Abstract: This article argues that in his Philippos (Isoc. 5.149), Isocrates reinterprets the Socratic daimonion , transforming it from an inner ethical sign into a divine power legitimizing political action. Embedded in the speech's broader anti-Socratic polemic, this alteration aligns with Isocrates' conception of the politikos logos as a practical, audience-directed discourse. The daimonion passage thus exposes the philosophical foundations of Isocratean rhetoric: divine sanction for the interdependence of logos and praxis . By invoking a divine mandate that unites logos and praxis , Isocrates presents his logoi as performative texts capable of guiding Philip II of Macedon toward the common political good of Greece.

Abstract: This study explores the moral character ( ēthos ) of metic litigants and non-litigants in select forensic orations of public nature in the Demosthenic corpus and argues the ad hoc socio-economic standing of metics, their legal status, and their occupations were critical factors in constructing elaborate and complex metic portrayals (individual or collective) in forensic narratives. The evidence shows negative portrayals of metic men and women, but metics were not invariably depicted as the malevolent "other." Taking as its starting point the Aristotelian teachings about constructing ēthos in forensic narratives, which ought themselves to be ēthikai , this analysis draws attention to legal status as a critical factor in constructing moral character, and in more nuanced and complex ways than contemporary, 4th-century BCE rhetorical theory would advise. Provided these portrayals were curated to appeal to large panels of citizen dikastai , these rhetorical portrayals of metics in court may shed light on ambivalent Athenian attitudes towards metics.

Abstract: This paper examines the reception of the pseudo-Quintilianic Declamationes maiores in the 14th and 15th centuries, highlighting in particular the important role of Lorenzo Valla's Elegantie lingue Latine as a medium for humanistic engagement with these rhetorical texts. Calderini, teaching at the Studium of Rome, used the Declamationes maiores as a study text, demonstrating a practical application of these declamations in the context of humanist pedagogy. Poliziano, on the other hand, although he did not engage directly with the Declamationes maiores , still occasionally cited the controversiae in his commentaries. Together, these examples illustrate that, for humanists of the late fifteenth century, access to, understanding of, and engagement with the Declamationes maiores were often mediated by Valla's Elegantie , which served as a conduit for their interpretative practices and as a source for quotations.

Abstract: Cicero's preface to De inventione 1 shows that his early understanding of the interdependence of philosophy and oratory, with particular emphasis on the importance of philosophy, was more advanced than it is usually thought. The thesis or the general question that opens the treatise showcases Cicero's ability to present Greek technical knowledge about rhetoric as a part of a broader—we may say philosophical—problem, foreshadowing the "thetic method" showcased in his later works. Both the preface to De inventione 1 and Cicero's criticism of Hermagoras's views on thesis at De inventione 1.8 reflect the influence of Philo of Larissa, suggesting that the treatise was not finished before 88 BCE.

Abstract: Robert Herrick's central oxymoronic trope in Hesperides (1648) of diligent negligence has traditionally been understood in general aesthetic terms. This essay argues that this trope, particularly as evoked in the poem "Delight in Disorder," relates especially to the art of rhetoric and that it had special currency in the language of curiosity deployed in the rhetorical discourse of the period, especially in the area of preaching. The essay begins by situating Herrick's poem in relation to contemporary rhetorical thought distilled, from Cicero via Justus Lipsius, in John Hoskyns's Directions for Speech and Style and expressed in the sartorial metaphor of Herrick's poem. It then turns to contemporary homiletic discourse to tie these ideas into the language of curiosity as applied to questions of arrangement ( dispositio )—the central concern in the poem's examination of appeal in female "dress"—arguing that it is this rich rhetorical context that provides the energeia of Herrick's poem.

