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In com­ parison to its centrality in the Renaissance and its conspicuous reinvention in late modernity, the decline of rhetoric in the intervening period is striking. Yet increasingly scholars have begun to show that any history of rhetoric in this period must go beyond the headline critiques of the art of persuasion mounted by many of the leading philosophical authorities of the age. Indeed, a number of sophisticated studies have begun to appear that trace the ironic afterlife of rhetorical categories in intellectual projects that both emblematize eighteenth-century inquiry and eschew any overt allegiance to rhetoric as a disciplinary formation (see David L. Marshall, "Early Modern Rhetoric: Recent Research in German, Italian, French, and English," Intellectual History Review 17 (2007): 75-93). This review examines some of the issues involved in the problem of language in early modern thought by tracing them through recent work on Port-Royal, Locke, Vico, and—briefly—Herder. As Delphine Reguig-Naya attests time and again in her recent treatment of Port-Royal writers on the subject of language, the ideal for thinkers such as Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole is often a kind of transparency in which language becomes a window on the mind free from distortion (p. 35). Thought is presumed to exist independently of its expression and, as a result, the task of expression is to render faithfully something already fully formed internally. This basic assumption about the separability of thought and language is related to a series of other points of departure that mark the Port-Royal school and figure prominently in many early modern critiques of 226 RHETORICA rhetorical assumptions about language: that the word and not the sentence is the more basic linguistic unit (p. 39), that syntax ought to mirror the structure of thought (p. 73), that representations arrived at arbitrarily are preferable to the lines of inquiry set in motion by the myriad formulations of resemblance (p. 93), that the mind moves much more quickly than speech and on a different track (p. 187), and that the equivocation of terms is the most dangerous problem posed by the embodiment of thought in signs (p. 195). Yet precisely because Port-Royalist anthropology owed so much to the Christian sense of the fall, rhetoric is also understood to be inevitable. If the sensuality of rhetorical address is suspect, it can (and must) be used on behalf of the good. Thus, even if enthymemes are characteristic of the kind of compromises and abbreviations that the tongue must make in order to keep pace with the brain, they are also so natural that they cannot simply be legislated out of existence (p. 63). Likewise, despite its reliance on the equivocating quality of resemblance, metaphor is endemic in language (p. 470). If the traditional domain of rhetorical self-consciousness—direct oral exchange—is more dangerous because of the diversity and potency of the various sensual media in play, the Port-Royalists place an equally rhetorical emphasis on the particular form of language that was the staple of hermeneutic activity—namely, textual...

The English poet-critic John Dryden (1631–1700) took a keen interest in refining the mother tongue. As a literary critic, he was particularly concerned with the contrast between the sound of the vernacular and that of Latin. This study establishes a connection between Dryden’s observations on sound and the recommendations concerning elocution found in such seventeenth-century rhetorics as Some Instructions Concerning the Art of Oratory (1659) by Obadiah Walker, in order to appreciate Dryden’s use of sound in his own poems, I argue that one should also take into account the phonetic theory provided by contemporary grammars. The study thus pays tribute to the fact that in the age of Dryden the concerns of rhetoric and grammar were closely interwoven.

404 RHETORICA grado le scarse attestazioni oratorie dal momento che questa pseudoquintilianea é, accanto alia XIII declamazione di Libanio, l'unica che possediamo sull'argomento. Per questo motivo un'importanza preponderante viene assegnata nella declamazione al pathos, al conseguimento del quale concorre un ampio uso del color poeticus: le scelte linguistiche ed espressive richiamano ampiamente Virgilio e Ovidio, un po' meno di frequente Seneca trágico, la cui memoria era tuttavia ineludibile dato il rilievo concesso all'argomento nel Thyestes. Di notazioni di carattere lingüístico e intertestuale (in qualche caso indispensabili a comprendere un testo non privo di oscuritá nella sua paradossalitá: cf., ad es., la n. 46 a proposito di 5, 2) é ricco il commento che tuttavia, come indica lo stesso S., «non si propone come un commento esaustivo , ma come un sussidio per l'intellezione di un testo sempre impegnativo, spesso arduo» (p. 30): rivolto agli studenti oltre che agli studiosi, esso offre perció la traduzione delle citazioni greche e anche di quelle latine che non siano immediatamente comprensibili (come dei titoli stessi delle opere dalle quali sono tratte). II tono del commento, come quello della traduzione, che privilegia uno stile colloquiale, é piano ed esplicativo, con frequenti delucidazioni del senso generale del periodo, il che, al di la dell'informazione, rende il volume chiaro e di piacevole lettura. II testo seguíto, in attesa di quello criticamente riveduto dallo stesso S. di tutte le Declamationes maiores, con traduzione e note, di prossima pubblicazione per i tipi dell'UTET, é quello di Hákanson (1982), seppure con un maggior numero di modifiche rispetto al primo volume della serie; la bibliografía é ampia e aggiornata al 2003. Antonella Borgo Universita Federico II (Napoli) Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), xi + 326 pp. Jennifer Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), vi + 212 pp. When Ben Jonson, then at the height of his reputation, visited William Drummond of Hawthornden in the winter of 1618/19, he was not slow to offer the Scots poet advice. Among his more forceful admonitions we find: "He recommended to my reading Quintilian (who, he said, would tell me all the faults of my verses as if he had lived with me)" and "that Quintilian's 6, 7, 8 books were not only to be read, but altogether digested." The precise resonance of this will be lost on most modern readers, but much of it could readilybe recovered by consulting Peter Mack's excellent Elizabethan Rhetoric. There we find that in the early modern period "University statutes require the study of classical manuals of the whole of rhetoric. At Cambridge where the first of the four years stipulated for the BA was devoted to rhetoric, the set Reviews 405 texts were Quintilian, Hermogenes, or any other book of Cicero's speeches" (p. 51). The name of Quintilian is indeed so familiar that it is unnecessary to spell out that the precise reference is to his Institutio oratoria, second only to books by Cicero (or the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herrenium) among the libraries of deceased Oxford and Cambridge scholars in the era. If the Institutio was not the prescribed text-book, it seems commonly to have been one of the principal authorities cited to support the one that was (pp. 52-3). Moreover, when we examine the English-language rhetoric manuals of the time, by such as Thomas Wilson, William Fulwood, and Angel Day, we find that they are all ultimately based on the classical Latin style manual, "found principally in Rhetorica ad Herrenium book IV and Quintilian's Institutio oratoria, books VIII and IX" (p. 77). So Jonson was not quite telling his host to go back to his grammar school studies - Quintilian was more advanced than their curriculum. But he was sending him back to one of the fundamental university style manuals of the day - which may not have been entirely tactful of him. Mack explains that his book "aims to contribute to the history of read­ ing and writing by showing how techniques learned in the grammar school and at university (largely through the study of classical literary texts) were used in...

