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.

202 RHETORICA mainstream composition studies, especially in the model of conversation for pedagogy" (p. 127). Examples of an exception as well as this merging are explored in texts by women such as Mary Augusta Jordan and Gertrude Buck, respectively. As noted, the conclusion argues that the tradition s de­ cline is linked to women starting to write rhetoric and composition textbooks for mixed-gender audiences. I would have liked to see more discussion of this claim, particularly related to the discussion of Buck. For instance, Buck's texts emerged directly from the all-women classes she taught at Vassar Col­ lege, and many examples in her books are targeted specifically at women. Although Buck's case may have been atypical, perhaps these differences could have been explored. In addressing new questions related to women's theorizing of rhetoric, Conversational Rhetoric is to be commended for enacting the new directions that historians and feminist scholars in the field have urged (Royster and Kirsch 2012; Gold 2012). In so doing, it illuminates a significant tradition of women theorizing conversation and introduces us to women with whom we may be unfamiliar. The book also suggests the need to investigate other examples of how women have theorized conversation and other potential ways that women have conceptualized communication. In spanning three hundred years and investigating such a wide array of texts, the book also is exemplary in terms of the breadth and depth that Donawerth brings to such an analysis. Suzanne Bordelon San Diego State University Stephen Pender and Nancy Struever eds, Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, ix, 299 pp., ISBN: 9781 -4094-3022-6 Rhetoric and Medicine have been compared since antiquity. Both are eminently practical arts, requiring their practitioners to work with the vari­ ability of human experience, on the basis of a growing but still contestable body of theory. Both are intimately concerned with persuasion and with the emotions. Rhetoric and Medicine in Early Modern Europe is a collection of ten essays, introduction and afterword, based on panels from the 2003 annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. This is a thought-provoking collection, including some excellent essays, which explores the relations be­ tween medicine and rhetoric from many different points of view and in relation to a range of different types of subject-matter. Stephen Pender in­ troduces the collection with an analysis of the physician's different needs for persuasion (rational and emotional). His own essay "Between Medicine and Rhetoric (revised from his 2005 article in Early Science and MLedicine} surveys the relations between rhetoric and the art of medicine in Plato's Phaedrus and Reviews 203 Gorgias, Aristotle s Rhetoric and the early modern English physician John Cotta's A Short Discoverie of the Unobserved Dangers ofSeverall Sorts ofIgnorant and Unconsiderate Practisers of Physicke in England (1612). Focusing on the uncertainty of medical diagnosis and treatment enables Cotta to align the physician's pragmatic flexibility with the prudence of the orator: "a practical, prudential interpretation of probable signs directed toward intervention.. .is at the heart of medical practice" (p. 59). Jean Dietz Moss analyses five local physician's descriptions of the health­ giving properties of the waters of Bath, which aimed to promote the attrac­ tions of the spa, written between 1572 and 1697. She analyses the rhetori­ cal techniques employed by these publicists, discussing their deployment of narratives, authorities and evidence in order to extol the divinely pro­ vided health-giving properties of the spa. Richard Sugg analyses the use of the metaphor of anatomy in a range of sixteenth and seventtenth-century titles. Andrea Carlino resituates Andreas Vesalius within the humanist mi­ lieu of 1540s Padua and particularly within the Accademia degli Infiammati. He argues that the title of Vesalius's famous work De humani corporis fab­ rica libri septeni (1543) alludes through the word fabrica both to Cicero's De natnra deorum and to architectural works such as Sebastiano Serlio's Sette libri d'Architettnra. He documents Vesalius's connections with members of the Accademia degli infiammati, including a letter to Benedetto Varchi in which he mentions the recent publication of Daniele Barbaro's commentary on Aristotle's Rhetoric. He...

