Book Review| August 01 2022 Review: Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells; Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book by Pauline Reid; The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by David Wiles Susan Wells. Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge. RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 211 pp. ISBN: 978-0-271-08467-1.Pauline Reid. Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 283 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0069-6.David Wiles. The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-49887-6. Timothy Barr Timothy Barr Northeastern University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2022) 40 (3): 325–330. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.325 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Timothy Barr; Review: Robert Burton's Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells; Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book by Pauline Reid; The Players' Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment by David Wiles. Rhetorica 1 August 2022; 40 (3): 325–330. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2022.40.3.325 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. © 2022 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2022The International Society for the History of Rhetoric Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge by Susan Wells Timothy Barr Susan Wells. Robert Burton’s Rhetoric: An Anatomy of Early Modern Knowledge. RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. 211 pp. ISBN-978-0-271-08467-1. Pauline Reid. Reading by Design: The Visual Interfaces of the English Renaissance Book. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. 283 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0069-6. David Wiles. The Players’ Advice to Hamlet: The Rhetorical Acting Method from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 370 pp. ISBN: 978-1-108-49887-6. The works reviewed here celebrate the openness and indefiniteness of rhetoric’s domain by arguing against its assimilation of a disciplinary mode of scholarship. They work from three distinct positions while drawing from the early modem and (mostly) English archive. Susan Wells’s argument for a “transdisciplinary rhetoric” (it is part of the RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric) is sustained throughout each chapter of her reading of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, refiguring what Nancy Struever has called rhetoric’s “theoretical insouciance” as its value for playing tavern-keeper at a crossroads of other disciplines’ inquiries. Pauline Reid’s work explicitly targets the boundaries between new media and bibliographic studies by showing how early modem print involved visual modalities beyond the oft-rehearsed oral-print divide. David Wiles offers a fresh perspective by taking counsel for the discipline from a position without one: the professional actor of the early modern English and French stage. Each has a distinct refrain: transdisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and a kind of “undisciplining”—unlearning the trained incapacity of academic theorization. Wells opens her book with an autobiographical note. She first read The Anatomy of Melancholy for her comprehensive exams in the mid-1970s. Although her scholarship did not initially take her into uncovering the allusive world of Burton’s massive work, she describes being impressed by the voice of his prose. It was one “utterly at ease with its learning ... thin, rhythmic, quizzical, the voice of an eccentric and intimate friend” (1). Although such notes are often left in the prefatory material, here it is germane to the work. Reading Wells is to hear her performance of just such a voice witty, opinionated, with an erudition that feels like an inviting gesture at a cherished library rather than the intimidating cage of fingers pressed against the don’s lips in office hours. Wells’s style is part of her argument: like Burton, she is a scholar writing for other scholars, but—also like Burton—she refuses any idée fixe, a symptom of melancholy and today of too academic a discipline. Her second chapter, published in an earlier form in Philosophy & Rhetoric, is a contribution to genre studies. Is a genre like a genus, a category [End Page 325] for an assembling of species? Or, as she argues, is it a kind of space for exchange rather than classification? The Anatomy is a sui generis work. Rather than merely dismissing all the previous scholarship devoted to locating it in a taxonomy—an admittedly “old-fashioned project” (40)—Wells reflects on the underlying metaphors of the field. Even the idea of a “hybrid genre” relies upon the species metaphor (49). Burton identifies his work variously as “satire, as a treatise, as a cento, as a consolatio, or as a drama, satire, and comedy, but not as a satiricocento or a dramatic treatise” (40). His use of genre is often skew, bent to his peculiar and often-changing purposes. He delves into the medical genre of observationes less for clinical knowledge and more for the narrative color and moral insight that these cases might provide. Sometimes he interpolates speech into these stories for dramatic effect, as when in a case of love-melancholy he has the stricken Lady Elizabeth say, “O that I were worthy of that comely Prince ...” (66). Elsewhere he neglects the more florid detail of the original observation in order to make a point. One case tells of “two Germans who drank a lot of wine and within a month became melancholy.” Their symptoms were diverse: one “sang hymns...