Reviews 101 Brian Vickers ed., English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999) xvi + 655pp. Brian Vickers's anthology collects modern spelling selections from the most important critical statements in English between Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke named the Governonr (1531) and Thomas Hobbes's 1675 preface to his translation of Homer's Odyssey. Dryden's critical prose, much of it published before 1675, is justifiably treated as beyond the scope of a renaissance anthology. The dominant figures are Sir Thomas Wilson, George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney, whose Defence ofPoetry is included complete, John Hoskyns, Thomas Heywood and Ben Jonson. In comparison to the two volumes of G. Gregory Smith's Elizabethan Critical Essays (1904), which it replaces, Vickers's book includes more poetry (notably Baldwin's "Collingbourne", from the Mirrorfor Magistrates, Spenser's "October" from The Shepheardes Calendar, a scene attributed to Shakespeare in which Lodowick and Edward III discuss the writing of love poetry, and John Ford's "Elegy on John Fletcher", here printed for the first time) and more rhetoric. Vickers gives less space to Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Campion and omits Thomas Lodge, William Webbe and Thomas Nashe. Vickers's introduction insists that since literature was a form of rhetoric, English renaissance literary criticism was largely prescriptive, aiming to provide the kind of help which would be useful to writers (pp. 1-6). This enables him to put rhetoric at the centre of renaissance literary criticism and justifies his extensive selections from Wilson, Puttenham and Hoskyns (the latter two particularly illustrating the figures of speech). Vickers's excellent notes show the reliance of these English rhetorics on classical sources and also on Susenbrotus's continental Latin compilation Epitome troporum ac schematorum. He might have pointed out that both Wilson's rhetoric and Angel Day's account of the figures (15 editions between them) offer a wider diffusion for the "Englished Susenbrotus" than Puttenham, whose Arte of English Poesie, was printed only once. Vickers quotes Jonson and Wilson on the importance of ethics for lit­ erature (pp. 12-13) which he links with the fashion for epideictic (excellently illustrated among the texts he includes). Perhaps Vickers ought to acknowl­ edge that the ethical teaching of the Arcadia, whose heroes have faults which run from deceit to intended rape (and against whose impulses humanist ethical education is strikingly ineffectual), is more problematic than can be summed up as a concern to embody fully-realized images of virtue and vice (p. 13). Vickers notes the way rhetoricians took examples of the figures and tropes from Arcadia, giving examples from Puttenham and Hoskyns. He had no space for Abraham Fraunce or for Fulke Greville's ethical reading ofArca­ dia. Given his rhetorical focus, Vickers might have said more about copia and amplification, or perhaps have found space for some of the English examples of dialectical analyses of texts. Part of William Temple's analysis of Sidney's Defence would have suited his selection well. On the other hand the argu­ ment that Erasmus's encomium on marriage is the source for Shakespeare's first seventeen sonnets (pp. 32-39), which justifies the inclusion of Wilson's 102 RHETORICA translation of that declamation (pp. 93-115) is not wholly convincing. The bibliography of secondary literature (pp. 627-28) needs to be extended in a revised edition. But such cavilling is hardly to the point. Vickers's introduction is lucid, wide-ranging and masterly. His notes are superb and properly acknowledge the contributions of earlier scholars. His selection of texts is enterprising, including much that is new, as well as a judicious choice of the best that is well-known. He provides a helpful glossary and user-friendly indexes to the material. This book is as useful as Russell and Winterbottom's famous selection of Ancient Literary Criticism and when it appears in paperback teachers and students of renaissance literature will find it indispensable. Peter Mack University of Warwick Manuel López Muñoz, Fray Luis de Granada y la retórica (Almería: Universidad de Almería, 2000) 222pp. Este libro es sin duda una rigurosa y documentada monografía so­ bre la aportación de Fray Luis de Granada a la...

344 RHETORICA in which he worked out his dramatistic poetics" (p. 105). As a set, the four chapters of Part One are the strongest of the collection in their consistent presentation and elaboration of Burke's later concept of aesthetics. Part Two collects three essays that consider Burke's work in the context of reader-response criticism, critical theory, and philosophy. Greig Hender­ son's "A Rhetoric of Form: The Early Burke and Reader-Response Criticism" considers Burke's concept of the formal relation between texts and audi­ ence expectations in the light of Wolfgang Iser's and Stanley Fish's readerresponse theories. Thomas Carmichael's "Screening Symbolicity: Kenneth Burke and Contemporary Theory" similarly examines Burke's theories in comparison with contemporary critical theory, suggesting ways in which Burke prefigured theorists like deMan and Lyotard vis a vis dramatism's antifoundationalist principles. Finally, Robert Wess's essay "Pentadic Terms and Master Tropes" examines A Grammar ofMotives's concluding chapter, "Four Master Tropes", in terms of its philosophical implications for dramatism. Part Three returns to more biographical material, but with the added emphasis of Burke's relation to religion. Wayne C. Booth's retrospective ac­ count of his correspondence with Burke emphasizes prominent religious undertones in the numerous "voices" Burke's letters often assumed. Burke's essay "Sensation, Memory, Imitation/and Story" represents Burke's strug­ gles towards the completion of the dramatistic model and, furthermore, is indicative of the religious undertones in Burke's theories. The final essay is Michael Feehan's discussion of Mary Baker Eddy, a prominent Christian Scientist, and her influence on Burke's Permanence and Change. Like Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, the editors of Unending Con­ versations see their collection as invoking and pluralizing "Burke's topos of the conversation" in contexts previously unvisited by Burke scholarship. As early attempts at expanding the range of application of dramatism, both texts offer useful and engaging starting points for further research. Paulo Campos The Ohio State University Peter L. Oesterreich and Thomas O. Sloane eds, Rhetorica Movet. Studies in Historical and Modern Rhetoric in Honour of Heinrich F. Plett (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 545. After yielding so many scholars the chance to discuss rhetoric, Prof. Plett s dedication to the subject is gracefully acknowledged in this collection of essays, published on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. In institutional terms his work has benefited all readers of Rhetorica: he was one of the founders of the ISHR in 1977 and served as its first Secretary General; he established the Centre for Rhetoric and Renaissance Studies at the Universitv Reviews 345 of Essen in 1989, and is an associate editor of this journal. In his own writing, such as the much-cited Rhetorik der Affekte, in the words of Thomas O. Sloane he "has welded a strong link between literary criticism and insights from the history of rhetoric". Written in English and German, Rhetorica Movet engages with the sub­ jects of three international conferences Prof. Plett organized at Essen: twothirds of it studies early modern rhetoric and poetics, with a subsidiary section on modern oratory. Some of the former contributions guide a rhetor­ ical technique smartly through an exercise programme, readying it at its classical antecedents then watching it bend and twist in a period's usage. Bernhard F. Scholz distinguishes Quintilian's view of ekphrasis as a report on the effect that a scene (not a work of art) has on the speaker's inner eye, such that the listener seems to see it too. Andrea and Peter Oesterreich examine Luther's comments on the relationship between rhetoric and dialectic. For Luther, dialectic produced faith while hope was aroused by rhetoric. Two authors take up Shakespeare's rhetoric: Wolfgang G. Muller, on the comic and persuasive uses of the enthymeme, and Peter Mack, on variants of antithesis which connect opposites structuring the last scene of The Winter's Tale. Two stylistic essays use frequency analysis on Dryden's versification (Hermann Bluhme) and mirroring structures in Spanish golden age verse (Jose Antonio Mayoral). Heiner Peters describes Sterne's explo­ ration of analogies between rhetoric and the art of fortification in Tristram Shandy. Other essays defend rhetoric. Judith Rice...

