Abstract

88 RHETORICA who seek a history of rhetorical theory that teaches, delights, and moves will find it here. Beth Innocenti University ofKansas William Pallister, Between Worlds: The Rhetorical Universe of Paradise Lost (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008). ISBN 978-0-80209835 -1; Daniel Shore, Milton and the Art ofRhetoric (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2012). isbn: 978-1-107-02150-1 Two books published in the last few years each have much to offer on the subject of how the English poet and statesman John Milton (1608-74) employed rhetoric in his various works and particularly in his epic poem Paradise Lost. William Pallister reminds or perhaps informs Miltonists of the centrality of rhetoric in the Renaissance and its utility both for persuasion and morality. He argues that contemporary criticism has overlooked the formal poetic and rhetorical presentation of Milton's ideas (7-8). Pallister's particu­ lar focus is Paradise Lost and the rhetorical issue of future contingency, which he traces through Milton's epic poem in terms of three distinct rhetorics, of hell, of heaven, and of paradise, the paradisal one being the most rhetorical because the most contingent. Pallister divides his book into two equal halves. His first five chapters are heavily documented demonstrations of Renaissance rhetoric, its clas­ sical roots, and Milton's engagement with it. In chapter one, Pallister first identifies contingency and probability as key issues in deliberative rhetoric and locates their discussion in such authors as Augustine, Boethius, Ock­ ham, Aquinas, Valla, Pomponazzi, Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin. He then demonstrates how Milton's theological concerns for free will in Paradise Lost are reflected in his preservation therein of future contingency. Chap­ ter two surveys the classical rhetoricians who had written on contingency, such as Isocrates, Aristotle, and Cicero, since Milton cites these authorities in his short pedagogical tract, Of Education (1644) rather than any of the educational theorists of his own period. Chapter three surveys Renaissance rhetoric in terms of its focus on eloquent style and its prescribed utility in politics, ethics, poetry, and theology, and in chapter four demonstrates how Milton's own prose identifies eloquence as "none . . . but the serious and hearty love of truth" (80; An Apology against a Pamphlet, Yale Prose 1: 948-49), a love that Pallister associates with Milton's "humanistic faith in the power of eloquence to captivate its audience and compel them to accept Christian values" (10). Chapter five considers rhetoric's relation to Christian theology and particularly the Bible as a rhetorical text, preaching as a rhetorical art, and God as a rhetorical and especially a poetic speaker. Reviews 89 With this foundation laid, Pallister proceeds in the second half of his book to investigate the rhetorical nature of Paradise Lost. In chapter six, he takes us to the poitions of Milton s epic that take place in heaven. Since there is little contingency possible in God's omniscience, the master tropes of hea\ en aie polugtoton and especiallv conduplica110, and the favored genus dieendi is epideixis, especially praise. Chapter seven surveys Satan's presentation as an orator in various authors before and including Milton, whose Satan is an accomplished orator, and chapter eight identifies the master trope of hell as demotes, or rhetorical cleverness, by which Satan not only deceives others but “tricks himself into seeing a contingent future that no longer exists for the defeated angels" (176). Chapters nine and ten treat rhetoric in the Carden of Eden, “the hub of Milton's rhetorical universe, [where] the theological, dramatic, and discursive conditions exist for rhetoric to thrive on all levels" (197) and where it comes most into its own as a agent of moral persuasion in the psychomachia of man's inner being (198). Pallister's text is a manifestly learned, monograph-length discussion of how Renaissance rhetoric, and particularly deliberative rhetoric, informs the greatest epic in the English language. Elis volume is well worthy to have won the Modern Language Association of America's Prize for Independent Scholars in 2009. Like all sublunary publications, however, it is not always perfect. Its extensive surveys in the first half are sometimes more trees than forest and might have benefitted from more signposting...