Abstract: In this paper, I offer a comprehensive interpretation of Pliny the Younger's discussion of amicitia in chapters 85–87 of his Panegyricus to Trajan. In these paragraphs, Pliny sets out his views on imperial friendship, illustrates them with an example of Trajan's behaviour, and places amicitia in broader political context. By analysing Pliny's conception of friendship against the wider backdrop of the Roman literary-philosophical tradition on amicitia , I show that this passage should not merely be considered a digression. Rather, Pliny's treatment of amicitia is an integral part of his rhetorical strategy because it, like the rest of the speech, emphatically pits Trajan against Domitian and demonstrates the former's virtuous nature.

Abstract: It is the role of scholars to shine the light of tradition on problems of today so the value of the rhetorical tradition is clear to a larger audience of students, citizens, and non-experts, even as these same scholars undertake the difficult, demanding work of unearthing, reinterpreting, and understanding anew the buried wisdom of that tradition. This is a rallying cry to reclaim the history of rhetoric as a theory of persuasion about contingency: to comprehend anew how the essential unpredictability of human judgment and action are guided by the power of words.

Abstract: This article offers a new interpretation of the near absence of personal naming of opponents in speeches made in the classical Athenian Assembly, casting the phenomenon as a discursive strategy which allows the orator of the moment to recommend his own superior qualities and reject his opponents not as individuals but as an undifferentiated (and uniformly wrong) mass. The article then examines Demosthenes’s use (and the sincerity of his commitment to his use) of this strategy to pursue this pair of persuasive aims across his Assembly career, and as part of the rhetorical toolkit with which he manages his transition from “outsider” status in the late 350s and early 340s BCE to a position of steadily growing political influence from 346 BCE onwards.

Abstract: In the early seventeenth century, rhetoric was understood as the art of lying. As poetry was a branch of rhetoric, this perception of untruthfulness made the question of religious poetry controversial. George Herbert confronts the question of religious poetry's moral status as rhetoric, treating the problem of sincerity versus artful language not as an irreconcilable opposition but as a creative tension. Herbert transforms cultural ambivalence about rhetoric into a sophisticated poetics by creating a sincerity effect in his poetry, thereby legitimizing religious verse. In short, Herbert achieves a sincerity effect in his rhetoric by acknowledging rhetoric's limited ability for sincerity.

Abstract: I argue that lists of Sumerian proverbs (mostly ca. 1800 BCE) were not anthologized either as collections of wise sayings nor as curricular tools, but as handbooks used for competitive praise-and-blame debates in intermediate scribal education. Positing a fundamentally dialogic purpose for the collections points us towards rhetorical performance as a goal of Mesopotamian education. A model of the game illustrates how the collections had the capacity to support a wide variety of rhetorical maneuvers. Both comparative and culture-specific evidence demonstrate how the "mixed" material of Sumerian proverbs and the rules it taught were appropriate for the instruction of young Babylonians in the politics of formal speech.

Abstract: Like other ancient and medieval writings, Bonaventure's Soliloquium ( c . 1259) aims not only to instruct, but also to move, exercise, and reform its readers. In fact, it is partly designed as a therapy for moral incontinence. Among its many elements, the therapy predominantly comprises several descriptions of death, judgment, and hell. Yet Bonaventure nowhere elaborates on the disease he is trying to cure nor why or how certain eschatological descriptions are supposed to work against it. Without such understanding, however, readers ignore how to engage with the writing, which makes its projected therapy inconsequential. The question then becomes: How are those descriptions formed to fulfill their role and how should the audience approach them? The present investigation attempts to answer this problem. The hypothesis is that rhetoric, especially its teachings on evidentia , plays a central part in the crafting of the eschatological descriptions and in their ability to function as therapeutic devices. Moreover, in researching this hypothesis, the investigation deals with three broader points. First, it shows the importance of images in Christianity insofar as they lead the attention from the invisible to the visible, instead of the other way around. Second, it argues that rhetoric is fundamental to Bonaventure's overall thinking. And third, it counters the widespread conception of religious fear as synonymous with dread and anxiety. It explains that Bonaventure had a more complex view of fear, which allowed him to help readers navigate through painful eschatological worries slowly toward positive, selfless, and loving fear of God.