Renaissance humanists modified rather than rejected the medieval adaptation of classical rhetoric to letter writing, but they came to scorn the “barbaric” grammar of the ars dictaminis. This development followed the widespread dissemination through printing, beginning in 1471, of the Elegantiae of Lorenzo Valla and its imitators. Niccolo Perotti incorporated Valla’s approach to language in a section on epistolography of his Rudimenta grammatices, and soon letter writing and elegantiae became closely associated in textbooks. By about 1500, not only medieval writers but even humanist pioneers of an earlier generation and contemporary professionals who dared to defend established epistolary etiquette were under attack. By 1522, when Erasmus published his De conscribendis epistolis, medieval formulas had become merely comic.

Martin Camargo The Waning of Medieval Ars Dictaminis T he five essays in this special issue grew out of papers presented at the Twelfth Biennial Conference of the Inter­ national Society for the History of Rhetoric (Amsterdam, July 1999), at the session entitled "What Killed the Ars Dictaminis? and When?" four of them ably chaired by Emil Polak. That session originated in a conversation I had with Malcolm Richardson inl997, at the previous ISHR conference, in Saskatoon. We had just discov­ ered that his research on practitioners of vernacular letter writing and mine on teachers of Latin letter writing in late-medieval Eng­ land independently suggested that in England the ars dictaminis had experienced something like what paleontologists call an "extinction event" around 1470. We wondered whether the suddenness of the demise was unique to England. Beyond that, we wondered why the most widely diffused and influential variety of practical rhetoric dur­ ing the later Middle Ages, an art that was highly teachable, adaptable to almost any institutional setting, aligned with key disciplines such as grammar and the law, should have disappeared at all. Having served the communication needs of a broad range of professionals throughout Europe since the late eleventh century, had the ars dic­ taminis simply worn itself out or had new needs arisen to which it could no longer respond? With good reason, more scholarship has focused on the origins of the ars dictaminis than on its demise. It is much simpler to identify the first medieval treatise that teaches how to compose letters than to decide which letter-writing treatise is the last in that tradition. Few of the surviving ancient treatises on rhetoric provide any explicit instruction on letters: in the Latin tradition, the brief chapter on letters that concludes the Ars rhetorica of Julius Victor (fourth century AD) is virtually unique.1 While some such pedagogy clearly existed in 5 Ed. Karl Halm, Rhetores Latini Minores (Leipzig, 1863), pp. 447-48.© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XIX, Number 2 (Spring 2001). Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223, USA 1 136 RHETORICA ancient times, as it did in the early Middle Ages, the transmission of that pedagogy in textbooks, at least in the Latin West, seems to have been an invention of the late-eleventh and early twelfth centuries. By contrast, letter-writing manuals continued to be produced in great numbers through the end of the Middle Ages, throughout the Renaissance, and up to the present day Thus, to locate the "end" of the medieval tradition is to engage with all the problems attendant on drawing a clear boundary between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Not surprisingly, scholars of medieval and Renaissance epistolography and rhetoric disagree on the sharpness with which such a boundary can be drawn. The most influential proponent of an overlap between medieval ars dictaminis and Renaissance humanism has been Paul O. Kristeller, who argued that a disproportionate number of the early humanists made their living as practitioners and even teachers of the ars dictaminis.2 Their humanistic interests were distinct from their professional duties, and they saw no conflict between writing letters that followed the rules of dictamen in their public capacity even as they imitated the familiar letters of Cicero when writing to their fellow humanists. In a series of important articles and a recent book, Ronald Witt has done more than anyone to develop and extend Kris­ teller's insight, documenting the gradual displacement of medieval dictamen at all levels of letter writing, a process that was not com­ pleted in Italy before the end of the fifteenth century.3 Most scholars agree that medieval practices coexisted with the new learning for a long time. If medieval ars dictaminis did eventually "die", it generally did not do so in the way implied by the title of the original conference session: hence I have adapted the title of Johann Huizinga's famous book in order to describe more accurately the picture that emerges from the papers published here. In attempting to trace and explain the...

128 RHETORICA not place Isocrates neatly in his category of epideictic. Again, Walker's sub­ tle argument that the Ciceronian ideal eloquence draws on the "epideictic registers" (p. 83) ignores many of Cicero's own quite dismissive remarks concerning epideictic or demonstrative oratory Others may have reservations similar to these concerning Walker's reconstruction of the enthymeme, but will find it difficult not to admire his patience in testing the concept in his readings of the archaic poets. And these observations do not diminish the value of this very ambitious and challenging book. Walker's revitalization of "epideictic" should provoke greater scrutiny of the ancient understandings of that category. His blurring the traditional boundaries separating rhetoric from poetics is both innovative and cogent. The "rhetorical poetics" he proposes will no doubt be profitably applied in the study of lyric forms from many cultures subsequent to that of archaic Greece. Richard Graff University ofMinnesota Martin Camargo ed., Medieval Rhetorics of Prose Composition: Five English "Artes Dictandi" and their Tradition, Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 115, (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995), xiv + 257 pp. In studying the history of letter-writing in the medieval culture of Eng­ land, Martin Camargo has made a pioneering achievement, the first critical editions of five treatises on epistolary composition by writers in England. Al­ though four of these works can be identified as belonging to the Late Middle Ages, they nevertheless represent a significant part of England's contribution to epistolography. Camargo's introduction, a meticulously written summary of the history of letter-writing in England from the late twelfth century to the mid-fifteenth, is a model of craftsmanship and painstaking research. Descriptions of the manuscript copies, the text, the author, and the struc­ ture and contents of the work in outline form, where appropriate, precede each text. Massive compilations of variant readings comprising the apparatus criticus and large collections of references to sources and analogues along with comments related to meaning, syntax, and vocabulary follow each text. Rearranged as footnotes throughout each edited text, the variant readings and notes would have precluded an arduous task for the reader who must constantly be turning pages. The carefully edited texts presented in chronological sequence begin with Libellus de arte dictandi rhetorice by Peter of Blois, the earliest treatise on letter-writing produced in England and found only in Cambridge University Library MS. Dd 9 38. This study should contain the last reference to the Reviews 129 uncertainty of Peter's authorship, as it has recently been shown that Peter of Blois was the author of this work. An edition of the prologue in Migne, PL. 207, cols. 1127-1128 is not mentioned. The second text is Compilacio de arte dictandi by John of Briggis, probably written in the late fourteenth century at Oxford, which survives in one copy in Bodleian Library MS. Douce 52. The next text is Formula moderni et usitati dictaminis, written c. 1390 by Thomas Marke, of which the most preferred copy is in Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 237. Although a copy found in Newberry Library MS. 55 is described, Paul Saenger's A Catalogue of the Pre-1500 Western Manuscript Books ...(Chicago and London, 1989) pp. 96-97 is not cited. The fourth text is Modus dictandiby Thomas Sampson, who taught at Oxford in the second half of the fourteenth century. One complete copy is found in British Library MS. Royal 17 B XLVII. An omitted study is J. I. Catto and T. A. R. Evans, The History ofthe University of Oxford, II, pp. 524-526. The final text is the anonymous Regina sedens Rhetorica, found in three manuscripts, the fullest text of which is in British Library MS. Royal 10 B IX. By way of suggestion and not criticism, a more complete survey of the history of letter-writing in England should include Gervase, Abbot of Premontre, Robert Elenryson, Thomas Hoccleve, Richard Emsay, Ralph of Fresburn, John Wethamstede, John of Latro, Richard Kendale, Joseph Meddus, John Mason, and references to anonymous treatises as found, for example, in Manchester, Chetham's Library MS. Mun. A 3 130 and Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. lat. misc. f 49. This study...