Abstract This paper presents a critical assessment of Vives's major rhetorical treatise, De ratione dicendi (1533). In terms of structure it shows that the first book is concerned with the linguistic basis of style, that the second deals with the qualities of style, the four aims of rhetoric, decorum and disposition and that the third presents guidance on composing ten genres of writing practised by humanists. The paper describes Vives's original contributions to the analysis of the linguistic basis of style, the qualities of style, emotional manipulation, decorum, and the composition of history and commentary. In assessing Vives's work it makes comparisons with rhetoric texts by Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Ramus. It finds that Vives's reform of rhetoric is based in his encyclopaedic grasp of human learning but that this very encyclopaedism can cause weaknesses in his discussions of particular topics. De ratione dicendi tells us a great deal about Vives's perceptiveness and breadth of reading but, with only three sixteenth century editions, it was not a successful textbook.

This paper presents a critical assessment of Vives’s major rhetorical treatise, De ratione dicendi (1533). In terms of structure it shows that the first book is concerned with the linguistic basis of style, that the second deals with the qualities of style, the four aims of rhetoric, decorum and disposition and that the third presents guidance on composing ten genres of writing practised by humanists. The paper describes Vives’s original contributions to the analysis of the linguistic basis of style, the qualities of style, emotional manipulation, decorum, and the composition of history and commentary. In assessing Vives’s work it makes comparisons with rhetoric texts by Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Ramus. It finds that Vives’s reform of rhetoric is based in his encyclopaedic grasp of human learning but that this very encyclopaedism can cause weaknesses in his discussions of particular topics. De ratione dicendi tells us a great deal about Vives’s perceptiveness and breadth of reading but, with only three sixteenth century editions, it was not a successful textbook.

Reviews 101 Brian Vickers ed., English Renaissance Literary Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999) xvi + 655pp. Brian Vickers's anthology collects modern spelling selections from the most important critical statements in English between Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke named the Governonr (1531) and Thomas Hobbes's 1675 preface to his translation of Homer's Odyssey. Dryden's critical prose, much of it published before 1675, is justifiably treated as beyond the scope of a renaissance anthology. The dominant figures are Sir Thomas Wilson, George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney, whose Defence ofPoetry is included complete, John Hoskyns, Thomas Heywood and Ben Jonson. In comparison to the two volumes of G. Gregory Smith's Elizabethan Critical Essays (1904), which it replaces, Vickers's book includes more poetry (notably Baldwin's "Collingbourne", from the Mirrorfor Magistrates, Spenser's "October" from The Shepheardes Calendar, a scene attributed to Shakespeare in which Lodowick and Edward III discuss the writing of love poetry, and John Ford's "Elegy on John Fletcher", here printed for the first time) and more rhetoric. Vickers gives less space to Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Campion and omits Thomas Lodge, William Webbe and Thomas Nashe. Vickers's introduction insists that since literature was a form of rhetoric, English renaissance literary criticism was largely prescriptive, aiming to provide the kind of help which would be useful to writers (pp. 1-6). This enables him to put rhetoric at the centre of renaissance literary criticism and justifies his extensive selections from Wilson, Puttenham and Hoskyns (the latter two particularly illustrating the figures of speech). Vickers's excellent notes show the reliance of these English rhetorics on classical sources and also on Susenbrotus's continental Latin compilation Epitome troporum ac schematorum. He might have pointed out that both Wilson's rhetoric and Angel Day's account of the figures (15 editions between them) offer a wider diffusion for the "Englished Susenbrotus" than Puttenham, whose Arte of English Poesie, was printed only once. Vickers quotes Jonson and Wilson on the importance of ethics for lit­ erature (pp. 12-13) which he links with the fashion for epideictic (excellently illustrated among the texts he includes). Perhaps Vickers ought to acknowl­ edge that the ethical teaching of the Arcadia, whose heroes have faults which run from deceit to intended rape (and against whose impulses humanist ethical education is strikingly ineffectual), is more problematic than can be summed up as a concern to embody fully-realized images of virtue and vice (p. 13). Vickers notes the way rhetoricians took examples of the figures and tropes from Arcadia, giving examples from Puttenham and Hoskyns. He had no space for Abraham Fraunce or for Fulke Greville's ethical reading ofArca­ dia. Given his rhetorical focus, Vickers might have said more about copia and amplification, or perhaps have found space for some of the English examples of dialectical analyses of texts. Part of William Temple's analysis of Sidney's Defence would have suited his selection well. On the other hand the argu­ ment that Erasmus's encomium on marriage is the source for Shakespeare's first seventeen sonnets (pp. 32-39), which justifies the inclusion of Wilson's 102 RHETORICA translation of that declamation (pp. 93-115) is not wholly convincing. The bibliography of secondary literature (pp. 627-28) needs to be extended in a revised edition. But such cavilling is hardly to the point. Vickers's introduction is lucid, wide-ranging and masterly. His notes are superb and properly acknowledge the contributions of earlier scholars. His selection of texts is enterprising, including much that is new, as well as a judicious choice of the best that is well-known. He provides a helpful glossary and user-friendly indexes to the material. This book is as useful as Russell and Winterbottom's famous selection of Ancient Literary Criticism and when it appears in paperback teachers and students of renaissance literature will find it indispensable. Peter Mack University of Warwick Manuel López Muñoz, Fray Luis de Granada y la retórica (Almería: Universidad de Almería, 2000) 222pp. Este libro es sin duda una rigurosa y documentada monografía so­ bre la aportación de Fray Luis de Granada a la...