Abstract: This article offers an overview of the reception of Aristotle's Rhetoric and its audiences in and since its own time until the present day. It defines the three types of audience under consideration: Who was listening to or reading the treatise? What implied audiences did their versions of it envisage and construct responsively (or not) to Aristotle's implied audiences, internal and external? And who were the people in the audiences who did ultimately hear the speeches of those who had consulted Aristotle? It then summarises the major stages in the reception of the treatise from later antiquity through the Byzantine, Arabic and western Middle Ages, to its first Latin translations and printed editions in the Renaissance. Aristotle's Rhetoric is currently enjoying an efflorescence both in and beyond the Academy, especially in education, despite some challenges from postcolonial legal thinkers to its continuing relevance.

Abstract: Aristotle's use of endoxa (generally accepted opinions) in his account of emotions, Rhetoric 2.1–11, 1378a-1388b, is analysed from the perspective of authorial style and the audience. When Aristotle says (1.1.12, 1355a), that speeches for the "multitude" ( polloi ) should rely on generally accepted opinions, he reveals the significance of endoxa in illuminating the perspectives of the non-elite. The use of endoxa imports the language of "everybody," which has implications for how the work operates and its relationship to a democratic audience. The integration of familiar phrasing and vocabulary enhances its cogency for a heterogeneous audience. The explicit framing of shared views, signposted by collective language, sits alongside implicit engagement with both views and vocabulary that would be familiar to the audience from tragedy. Endoxa shed light on Aristotle's status as a writer, the cultural situatedness of his ideas, and the appeal of Rhetoric to a wider public.

Abstract: This article analyses the way Aristotle constructs the category of "everybody" in relation with himself and his treatise's audience. In the Aristotelian corpus, the noun anthrōpoi ("humans") is chosen when men as a species are contrasted with gods or animals, while the substantivized adjective pantes ("all"), as a universal quantifier, is used in contrast with smaller social subdivisions (e.g., "the majority," "the wise," etc.) and refers to "all men" in a distributive, rather than a collective, sense. Moreover, pantes may often be the subject of a first-person plural verb, thus explicitly including the observers—Aristotle and his readers/listeners—into the object of the observation. "Gnomic" anthrōpoi presents observations about humans as established truths from an external perspective whereas the "social" and hic et nunc character of pantes is at home both in demonstrative arguments and in the discussion of rhetorical tasks in the context of the Athenian democracy.

Abstract: This article investigates the conditions under which someone can be deemed an effective spectator of a poetic or oratorical performance, first considering Aristotle's distinctive theory of mimesis from Poetics . The question of whether Aristotle believes that spectatorship has a positive effect on the soul (not expressly dealt with in Poetics ) is illuminated by Aristotle's argument in Rhetoric that effective rhetorical performances produce psychic correspondences between speaker and audience member, something like "sympathies," crucial to Aristotle's theory of successful political persuasion and action. Aristotle coins a new term sunomoiopathein to explain how these sympathies obtain. The audience member in a rhetorical speech literally identifies with the character of the orator—an activity parallelled by the spectator's mimesis of the theatrical actor's actions. Hence, the dramatic and rhetorical stages become, for Aristotle, universal centres for learning about human character and its consequences for ethical and political action.

Abstract: Thomas Hobbes' 1637 adaptation of Aristotle's Rhetoric, A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique , was the first English-language version of the ancient Greek treatise. It de-democratised it, rendering it useful to a leader who, in Hobbes' ideal polity, would have no need to contend with articulate subordinates. But it was hugely influential, being republished in various editions for practical use, rather than antiquarian interest, right through to the 20th century. This article sets the Briefe both in the political context in which it appeared, and against the background of Hobbes' earlier rhetoric-focused translation of Thucydides, motivated by his despair at the current political scene in the early 17th century. The intensity of Hobbes' engagement with Thucydides' accounts of Athenian orators illuminates his decision to study Aristotle's Rhetoric , the earliest extant handbook on persuasive speech and one produced in the context of the Athenian democracy so vividly portrayed in Thucydides.