This article reviews studies on Ramus amd Ramism published between 1987 and 2000 under the headings: Biographical and General Studies, Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, Scientific, and Ramism, this latter subdivided by geographical areas. It finds that the study of Ramus is in a very healthy state, particularly through international collaboration, though there are still considerable problems for scholars in securing access to the different versions of his works. Ramus is now presented primarily as a teacher and educationalist. The debate about Ramus's "humanism" has produced new work on his classical commentaries. Attempts have been made to achieve better definitions of Ramism.

RHETORICA 106 J. Stephen Russell, Chaucer and the Trivium: The Mindsong of the Canterbury Tales (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998), x + 266 pp. Although he acknowledges the veil of time hiding the exact nature and extent of Chaucer's education from us, J. Stephen Russell argues that the curriculum of late medieval grammar schools, the trivium (grammar, dialectic, rhetoric), thoroughly influenced and shaped die Canterbury Tales. Establishing his key assumptions early on, Russell claims that Chaucer usually relied on accessus, florilegia, and other scribally-mediated collections of classical and medieval authors rather than full texts, and consequently that Chaucer's citations of specific auctores, texts, and terms does not prove that he knew them well. Russell assumes the grammar school curriculum was Chaucer's only formal education and objects to some current, grander claims about Chaucer's knowledge of philosophy or theology. Chaucer, for example, "may have known Ralph Strode, but Strode did not teach Chaucer the Summa Logicae over dessert" (p. 8). Such claims raise questions about what limits we might want or need to place on Chaucer's capabilities, and they raise questions about how extensively we can argue for a culture's ability to write itself into individual texts. Russell does not, however, explore these issues; instead, he focuses on the trivium specifically and explores ways it shapes the Canterbury Tales. The primary value of his study is to reassert the crucial importance of medieval rhetoric and literacy studies for any reading of Chaucer. Russell provides an overview of the trivium in his first chapter, "A Medieval Education and Its Implications". Grounded in Latin grammar and readings, the curriculum taught children a "subliminal lesson that Latin was purity and precision, the vernacular chaos and compromise" (p. 11). Elements of the school curriculum that addressed dialectic or logic posited a basic model of human cognition: the agens intellectus "recognizes" objects perceived through the senses; the intellectus passivus "cogitates" on those objects. Students learned that a universal, "mental" language exists that is capable of perceiving truth but that our Reviews 107 language of actual communication in the world, "natural" language, is always inadequate and inferior to ideas. (Here some might object to Russell's simplifications of the models or to his use of more obscure semanticists like the Modistae.) In this chapter, Russell stresses the importance of the Tree of Porphyry, Aristotle's Categories, and supposition theory; together, these created taxonomies and produced particular kinds of thought patterns in students. Russell subsequently traces the influence of this curriculum on Chaucer's work, preferring to locate ré­ inscriptions rather than refusals of these models. In the General Prologue, Chaucer the pilgrim-narrator uses the Aristotle's ten categories as the groundwork for his observations. Beginning with a careful study of Chaucer's grammar, Russell develops a brilliant explication of the conceptual structure of the General Prologue: "each successive verbal act, each step in the dance of predication, involves the ubiquitous decision Quid est? and the answer to that question, Chaucer knew, is always a pas de deux between the object and the predicator, the other and the self" (p. 96). As the Chaucer the observant pilgrim "falls" into language, negotiating tensions between ideal human types and the rather motley crew before him, he cannot sustain Aristotelian formality. His own passions begin to show, and a "slippage" occurs "from natural and accidental supposition to confused determinate supposition, reflecting the narrator's fall from objectivity and reportorial responsibility" (p. 95). For Russell the Knight's Tale focuses on issues of definition, the Man of Law's Tale on "words as commerce, apostrophe (or right coinage) and...God's jurisdiction" (p. 137). The Clerk's Tale offers Russell the opportunity to explore metaphors (i.e., Walter as "the fallen creator", Griselda as a Christ-figure), rhetorical features of narrative, and the epilogue (where the Clerk explicates his own tale). For Russell, the tale is, finally, "an abstraction, a meditation on linguistic, logical, and theological arts that is almost", but not quite "abducted from complications of authorship" (p. 173). Russell does much to establish that the Canterbury Tales "explodes into life thanks to the lessons of grammar, rhetoric, and logic" (p. 202), although...

Reviews 341 Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) xvi + 477 pp. More than one historian has criticized the "history of ideas" approach: too many ideas and not enough history. Over the past twenty years, Quentin Skinner, along with fellow historians John Dunn and J. G. A. Pocock, has attempted to correct this methodological bias by developing a contextualist approach to history. The result has been a new approach to the history of ideas and a growing body of scholarship that foregrounds rhetoric as both an intellectual tradition and as a method by which to study ideas in history. In his first major work, the two volume The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, (1978), Skinner began his analysis with an account of how the study of rhetoric in the Italian universities gave rise to the Republican civic ideology that would be so important in the political and religious revolutions in Europe (and America) between 1500 and 1800. In his latest book, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes, Skinner continues these inquiries and proposes a revisionist reading of Hobbes's civic and moral philosophy; one that positions it squarely within the humanist tradition of education in Renaissance England. Historians have previously understood Hobbes's intellectual development as paralleling the larger shift from humanism to science in seventeenth century European intellectual culture. Hobbes's earlier works, including his translations of Thucydides's Histories (1629) and his abridgment of Aristotle's Art of Rhetoric (1637), evidence his humanist phase. However, like Descartes and other philosophers looking for epistemological certainty in the seventeenth century, Hobbes loses faith in the humanistic rhetorical training of his youth and applies geometrical models to moral reasoning in his Elements ofLaw and De Give, both published in the early 1640s. Skinner argues that beginning about 1650, however, Hobbes began to doubt the possibility of constructing a science of virtue and vice. Contemplating the Leviathan, Hobbes began to ask himself, "If the findings of civil science possess no inherent power to convince, how can we hope to empower them?" (p. 351). This was, of course, the same question that 342 RHETORICA classical and Renaissance rhetoricians had addressed. Hobbes found the answer to this question, Skinner contends, in rhetoricians such as Cicero and Quintilian who had argued that the dictates of ratio, or demonstrative moral reasoning, needed to be empowered by the "moving force of eloquentia" (p. 351). Thus, in the Leviathan (1651) Hobbes returned to the humanist training of his youth, arguing that eloquence is an indispensable partner to reason in the maintenance of the commonwealth. Skinner divides his book into two parts: "Classical Eloquence in Renaissance England" and "Hobbes and the Idea of a Civil Science." The first part, which can stand on its own, exhaustively reconstructs the place of classical rhetoric in the Tudor education of Hobbes's youth. The second part situates the development of Hobbes's philosophical thought in the educational context of English humanism delineated in the first part, examining Hobbes's initial enthusiasm for, later rejection of, and ultimate return to both the values and strategies of humanist rhetoric. Even if historians are not as interested in the second half of the book, Skinner has provided a great service to those interested in both classical and Renaissance rhetoric by surveying "the teaching of rhetoric in the grammar schools...and more broadly the place of the ars rhetorica in Tudor political argument" (p. 211). Historians of rhetoric in all periods will also be interested in Skinner's historiographical approach. Along with Pocock and Dunn, Skinner's work defines a specific approach to the history of ideas, known as "Cambridge contextualism," which he summarizes as "trying to place [historical] texts within [historical] contexts...to identify what their authors were doing in writing them" (p. 7). Following the lead of Ludwig Wittengenstein and later speech act theorists like John Austin, Skinner and other Cambridge contextualists separate the locutionary (propositional) and illocutionary (rhetorical) dimensions of language. They argue that to situate a text in context and understand its historical meaning, historians need to examine not only the sense and reference of words—what the author is saying—but...

