Abstract

Reviews 331 Il commenta, prevalentemente letterario-linguistico, fornisce molti loci pnrnlleli e informazioni linguistiche di varia natura: particolarità della lingua e della sintassi della declamazioni in confronto con il latino di età classica, discussione dei passi problematic! dal punto di vista filológico. I passi in cui Z. opera scelte diverse rispetto all'edizione di riferimento vengono elencati già in nota a p. 106 e alcuni di essi vengono poi discussi nel commento: come in tutti i volumi della collana, infatti, anche questo è privo di apparato critico. Va tuttavia notata l'assenza di informazioni relative alla tradizione del testo, che sarebbero state di aiuto nei casi in cui vengono affrontati problemi di tale natura (cfr. p. 162, per esempio, sulle varianti debilitate e debilitas, 112 H., in alternativa alie quali Z. preferisce ad debilitatem). Z. fornisce un esame attento e sottile degli aspetti formali e retorici della declamazione, indaga e testimonia la presenza in essa di materiale letterario precedente o contemporáneo e la sua permanenza nella letteratura successiva. II suo contributo è altresi prezioso per il confronto tra la realtà culturale contemporánea e quella tratteggiata nella declamazione, con cui egli dimostra in modo esemplare come le declamazioni possano contribuiré a ricostruire il dibattito del tempo sui valori e sulle rególe comportamentali. María Luisa De Seta Lattarico, Italy David L. Marshall, Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press), Cambridge & New York, 2010. 302 pp. It has always seemed fitting that Giambattista Vico's last rediscovery came at the end of the psychedelic era in 1969 (Giambattista Vico: An Inter­ national Symposium, eds. Giorgio Tagliacozzo and Hayden V. White), when category mistakes could appear at the heart of cultural and political revo­ lution. Unlike Foucault's orderly thinkers of the Enlightenment, Vico and his tables of knowledge always appeared intriguingly disheveled and full of holes that led, if one was fortunate, to new dimensions of time and human character. But like other casualties of the psychedelic era, Vico has often seemed in danger of perishing in the epiphany, falling victim to accusations of idiosyncrasy or even incoherence. Thanks to David Marshall, however, we now know that the story of Vico's rediscovery does not end this way. In his landmark book Vico and the Transformation of Rhetoric in Early Modern Europe, Marshall demonstrates that Vico is once again a pivotal figure in a modern age broadly conceived, where sober sciences newly engage the irra­ tionalisms of emotion, language, and human history. We can now celebrate the first major, English-language monograph on Vico in over a decade at the same time that we enjoy expert guidance through a range of concerns that traverse Vico's work; Marshall's book serves as an excellent primer on the 332 RHETORICA interlocking fields of modern epistemology after Descartes, the prehistory of Peircean pragmatism, early modern European intellectual history across four literatures (English, German, French, and Italian), and the history of rhetoric and communication, which serves as a key to the rest. Marshall launches the story in original fashion when he begins with Vico's De coniuratione principum neapolitanorum, a history of the 1701 Neapoli­ tan Conspiracy of Macchia that was unpublished and unacknowledged by Vico, although it was probably in circulation, as Marshall discovered through manuscript research at the Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli, within months of the event itself (p. 33 n. 3). This document turns out to be crucial be­ cause in it one sees the driving question that would give shape to Vico's entire scholarly initiated at the University of Naples in 1699 as professor of rhetoric and continuing through the posthumously published 1744 edi­ tion of the Scienza Nuova, for which Vico is justifiably famous. Frustrated, Marshall speculates, by the limited utility of rhetorical historiography tra­ ditionally conceived, Vico asks in light of the Conspiracy "What would it take to reconfigure rhetorical inquiry for Neapolitan conditions?" (p. 32) given that Naples lack the conditions for immediate politics imagined by the rhetoricians of classical antiquity. And from this seemingly simple ques­ tion emerges a transformative moment for Vico in the history of rhetoric. Marshall summarizes that "Vico's oeuvre takes on a new unity...