This essay reads John Bulwer’s seventeenth-century gesture manuals Chironomia and Chirologia. Bulwer advances a theory of invention as an inherently gestural form. The frequent consignment of gesture to delivery is rooted in a persistent tendency to treat motions as ornaments that may be taken or left. Bulwer’s gesture theory refuses the separation of action and invention from which this tendency derives. From this refusal, I argue for a model of animate eloquence that can be used to collapse distinctions among mind and body and reason and emotion in the production, transmission, and reception of persuasive claims.

This essay offers “material rhetoric” as a new addition to the usual list of categories used to describe rhetoric in the eighteenth century (neoclassical, belletristic, elocutionary, epistemological/psychological) by examining the material elements of treatises written by Joseph Priestley and Gilbert Austin. Those material elements—namely heat, passion, and impression—are tracked through Priestley and Austin’s scientific writings, thereby positioning their particular strains of material rhetoric as legacies of philosophical chemistry.

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