RHETORICA 338 for most individual readers. I am happy to report that the International Sales Manager of Brill subsequently wrote to me to say that, as a result of my review, the cost of those books was being reduced to 90.00 dollars each. DK is still expensive, but much less so than these others were; and where a bilingual edition is involved, it is understandable that overhead costs would be higher. And, once the purchase is made, the reader may luxuriate in the sumptuous quality of a Brill edition. JOHN T. KIRBY Purdue University Vivian Salmon, Language and Society in Early Modern England (The Netherlands: John Benjamins, 1996) 276 pp. The twelve essays reprinted in this collection demonstrate a variety of approaches to, and treatments of, the topics of language and society in Early Modern England. The subjects range from language concerns of the sixteenth-century England, to the development of female rhetoric by figures such as Bathsua Makin, to the discussion of the actual use of language in a specific socio­ political context, such as the early Anglican church. Although Salmon writes from a linguist's perspective, her well-researched material allows the reader to place rhetoric within a broader context. Her descriptions of historical figures and their contributions are well defined, especially in relation to their connections to logic, rhetoric, and grammar. She includes social, historical, religious, and political details that influenced linguistics and rhetoric. Her theory is balanced nicely with concrete examples, such as enhancing foreign language instruction by the rhetorical considerations of gesture and tone. Salmon looks at the connection between pronunciation and rhetoric, claiming that "sounds changed in accordance with certain figures of rhetoric, for example, prosthesis, apharaesis, epenthesis, and syncope" (p. 8). Other figures, she notes, cautiously retain the classification of sound changes by reference Reviews 339 to rhetorical figures" (p. 8). She also examines challenging issues in translating the Bible, teaching the native tongue to foreigners, and finding the Adamic language. In chapter one Salmon emphasizes the rhetorical elements of syntax. She discusses the seventeenth-century belief that meaning is a nonverbal concept in the mind. Some elements of that concept might remain unexpressed in speech, or even actively "suppressed". Priscian used the term "subaudiri" to refer to sentence elements that are "understood" but not spoken; Salmon notes that traditional rhetoric came to terms with this view by distinguishing between simple and rhetorical syntax, a distinction that was familiar to seventeenth-century scholarship (p. 17). Salmon traces this rhetorical concern with syntax through Gill, Wilkins, Linacre, Sanctius, Lancelot, Cooper, Lane, and Harris. Salmon spends several chapters focusing on the power of words. Chapter three is constructed on three main points: the natural or conventional origin of words (Platonic/Aristolian debate, Socrates, and Hermogenes); the status and power of words; and the meaning of translation, especially when translating the Holy Scriptures. Chapter four talks about language properly to be employed in the liturgy and sacred books of the church. More specifically, Salmon mentions the developments of two kinds of sermons: the "typical Protestant type of Hugh Latimer and Laurence Chaderton that was plain and colloquial" (. 94); the other type was "typical of High Church divines influenced by the rhetorical style of much of sixteenth-century poetry and prose, and in the seventeenth century in the witty and metaphysical style of John Donne, directed at more sophisticated hearers" (pp. 94-95). In chapter five Salmon notes that some seventeenth-century authors like Wilkins argued for a plain writing style because congregations had difficulty understanding the highly rhetorical style adopted by Anglican preachers in the later sixteenth century (p. 103). Bedell was also convinced that his Protestant congregation got lost in the incomprehensible vernacular and the use of rhetorical and ambiguous language (p. 101). Of significance to rhetoricians is chapter six, "Wh- and Yes/No Questions: Charles Butler's Grammar (1633)". Butler's work influenced eighteenth-century rhetorical grammarians like 340 RHETORICA John Walker (1785) who in turn influenced the training of elocutionists. Salmon observes that previous grammarians placed "question" in a section on syntax, but that Butler was the first scholar to place "question" in a chapter on punctuation where he looked at "tone...

In the Christian society and culture of England before the Norman Conquest literary education was centred on grammar. The extant texts reflect an educational system which by no means neglected rhetorical education—but the classical ars bene dicendi was apparently basically unknown. Anglo-Saxon England thus provides a test case for the continuation and elaboration of alternatives for classical rhetorical teaching. It is argued that, besides the influence of pedagogical considerations and Germanic poetical devices, the background of Anglo-Saxon rhetorical strategies is to be sought in an extended grammatical curriculum. Instruction in the praeexercitamina may have been included in this curriculum. The figures and tropes contained in the grammars for the purpose of text interpretation were certainly studied, and they were also employed in the production of literature. Of utmost importance was the creative use of rhetorical techniques which were deduced from model texts by way of grammatical enarratio.

