Abstract

Reviews 115 of the high Middle Ages, Scholastics, scholars of the emergent scientific rex olution, and authors of the great late medieval vernacular literary works all had distinctly different understandings, valorizations, and usages of sense-derived knowledge and the category of 'experience'. This observation would, I think, impact Carruthers' analysis of the stylistic notion of 'curiositas ', particularly in relation to Bernard of Clairvaux (pp. 149-150): the cita­ tions from Bernard suggest a response to 'curiositas' as much ethical as aesthetic/ I do not mean these comments to detract from what is clearly a bril­ liant and erudite study of the aesthetic pleasure readers took in rhetorically constructed texts in the Middle Ages. My concern is not about Carruthers' analysis so much as her positioning of it under the critical terms 'Beauty' and 'Experience'. A title like 'The Pleasure of Aesthetic Judgments in the Middle Ages', though less impactful, might have captured the nature of the argument more accurately. I strongly recommend this book to all inter­ ested in the aesthetic reception of rhetorical texts in the Middle Ages and invite them to take the thought-provoking iter laid out for them by Profes­ sor Carruthers. Their experience of beauty along the way will be, in the way of experience, for them alone to judge. Juanita Feros Ruys Michelle Baliff, ed.z Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. 238 pp. ISBN 9780809332106 Theorizing Histories of Rhetoric is well-conceived collection of essays on historiography. Most of the essays review the literature relevant to the area of historiography addressed and illustrate the historiographic principles considered with an example. These features, probably the result of editor Baliff's nudging, make the collection appealing as a textbook for a graduate course. Both Baliff in her "Introduction" and Sharon Crowley in the "After­ word" recall the heady days of the 1980s and 90s when historiography inspired passionate debate, contrasting those times with the current scene. The questions debated then were of three types: (1) Political: What principles of selection led to the creation histories that were racist and sexist? (2) Formal: Should a historiography be suspicious of a narrative of a tradition with "tra­ dition's" inherent propensity to mask fissures and occlude determinative local, situational factors? (3) Generic: Should the historian attempt to recon­ struct the past in its own terms, muting the historian's voice? Or should we frankly and freely appropriate the past for our own ends? The contributors to this volume address these same issues, and if, at the philosophical level, 7This in contrast to Carruthers' assertion that the terms of rhetoric 'are less assessments of states of being or of ethical worth than of sensory affect (p. 45). 116 RHETORICA the answers to these questions seem more settled, differences in approach and emphasis are still important. All the contributors directly or implicitly welcome the expansion of the rhetorical tradition and applaud the critique of rhetoric's traditional norms as sexist, racist, heteronormative, and ethnocentric. In her chapter, Jessica Enoch helpfully divides and categorizes the critique under the rubrics of "recovery" and "re-reading," but she also complains that the current histo­ riography cannot accommodate gendered readings of the rhetoric of public memory and the gendered nature of the architecture of certain sites of typi­ cal rhetorical performance—literatures she reviews. Byron Hawk supports recovery work but seems bored with it, characterizing the effort to "retrieve the excluded" as having become a "bureaucratic mandate" (110). Hawk is impatient: the recovery work of the last twenty years has merely fit more figures into the familiar teleological narrative. He calls for more radical his­ toriographies and histories. Hawk primarily objects to teleology, and he suggests principles of a his­ toriography that would resist teleology and produce radically subjective, performative histories. A properly postmodern historiography would be compatible with the new materialism (Deleuze and Guattari) and with (non-teleological) complexity theories that have characterized recent work across humanities disciplines. Hawk finds a source of inspiration for such a historiography in the writings on improvisation of music theorist and jazz musician David Borgo. He claims his model would ultimately produce "bot­ toms up"(120) histories that would identify discrete moments...