Abstract: Teaching of Aristotle's Rhetoric at secondary level in Britain has, until recently, been largely confined to elite fee-paying schools, attended by only seven per cent of young people. But since 2020, several projects have challenged the status quo by creating freely accessible resources based on Aristotle's Rhetoric for all schools to use. This article provides an overview of the recent educational audiences for Aristotle's Rhetoric , including an experimental modern Aristotelian "triad" of ethos, pathos, and logos in a deprived school in Surrey, grassroots initiatives inspired by a 2022 Ofsted (Office for Standards in Education) Research Review for English, the activities of the Network for Oratory and Politics , debating competitions, and the introduction of the teaching of Aristotelian rhetoric in prisons. The article concludes by pointing to future possibilities for further widening of access to this text in British classrooms.

Abstract: The preface provides a brief introduction to the five contributions collected in the issue and related to Laurent Pernot’s book La rhétorique de l’éloge dans le monde gréco-romain thirty years after its publication. The preface also highlights the main breakthroughs that Pernot’s book has made, constituting a methodological model for any research on ancient rhetoric. The book’s comprehensiveness and modernity in its approach to authors, works, genres, contexts and ideas is also emphasized.

Abstract: In the Rhétorique de l’éloge L. Pernot elucidates the purposes of ekphrasis in speeches of praise, identifying them in the evocation of pleasant sensations or strong emotions (pity or indignation). In both circumstances the contribution of vividness (ἐνάρ-γεια) is important. This paper draws inspiration from the words of L. Pernot to link ἔκφρασις and διατύπωσις, often wrongly considered synonymous, to different purposes of description and to explain the word-image relationship in the rhetoric of social media.

Abstract: This paper starts from the relationship between the Universities of Strasbourg and Naples, based on the friendship between Laurent Pernot and the author of the paper, both members of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. In this field of research, Pernot’s La rhétorique de l’éloge is a precious and seminal work. The rhetorical praise often involves the audience as object of the praise itself, with remarkable differences in the political experience.

Abstract: This article provides a systematic analysis from an emic (culture-specific) perspective of the role of implicitness in classical Chinese rhetoric. Although implicitness is among the defining characteristics of East Asian rhetorical traditions and contributes to misunderstanding of ancient Chinese texts, there has been limited discussion of the role played by implicitness in classical Chinese rhetoric and argumentation. This article explicates the nature of implicitness rooted in the high context Chinese language, literary, and philosophy traditions, and explores the function of implicitness as a strategic means of persuasion in influential texts in the Chinese rhetorical tradition. The essay contributes to a multicultural knowledge of Chinese classical rhetoric beyond the Eurocentric traditions for understanding rhetoric, language, and communication in non-European cultures.

Abstract: This paper relates the modern invective “topoi,” important in research on Cicero’s speeches, to ancient rhetorical theory as present in Cicero’s De inventione . A particular proximity is evident in the doctrine of indignatio , which lists loci communes in which “topoi” such as the tyrant or the sacrilegious are implicitly recognizable. I shall examine the relationship between the rules on loci communes and the “topos” of the sacrilegious in this paper, using Cicero’s speeches against Verres as an example: Impiety, a frequently ignored object of Cicero’s invectives, is thus brought into connection with his theoretical utterances. In doing so, I shall briefly discuss Verres’s depiction as a sacrilegious person in general and its references to other speeches of Cicero. Mainly, however, I focus on the use of the motif in the indignationes of the actio secunda in Verrem . Here, Cicero’s productive use of the teachings of Greek theory becomes apparent.

Abstract: This paper is a rhetorical analysis of Plunkitt of Tammany Hall , a book of “plain talks” by George Washington Plunkitt. Plunkitt was a prominent politician in the Tammany machine. These talks expose the inner workings of how politicians become wealthy, how Tammany operated, and how to build a political machine. He rails against his enemies—those in the civil service, the Albany government, and the Republicans, to name a few. Ultimately, Plunkitt’s rhetoric is persuasive due to his use of Irish ethnic and Catholic religious identification, his appeals to the material efficacy of patronage politics, and his populist rhetorical style.