Reviews 333 L'inventaire final, plus large que la matière traitée (il englobe même les"histoires" qui ne servent pas d'exemples) complète admirablement l'exposé, en trois étapes: les exemples sont d'abord classés, selon l'ordre traditionnel des oeuvres de Grégoire, avec tous les critères de nature rhétorique exploités dans les deux premières parties; une deuxième liste suit l'ordre alphabétique, en distinguant matériau biblique et matériau "païen"; une troisième obéit à l'ordre traditionnel de la Bible. Un livre majeur, donc, sur l'oeuvre de Grégoire de Nazianze, et un livre exemplaire, pour des enquêtes analogues sur d'autres auteurs. Alain Le Boulluec Transmundus, Introductiones dictandi, ed. and trans. Ann Dalzell (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1995) x + 254 pp. Considering how few among the hundreds of medieval arts of letter writing have been printed at all, the appearance of such a text in a critical edition is in itself an important event. Ann Dalzell's edition of Transmundus' Introductiones dictandi is especially significant because it is the first edition of an ars dictandi to be accompanied by a modern English translation of the Latin text. As Dalzell points out, the treatise merits editing and translating for several reasons: (1) it provides a comprehensive introduction to the ars dictaminis, (2) its use of classical rhetoric illuminates the "state of classical learning in the late twelfth century and contemporary attitudes toward it," and (3) its author's service as protonotary of the paper chancery invests its contents with unusual authority (pp. ix-x). An additional attraction is that the treatise is presented in the form of a letter and frequently observes the rules for the Roman cursus and the other precepts of style that it teaches. Like Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, with which it is exactly contemporary, the Introductiones dictandi is at once about the art of letter writing (de arte) and an example of that art (ex arte). 334 RHETORICA Dalzell provides a substantial introduction in which she treats under separate headings the life of Transmundus, as well as the composition, the sources, the style and syntax, the manuscripts, the editing, and the translating of the Introductiones dictandi. Like the equally full commentary that follows the edition and translation, the introduction not only provides the essential information about the text being edited but also about its generic context. In fact, the comprehensiveness of the text itself, the richness of the commentary, and the presence of a translation combine to make Dalzell's book an ideal introduction to the genre of the ars dictandi for advanced students of rhetoric. Among the most important scholarly contributions of the introduction is its precise description of the treatise's complex transmission. According to Dalzell, two versions of the introductiones dictandi survive. The earlier version is preserved in four copies, each of which differs from the others in significant ways. Dalzell believes that this version was composed while Transmundus was still at the papal chancery, possibly as early as the 1180s, and was subsequently revised at Clairvaux, after Transmundus had joined the monastic community there. Sometime after 1206 but still early in the thirteenth century, a second version was produced by Transmundus or someone else, probably at Clairvaux. This later, revised and expanded version is preserved in at least twelve copies, which exhibit greater consistency among themselves than do the copies of the first version. Although Version II almost certainly contains material not contributed by Transmundus, it is the version of the treatise that was most widely used and hence is the one edited and translated by Dalzell. To illustrate the relationships among the four copies of Version I and between Versions I and II, she also edits and translates the initial treatment of Style (appositio) from each copy of Version I in an appendix. Version II of the Introductiones dictandi, Dalzell further shows, is itself divided into an elementary course and an advanced course. The elementary course (sections 1-11, in her edition) sketches the basic rules on epistolary style and the parts of a letter; the advanced course is...

Reviews 339 preachers' macaronic compositions, recently well-documented by Siegfried Wenzel. All ingeniously augment the means of sharing Christian wisdom among the laity. Georgiana Donavin Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, The Empty Garden: the Subject of Late Milton (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) xvii + 515 pp. Sharon Achinstein Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994) xv + 272 pp. Hardly any student of modem American politics would fail to agree that the mass media—specifically television—play a key role in structuring political discourse. Whether or not individual politicians and their media representatives actually formally study mass communication, all know the forms, demands, and constraints of television. Failure to master the medium usually results in failure to win an election or carry the day in a discussion of public policy. Further, the medium creates a series of expectations in viewers, expectations that must be met or consciously manipulated and subverted by any political writer or speaker. Now, imagine reading a scholarly book on modem political discourse that may mention television but does not examine its characteristics as a medium or the viewing habits or demographics of the audience, and yet claims to study "media". Such is frequently the situation in current studies of the literature, politics, and political discourse of seventeenth-century England. The word "rhetoric" often appears in titles, and indeed in authors' arguments, but, on inspection, a reader hoping to find discussion of the ars bene dicendi as an epistemic approach to structuring political language will be disappointed. Too often "rhetoric" simply becomes a synonym for "language" or "trope", rather than a means of inquiry into the workings of argument. 340 RHETORICA The reasons for scholarly attention to political language in the period are manifest. The century claims what for many historians is the first modern revolution, complete with a nascent public sphere, people beginning to perceive themselves as public actors, and, most importantly, a free press that empowered both. It claims many writers engaged in pamphleteering who at any time would rank with the best in the language, from William Prynne and John Lilbume to Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. Milton's stature as a poet guarantees attention to his political prose and to the politics of his great poems. Moreover, without question, the educational practice of the century, beginning in the grammar school, was relentlessly rhetorical. Rhetoric thus saturated seventeenth-century writers and readers as much as television does the modern political nation. The period is thus ripe for rhetorical analysis. I examine here two recent exemplars of Milton studies that illustrate the gulf between "rhetorical study" and knowledge of rhetoric that pervades current seventeenth-century scholarship. Both books have been extensively, and largely favorably, reviewed in reputable journals. One received the James Holly Hanford Award from the Milton Society of America as the best book on Milton published in 1994. Both are learned and engaging, and both offer valuable insights into Milton's work. But the arguments of both are compromised by the writers' apparent unfamiliarity with the entire field of the history of rhetoric. In one case, the author's knowledge of rhetoric is limited; in the other, the author lacks any comprehension of rhetorical theory, principle, or practice. My purpose here is to highlight the ways in which this blind spot affects the theses of these two otherwise powerful books, and to call attention to two recent studies of other periods that admirably achieve, through their grasp of rhetoric, what the Miltonists attempt. In The Empty Garden, Ashraf H. A. Rushdy offers a study of the Jesus of Paradise Regained as founder of a religious culture that offers a "new way of knowing and a new way of being" (xi) through self-knowledge gained by "reading", broadly defined as interpreting both the written word and the "text" of the world. Through his creation of Jesus, and his contrast of that Jesus to the Samson of the companion work Samson Agonistes, Milton becomes Reviews 341 a powerful cultural critic, ultimately arguing that the relationship between self-knowledge and self-representation may best be negotiated through politics. As Rushdy makes abundantly clear in his first chapter, "'Confronting the Subject: The Art of...

