This article describes the author’s development of a digital historical tool that collects and visualizes metadata on women’s pedagogical activities from the Progressive Era through the present. The tool, Metadata Mapping Project, offers a new take on historical mapping by focusing on the locatability of documents, subjects, and events, and by making it possible for users to trace activities that would otherwise occur as references in archival ephemera. Using one pedagogue as an example of how the database can work, this article also considers the implications of this and other tools for feminist rhetorical historiography, especially for constructing rhetorical ecologies that are not artifact based.

This article uses the convergence of our positionings as feminists, pragmatists, and rhetoricians to theorize communicative gaps related to different beliefs about writing instruction as sites of generative dialogue. We offer a WPA/TA discourse model centered on productive resistance and on discursive power to posit feminist pragmatic rhetoric as a communicative art of writing program change.

Abstract This essay examines linguistic and contextual features to understand Anne Askew's ironic performances, her positioning in rhetorical history, and her texts' persuasive power. While Askew's tactical irony has been studied as silence, resistance, and protest, this essay shows that she uses irony to undermine the communicative event and to initiate discourse without committing to cooperative communication for all audiences involved. I argue that Askew's performances are best accounted for as relevant-inappropriateness, and that a close examination of embedded features in her discourse helps us view Early Modern women's performances as inventive and productive rather than patriarchal or anti-patriarchal.

This essay examines linguistic and contextual features to understand Anne Askew’s ironic performances, her positioning in rhetorical history, and her texts’ persuasive power. While Askew’s tactical irony has been studied as silence, resistance, and protest, this essay shows that she uses irony to undermine the communicative event and to initiate discourse without committing to cooperative communication for all audiences involved. I argue that Askew’s performances are best accounted for as relevant-inappropriateness, and that a close examination of embedded features in her discourse helps us view Early Modern women’s performances as inventive and productive rather than patriarchal or anti-patriarchal.