Abstract: The Hebrew Bible accords great moral agency to the collective “children of Israel.” Its discourse focuses as much on the attitudes, words and actions of the nation as on those of kings, priests, or prophets, let alone ordinary individuals. Yet key texts emphasize that God’s covenant is forged with individuals. The relative priorities of individuals vs. the nation are nowhere stated explicitly. However, a remarkable text, King Solomon’s dedicatory address for the Jerusalem Temple in 1 Kgs 8, suggests that they have equal claim on God’s attention. Solomon authorizes seven types of petitions, half for individuals and half for the nation. The importance of individuals’ petitions is heightened through four distinctive rhetorical strategies—sequence, amplitude, narrative time, and billing. Implications are sketched for understanding the Hebrew Bible’s conception of identity, agency, and moral character.

Abstract: The Epistles of Pliny the Younger confound his readers: some read like genuine correspondence, written to transmit information, others like careful literary pieces. Pliny’s description of his Tuscan villa, in Epistulae 5.6, seems to fall into the latter category. This letter, the longest of the corpus, has Pliny taking his addressee, Domitius Apollinaris, on a virtual walking tour, and describing what he sees. But Pliny’s villa, as described, seems mostly empty and lacks expected features if it were inhabited. The villa’s emptiness, however, provides nooks and crannies for practicing the rhetorical Memory Palace technique. By using this space for rhetorical exercise, Pliny, like his uncle, spent his otium wisely.

Abstract: I argue that in De inventione 1.1–5, Cicero reconciles technical rhetoric with Roman culture by crafting a justificatory narrative for rhetoric’s place at Rome. Cicero employs a calculated lexical strategy and redefines eloquentia in a way that shifts the meaning of the word to embrace ἡ τέχνη ῥητορική. Cicero further justifies rhetoric by emphasizing its utility for the Roman aristocracy and for the Republic. In the final analysis, Cicero argues for the value of technical rhetoric by demonstrating its compatibility with the values that underpinned Republican political culture.

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

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

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

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

Abstract: This paper highlights the importance of an audience-centric approach in the study of Athenian forensic rhetoric and leverages insights from Social Identity Theory and Burke's concept of 'identification' to examine courtroom speeches. Litigants, perceiving the Athenian dikastai as a distinct group marked by a salient social identity, rhetorically employed the group's prototypes, norms, and interests to establish their identification—and underscore the opponent's division—with the audience. This prominent role of social identity and the potential for jury bias affecting the large audiences of dikastai prompt a reconsideration of the nature of Athenian trials and suggest that, in addition to upholding the law, Athenian courts functioned as platforms for the imposition of social and legal conformity.

Abstract: Ennodius' panegyric for Theoderic the Great shows the employment of Roman rhetorical tradition and republican-era virtues to legitimise the new Germanic ruler of Italy. After Ennodius' general strategies to depict Theoderic as a Roman are discussed, this paper analyses two specific samples from the speech which show the use of traditional symbols, exempla , and even Ciceronian conceptions of tyranny alongside contemporary views of Romans and barbarians. These strategies were used to shape a version of Theoderic that removed the ruler from his Germanic background and reinterpreted him as a Roman ruler.

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

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

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

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

Abstract: Gorgias's Encomium of Helen stands out as more than a display speech: it is a sophisticated statement on fifth century Greek life. Within a mythic framework, it presents Gorgias's post-Eleatic understanding of the world, including new ways of conceiving the logos within the finite boundaries of human life. I show how Gorgias's thoughts build out of Empedocles's cosmology and stylistics, leading Gorgias to consider more deeply how language and world go together. I demonstrate that the order of Gorgias's four causes is cyclical, which allows Gorgias to make gradated distinctions about responsibility. Gorgias's exploration of responsibility enables him to portray the world as something that continually marks and molds human being, and this includes the logos . Gorgias also addresses temporality, which not only imposes existential limits on human capacity but also contours language itself. Ultimately, the Helen conducts third-order (self-reflexive) thinking by marshalling a battery of rhetorical resources designed to attune an audience to how their own participation in the logos generates and sustains its powers. In effect, what the Helen is about is the work that the Helen does. Through a mixture of new insights into persuasion, language, temporality, and psychology, combined with self-reflexive rhetorical work, the Helen inspires further thought about key aspects of Greek existence.