RHETORICA 346 parliamentarians' polemical methods new? How was the "revolutionary reader" an improvement on the grammar-schooltrained reader? Was there ultimately such a creature as a "revolutionary reader"? For a student of the history of seventeenth-century rhetoric, the most striking irony of these two books is the way in which they embody the great divide in perception that, as Richard Lanham has recently reminded us, occurred with the advent of Ramism. Despite the paucity of his rhetorical discussion, Rushdy's assumptions about the epistemic nature of the rhetorical self are profoundly humanistic, Achinstein's limiting of "rhetoric" to tropes, figures, and entertainment, supremely Ramist. In an age that demands critical self-consciousness, it is appropriate to expect that scholars of seventeenth-century "rhetoric" examine their own understanding of the term, and bring to their work an awareness not merely of current theoretical trends but of the theory and practice that pervaded their subjects' world. For this kind of study, models abound. To name only two examples, I call readers' attention to Mary Thomas Crane's Framing Authority (1993), which compellingly shows how school training in the practice of keeping commonplace books radically structured sixteenth-century poetic practice, and Garry Wills's Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992), which, through brilliant rhetorical analysis, demonstrates how Lincoln drew from the oratorical practice of the day to transform American political thought. Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler Emmanuel Bury, Littérature et politesse: l'invention de l'honnête homme (1580-1750), Perspectives littéraires (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996) 268 pp. Emmanuel Bury's ample and ambitious synthesis seeks to link the elaboration of norms of social behaviour in early modem France not so much to large-scale social processes (though these are not ignored) as to the emergence of a new literary culture from the humanist inheritance. It shows how literature functioned Reviews 347 as a pedagogic agency in the broad sense, and thus enables a fuller comprehension of the subtlety of what neo-classical poetics meant by 'instruction'. The most fruitful emphasis of the introductory chapter on humanism is on the role of procedures of reading in the constitution of an individual and cultural memory: above all the absorption of exempla and sententiæ, particularly from classified anthologies of ancient writing. Not only ethical ideals are thus nourished, but practices of writing: the presentation and re-presentation of moral truth in fragmentary form, or in new, often fictional or dramatic, contexts. 'Truth' here, of course, means the truths of doxa; and the empire of the probably is consolidated over prose fiction and theatre, as conceived and produced from the 1630s on: the very period in which the notion of honnêteté becomes established. 'Descriptive' mimesis constantly slides into the 'prescriptive' inculcation of norms. The romance (d'Urfé, Scudéry) is a kind of laboratory for the development and testing of moral codes, equipping readers to participate in the social world; comedy, Balzac and others argued, offered unobtrusive instruction through the presentation of character. Aspects of this ideal of moral and social formation through literary culture survive into the eighteenth century, but Bury well brings out the various pressures that eventually transform it almost beyond recognition. The rejection by Pascal, Descartes, and Malebranche of the logic of the vraisemblable and the humanist cultural memory in favour of an individual apprehension of truth is suggestively linked to the emergence of a literature (as in Marivaux) that appeals to communicable individual experience rather than a doxal culture shared by author and reader. Although retaining the sense of literature as morally formative, Marivaux's conception of style and personality breaks radically with the humanist inheritance: he is a major figure in Bury's global narrative of the displacement of humanist paideia by the modern conception of 'literature'. The affinity between literature and honnêteté as an ideal of sociability is jeopardised when late seventeenth-century writing takes up the criticism of society and especially of the court, a theme also of contemporary discourses of honnêteté which define it more and more in terms of probity. The analysis is pursued down to Rousseau, in whom the suspicion of culture and of society is most 348 RHETORICA radically voiced...

Reviews 233 dramatic characters and explain their actions as though they were real people. The Socrates Kastley portrays seems less like the Socrates of Plato than that of Cameades's Academy. And if Persuasion shows us how, in the wake of social transformations, it became necessary for women to discover how to speak, cannot the same be said of men? On the other hand, Kastley's argument that Sartre quietly allows Kant in by the back door and his detailing of the paradoxical results of de Man's favoring knowledge over action are both persuasive. Even more impressive is the subtlety with which he thinks through the problems posed by post-Enlightenment thinking to reject the temptation to find some place to stand "outside the rhetorical flux" and move, rather, toward a world in which we act, toward a community that is pluralized, temporal, and a provisional form of sharing, where we might begin to wrestle with the injustice and injury that are inevitable, but not insurmountable. Kastley's "refutations" are, in the end, affirmations; and for those he is to be commended. THOMAS M. CONLEY University ofIllinois Gabriele Knappe, Traditionen der klassischen Rhetorik im angelsachsischen England (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1996), xx + 573 pp. According to Gabriele Knappe, previous efforts to assess the knowledge, use, and function of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England have failed to distinguish between the tradition of ancient rhetoric proper and elements of rhetorical instruction taken over by grammarians. The goal of the former was the production of prose texts designed to have a specified effect on an audience, while the principal goal of the latter was the proper interpretation of texts and only secondarily their production. Systematic evaluation of all available evidence indicates little or no direct knowledge of classical rhetoric per se in England from the seventh through the eleventh centuries: Knappe demonstrates convincingly that the sources of "rhetorical" instruction available in early medieval England invariably belong to the grammatical tradition. RHETORICA 234 The study is divided into four large parts. Part I raises the central problem of the different traditions of classical rhetoric, surveys and critiques previous research on classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England, and concludes with a brief overview of the book’s goals and procedures. In Part II, Knappe sketches the major developments in the teaching and transmission of rhetoric in late antiquity, with particular emphasis on the ways in which the teaching of the figures was incorporated into grammatical textbooks, such as that of Donatus; into other works, notably Cassiodorus's Expositio psalmorum, that may have been used in teaching grammar; and, along with the progymnasmata, into a grammar instruction that was broadened to include not only "correct" but also "good" speaking and writing and even the production of texts. The heart of the book documents the reception of the traditions of classical rhetoric in Anglo-Saxon England. Drawing on the evidence of surviving insular manuscripts, book lists, and contemporary testimony, Knappe concludes that the Anglo-Saxons appear not to have participated in the transmission of ancient rhetorical texts. Even the single work by an Anglo Saxon author that is directly based on such texts, Alcuin's Dialogus de rhetorica et de virtutibus, was written and circulated on the Continent. In his panegyrical verses on York, Alcuin claims that archbishop Alberht taught Ciceronian rhetoric; but if this is true, no other traces of that teaching survive. By contrast, Knappe finds abundant evidence for the availability and use of grammatical texts with rhetorical contents. In considerable detail, she shows that texts such as Bede's Liber de schematibus et tropis, Elfric's grammar, and Byrhtferth's Manual derive their treatments of the figures exclusively from grammatical sources. Part IV approaches the question of influence from the perspective of text production, especially in the vernacular. Although Knappe is able to make some distinctions regarding rhetorical techniques—for example, writers of prose prefer figures that enhance clarity and accuracy, whereas writers of verse are more likely to employ figures for aesthetic effect—the considerable overlap with native Germanic traditions makes it impossible in most cases to prove that a given passage was influenced by rhetorical doctrines taught in the context...