ABSTRACT Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that leading judges into passions is like warping a rule or kanon before using it. Rather than seeing this as an exclusion of emotion from rhetoric, I argue that the ability for the pathe to bend judgment has its appropriate use in achieving equity. The pathe are themselves a kanon, resembling the soft, leaden rule used by Lesbian masons, referred to in his discussion of equity in the Nicomachean Ethics. In problematic cases, the rigidity of law requires the correction of a judge's pathetic capacity. I then read Lysias's Against Simon, a speech given under strict relevancy requirements, to show how the pathe are used in the narration of the accused party in seeking an equitable judgment. I conclude with how such a view may inform contemporary rhetorical inquiry on the emotions.

Book Review| May 01 2018 Review: Disability Rhetoric, by Jay Timothy Dolmage, and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, by Shannon Walters Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 349 pp. ISBN: 9780815634454Shannon Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 257 pp. ISBN: 9781611173833 Timothy Barr Timothy Barr Timothy Barr 5179 Kincaid St. Pittsburgh, Pa 15524 USA timothybarr@pitt.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2018) 36 (2): 205–208. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.205 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Timothy Barr; Review: Disability Rhetoric, by Jay Timothy Dolmage, and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, by Shannon Walters. Rhetorica 1 May 2018; 36 (2): 205–208. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.205 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. © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2018 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews Jay Timothy Dolmage, Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2014. 349 pp. ISBN: 9780815634454 Shannon Walters, Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014. 257 pp. ISBN9781611173833 Rhetoric is an ability. So begins the blithe Englishing of Aristotle's defi­ nition of rhetoric. In early translations it appears as a faculty, following the European vernaculars and the Latin translation of Aristotle's dunamis with facultas. Yet even if this translation flattens the complex significance of Aristotle's original sense, it happily brings us within the orbit of pressing problems in our own moment. We may now pose new questions: If rhetoric insists it be thought of as an ability, how might we inflect this idée reçue of the field by thinking through the meaning of rhetoric from a position of disability? This is not a matter of simple inversion. Disability is not the opposite of ability but the suspension of the assumptions of ableism. In this sense, it is like disbelief. We say we are in a 'state of disbelief' precisely when we are presented with incontrovertible evidence that commands assent. Disability rhetoric, then, seeks to illuminate the unreflective assump­ tions and heuristics that we commonly use to make judgments concerning the conditions and abilities of others. In Disability Rhetoric and Rhetorical Touch: Disability, Identification, Haptics, Jay Timothy Dolmage and Shannon Walters offer book-length elaborations of what such a rhetoric might be. The authors do not simply challenge rhetoric about disability or examine disability advocacy rhetorically, although both these aims are crucial to their projects. The authors argue that a thoroughgoing criticism of ableism requires a reexamination of rhetorical history and theory. The classical tradition's inability to think through bodily difference made it narrower than it otherwise might have been. Quintilian asserted that the limits of rhetorical education could be found in the body of the orator, "for assuredly no one can exhibit proper delivery if he lacks a memory for retaining what he has written or ready facility in uttering what he has to speak extempore, or if he has any incurable defect of utterance." Any such "extraordinary deformity of body ... cannot be remedied by any effort of art" (11.3.10). Unable to think of bodily difference as anything but deformity gave ancient rhetorical theory a Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 2, pp. 205-215. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2018 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www. ucpress.edu/joumals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.2.205. 206 RHETORIC A false sense of order and precision, erected upon the assumption that audience and orator could be treated as positions within a discourse rather than approa­ ched within the complexity of situated and contested embodiment. These books can be taken as complementary projects. Dolmage wishes to extend and reinterpret the repertoire and vocabulary of critical rhetoric. Walters focuses on the inventional strategies of disabled persons and their circles. This is not to say that Dolmage neglects invention or Walters criti­ cism. Disability rhetoric shows the imbrication of criticism and invention, since both rely upon practices of sensitization. We might extract six maxims to serve as guideposts for furthering this critical-inventive program. 1. Modes of communication require invention and shape meaning. The con­ stitution of communication between Annie Sullivan and Helen Keller in the now famous story of their experience at the water pump (Sullivan hand­ spelling 'water' in Keller's palm after running water over her hand, marked by Keller as her entry into language) resulted from a pragmatic awareness of possible channels of meaning-making. Walters argues that many of these possibilities reside within touch and her book serves in part as a collection of examples showing the variety and power of haptic communication. Perhaps even more importantly, a disability rhetoric would attend to the way in which the mode of communication constitutes and affects the meaning of the communication. Rather than appealing to the sensus communis...