Abstract: The renaissance witnessed both a large expansion of teaching and composition of rhetoric manuals and a flowering of literature in the sixteenth century. This essay asks what rhetorical theory contributed to renaissance literature. Where some earlier accounts, for example by Cave, Eden and Vickers, focus on the impact of one or two rhetorical doctrines, this essay argues that renaissance writers drew on, adapted and combined a wide range of rhetorical doctrines in thinking about how to persuade and move their audiences. In order to make this argument it sets out sixteen skills taught by renaissance rhetoric which writers could use: thinking about the audience; self-presentation; reusing reading in writing; style and amplification; emotion; pleasing; narrative; character; argument; examples; comparison; contraries; proverbs and axioms; disposition; beginning; and ending. It analyses texts by Erasmus, Tasso, Sidney, Montaigne and Shakespeare to show how the greatest renaissance writers adapted and combined ideas from rhetoric.

Abstract: Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq (192–260/808–873) is mainly known as a translator of Greek works into Arabic, but he was also a prolific author. This article focuses on one of his least known treatises, On Vines ( Kitāb al-Karma ), which still remains unedited. On Vines is an eclectic and unclassifiable work that combines different genres. It has been traditionally considered a dietetic treatise on the properties of vine products inserted in the Galenic tradition. But On Vines is also a disputation on the excellence of trees written in the form of questions and answers and, ultimately, a polemical encomium of wine that relies for its effect on the opinions of ancient Greek authorities such as Homer, Diogenes, Aristotle, Socrates or Theophrastus. In this article I analyse the structure of the treatise, identifiying its generic affiliations and the rhetorical strategies deployed by Ḥunayn. I discuss specially the long sections on wine and Ḥunayn's defence of the virtues of this drink against its critics, arguing that the structure of the treatise is also determined by the religious implications of praising wine in an Islamic environment.

Abstract: This paper explores the relationships between style and complexion, temperament and disposition, climate and place in seventeenth-century thought. Facility and variation in style not only depend on reason, judgement, and responsiveness, but on the material substrata of the imagination and memory, in turn conditioned by air and temperament, climate and the uneven geographical distribution of environmental and internal, vital heat. This ensemble ofconcernes spurred wide-ranging enquiry in early modern anthropology, ethnography, and rhetoric, which I examine her in order to substantiate the mathematician and rhetorician Bernard Lamy's 1675 claim that "Every Clymat hath its style."

Abstract: This introduction offers a brief overview of the scholarly landscape on rhetoric and medicine from antiquity to early modern times. It argues that the relationships between rhetoric and medicine offer a field of study quite distinct from the rhetoric of science, and that they can be understood and approached from multiple angles. It then describes the contents of the papers in relation with the argument.

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of rhetoric within ancient medicine by setting medical writings in dialogue with contemporary forensic texts. Reading across these two genres allows us to capture the shared ways in which early medical and forensic discourse mobilise rhetoric in response to the epistemological limits of medical and forensic practice. Both medical and forensic discourse frame factual and practical knowledge as the remedy to the slippages of words, but at the same time they need words to formulate and validate their tentative knowledge of those very facts. Select readings from the Epidemics illustrate the importance of a rhetorically structured narrative in response to uncertain scenarios. Much like the narrative of forensic texts, I argue, the case-histories of the Epidemics try to shape elusive realities through a rhetorical gesture that confers a precise meaning upon them. Rhetoric, the paper concludes, is not merely an embellishment nor a skill. It is, instead, a medium for the communication of knowledge and the negotiation of its limits, even in texts that at first glance seem, or claim, to be devoid of any rhetorical features.