RHETORICA 230 unify. As in the past, he continues to argue for the multiple moments of composition theory. George Pullman Georgia State University Kathy Eden, Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 119 pp. Those interested in the evolution of particular discursive practices that helped shape antiquity, especially the theoretical relationship between reading and interpretation, will benefit from this study in locating classical antecedents that ally rhetoric and hermeneutics. Unlike most studies of hermeneutics that spring from the Germanic tradition of Schleirmacher and Dilthey or the recent perspectives of Gadamer or Riceour, this study prizes the rhetorical precedent of an ancient mode of reading, known as interpretatio scripti, as crucial to the development of the field study of hermeneutics. By tapping into this rhetorical tradition largely overlooked in philological studies, Eden historically discerns and synthesizes a convincing case for the recognition and study of interpretatio scripti as a meaning making agent common to both the rhetorical and hermeneutical enterprises that have gained renewed prominence in humanistic inquiry today. In what may be the most valuable portion of the book, the first chapters construct the significance of interpretatio scripti as a model of reading that Roman rhetoricians inherited—from the Hellenistic rhetorical tradition—as "a loosely organized set of rules for interpreting the written materials pertinent to legal cases" (p. 7). As a point of origin, Eden moves decisively to Cicero, particularly De inventione and De oratore, in contextualizing how transforming character of interpretatio scripti often complicates treatments of proof and style in his rhetorical manuals, and plays a deciding role in appropriating legal arguments between the intention (voluntas) and the letter (scriptum) of an author or text under scrutiny. Interpretation, to Cicero, is understood in terms of controversy; thus interpretation theory (and by later implication Reviews 231 hermeneutics) finds a habitual home in rhetorical theory. Eden notes that while Cicero was not the first one to do this, his work has enjoyed the widest reception and can be seen as a generative point from which to track the influence of interpretatio scripti in her book's subsequent chapters. Such a discursive heredity becomes convincing as Eden links the interpretive principles of interpretatio scripti to the classical arts of poetry and grammar as seen through Plato, Aristotle and Plutarch. The prerequisite study of grammar, in classic times, is seen to develop similar concerns as its rhetorical counterpart in the coordinating and complementary notions of decorum and oeconomia which prove crucial in "underlying the hermeneutical concept of contextualization, historical and textual, respectively" (p. 41). Eden extends her coverage of the influence of interpretatio scripti through the Christian appropriation of classical culture, in Basil, Paul and most notably in Augustine. Amidst this backdrop of Patristic hermeneutics, Eden achieves a fine sense of dialogue between the concepts of Cicero, Quintillian and Augustine, and accommodates both a spiritual and historical order that extends into the rehabilitating humanism of Erasmus. Though less substantial than the first part of the book, the final few chapters bring the selected work of Philip Melanchthon and Flacius's Clavis scripturae sacrae into the interpretive landscape as a whole. In the end, this book serves a vital role in establishing the credibility of classical scholarship in legitimizing what Ricoeur would call the hermeneutics of tradition. As a centerpiece in the debate between the role of equity and spirit in the ancient act of reading, interpretatio scripti emerges as a meaningful landmark in charting the never-ending task of interpretation, and suggests an expansion in the intellectual history of both hermeneutics and rhetoric. As an instalment in the Yale Studies in Hermeneutics, this book works an effective balance between written economy and great scholarly depth. Such a stylistic blend should provide ample access points for both experts and novices interested in theories of interpretation, antiquity and rhetoric. RICHARD A. MILLER Bowling Green State University ...

Gualtiero Calboli From Aristotelian \é£iç to elocutio 1. Introduction o ver the last few years it has become fashionable to criticize Robert Pfeiffer for overestimating the contribution of the Stoics and underestimating drat of the Peripatetics towards the development of rhetoric, grammar and philology. In fact Aristotle deserves the credit for connecting rhetoric with dialectic and poetry, without losing sight of its practical employment in the assembly and courts of law. Another development of rhetoric which occurred after Aristotle and perhaps Theophrastus was the development of an excessive number of rules, especially in the doctrine of tropes and figures of speech. That happened during the second century B.C. on the island of Rhodes and may be considered a kind of Asianic rhetoric. It was introduced into Rome through at least two handbooks, Cicero's De Inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium. However, in 55 B.C., at the beginning of his Platonic dialogue De Oratore, Cicero disowned his early work {De orat. 1.5). 1 R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship, From the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 2 This is the opinion of F. Montanari in La philologie grecque à l'époque hellénistique et romaine, ed. F. Montanari (Vandoeuvres - Genève: Fondation Hardt, Entretiens XL, 1994), p. 29. I agree with him but recall that Pfeiffer also pointed out the importance of Aristotle and the Peripatos for Hellenistic philology: cf.z e.g., pp. 192; 197 of the Italian translation by M. Gigante and S. Cerasuolo (Napoli: Macchiaroli, 1973). 3 The origin and development of the doctrine of tropes and figures is not clear. It has been investigated by K. Barwick, Problème der stoischen Sprachlehre und Rhetorik (Berlin: Abhandlungen der sàchsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philol.-hist. Kl., Bd. 49, Hft. 3, Akademie-Verlag, 1957), pp. 88-111, but must be reconsidered now (see below)._____________ __ __________© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XVI, Number 1 (Winter 1998) 47 RHETORICA 48 The date of composition of De Inventione is about 87 B.C., only one year after Cicero heard Philon of Larissa in Rome, as has been recently noted by C. Lévy.4 5 Both Cicero's De Inventione (8887 B.C.) and the Rhetorica ad Herennium (86-82) were composed at a time when the democratic party dominated Rome and before Sulla came back from the Orient (82). I do not want to discuss the political position of the author of Rhetorica ad Herennium here, although the idea that he was a democrat has recently been confirmed by G. Achard and J.-M. David.6 In the period between the Ars Rhetorica written (but not completed) by the great orator M. Antonius (about 96 B.C.)7 and Sulla's dictatorship (82), there are about fifteen years of rhetorical activity8 during which the censorial edict by L. Crassus and D. Ahenobarbus of 92 was ineffective. This edict, as has been demonstrated by Emilio Gabba, became effective with Sulla who continued the action that the nobility's faction had brought under the law proposed by the tribune Livius Drusus in 91 B.C. in order to reorganize the Roman State.9 We know that the orator L. Crassus, a teacher of Cicero, was another of the promoters of this law but died before its approval. After considering Gruen's position on this subject, I 4 Cf. Cic. Brut. 306; Tusc. 2.9. When did Philo come to Rome? The answer is given by W. Kroll in his Commentary ad loc., p. 217f.: "Die glücklichen Erfolge des Mithridates verleiteten die Athener, an deren Spitze sich der Peripatetiker Aristo stellte, im J. 88 von den Rômem abzufallen und sich mit Archelaus, dem Feldherm des Mithridates, zu verbünden. Die Optimaten, welche treu zu den Rômem hielten, mufiten nun flüchten". Cf. also J.-M. David, Le patronat judiciaire au dernier siècle de la republique romaine (Roma: Ecole Française de Rome, Palais Famèse, 1992), pp. 371 f. C. Lévy, "Le mythe de la naissance de la civilisation chez Cicéron", in Mathesis e Philia, Studi in onore di...

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...

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...

Abstract: Eberhard the German's Laborintus, the first of the artes poetriae to be printed, has received comparatively little scholarly attention. Both Kelly and Murphy have noticed that the work conveys a pedagogical emphasis. This essay, however, demonstrates that Laborintusis not merely a manual for teachers of verse. Rather, the work is a delightful maze of verse, grammar, and rhetoric, a labyrinth of learning containing an allegorical account of grammar,poesy, and rhetoric. On one level, the rhetorical figures are used as inventional schemes for the composition of verse in proper meter. However, the examples used in Eberhard's account of the rhetorical figures also contain Christian homilies on faith and action that are exemplary primers for teachers. The homilies in tum underscore Eberhard's pedagogical theory, which is ultimately the key to his labyrinth.