Research Article| November 01 1995 The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences R. H. Roberts and J. M. M. Good (ed.), The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1993), xii + 278 pp. Peter Mack Peter Mack Department of English, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, United Kingdom. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1995) 13 (4): 455–456. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1995.13.4.455 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Peter Mack; The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences. Rhetorica 1 November 1995; 13 (4): 455–456. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1995.13.4.455 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1995, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1995 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

I have often wondered what would happen if one of our students were to hand in an assessed essay which followed the form and style of one of Montaigne's. First and second marker would pronounce it so disorganised as to be unmarkable, and the external examiner would fail it. Only at the final examiners' meeting would we confront the fact that we had confidently rejected one of the masterpieces of the genre. This story illustrates potentially destructive paradox. When teachers are defending essay writing, they argue that their students are practising the same genre as such great writers as Montaigne, Addison, Lamb, Woolf and Orwell. But when we mark students' essays we have different and at times rigid expectations, expectations which many of the classic essayists would not meet. This paradox is related to another. most commonly accepted formulae for educational essays are extremely strict, and look as though they derive from rhetorical precepts on the outline of the oration. In the English model this is the four-part essay (Introduction, points for, points against, conclusion)' which appears to derive from the model of the four-part oration (exordium, narration, proof and refutation, peroration) by omitting the narration and altering the function of the refutation. American model of the five point essay (Introduction, three arguments, conclusion) presumably derives from the same source, together with the often repeated instruction to restrict divisions to three headings.2 These popular (and in their way appalling) instructions run quite counter to Montaigne's open hostility to the rules of rhetoric, when he founded the genre. They are also opposed to the views of many practitioners. Sir William Williams prefaces his A Book of English Essays (Harmondsworth 1951), by saying that the essay has multitude of forms and manners, and scarcely any rules and regulations (p. 11). It should be short piece of prose which is not devoted to narrative. (There are plenty of exceptions even to rule as permissive as this.) Maurice Hewlett's celebrated The Maypole and the Column describes the essay, as a theme set up, and hung with loving art; then round about it measure trodden, sedately for the most part, but with involuntary skips aside as the whim takes him (ibid., p. 238). He prefers dance and digression to order and structure. Lamb is his admired model. My argument in this essay is that rhetoric, argument and ideas of structure have been involved with the essay (often as imperatives to react against) right from the beginning and that rhetorical ideas can help us understand the relationship between the belles-lettres essay and the schoolroom exercise. I shall raise the historical question of how genre which originated in opposition to rhetoric came to be taken over by rhetoric. For the sake of brevity my narrative will concentrate on four moments of the story: the birth of the essay, the English essay of the