Reviews 319 trovano collocazione come fr. 89 in riferimento a Democrito, in virtü del noto aneddoto che circolava in antico secondo cui Democrito aveva pretérito lasciare a pascólo le proprie terre. Troppo poco, sostiene in maniera impeccabile Grilli, per un'attribuzione che l'esiguitá del materiale non puó in alcun modo sostenere. Mi sembra di aver dato qualche breve, ma significativo saggio del modo di procederé di Grilli, aperto per necessitá a piu direttrici di senso e impegnato , pour cause, a lavorare su piu fronti, in considerazione dell'amplissima fortuna di cui il trattato godette in ogni tempo, ma soprattutto in autori come Lattanzio o Agostino, presso i quali le meditazioni ciceroniane apparivano a tal punto contraddistinte da luciditá argomentativa da offrire un esempio particolarmente apprezzabile e un modello; ma proprio questa considera­ zione, che é nei fatti una valutazione attenta della ricezione del trattato e della considerevole fortuna di cui esso godette in ámbito cristiano, impone alio studioso le ragioni della prudenza, in special modo quando si tratta di operare tra ció che puó risultare quanto meno con ragionevole certezza imputabile a Cicerone e quello che, ispirato al?Arpíñate e al trattato, va invece letto come frutto della rielaborazione altrui. Di questi rischi Grilli avverte la pericolositá soprattutto per opere come il terzo libro delle Divinae institutiones di Lattanzio o i libri 13-14 del de Trinitate di Agostino, opere che risentono di certissimi influssi de\YHortensias, ma proprio per questo 'pericolose' per i rischi di indebite attribuzioni al trattato di riflessioni in ogni modo ad esso riconducibili. E proprio per tali ragioni, di tali finissime riflessioni di Grilli, maturate in un lungo arco cronológico e concretizzatesi in questa preziosissima opera, la comunitá scientifica non puó che dirsi grata all'Autore, cui é mancato il piacere di veder pubblicata l'opera nella veste definitiva, e a chi, meritoriamente, ne ha ultimato gli sforzi. Alfredo Casamento Palermo Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 450 pages. Joel Altman's The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood is, like his earlier The Tudor Play of Mind, a big book. It offers extensive, detailed commentary on one of Shakespeare s major tragedies as well as briefer examinations of other plays. It situates those readings, as well as the stage practices, the acting, and Shakespeare s own sense of himself and his craft, in their historical context, specifically relating them all to what Altman calls the "rhetorical anthropology" that he sees as defining the Renaissance. It also traces that rhetorical anthropology back to 320 RHETORICA its sources in antiquity. Finally, Altman's study offers a detailed analysis of a concept that is central to rhetoric—probability—and shows us its importance not just for that discipline, but for dialectic and philosophy as well as for concepts of self and society. As in his previous book, Altman starts from the assumption that for the Renaissance rhetoric was the "Queen of the Sciences." But whereas in The Tu­ dor Play ofMind, he was interested in how the teaching of students to debate questions from different points of view (the argumentum in utramqne partem) shaped the development of the English Renaissance drama, here he sees rhetoric as determining the basic ways that people viewed both themselves and their culture. According to the pre-Socratic philosophers, who invented rhetoric, we live in a world of appearances, where matter is in flux and the senses unstable, the world of rhetoric that deals not with absolute truths, but with probabilities. This view, which was inherited by Renaissance humanists, is what Altman calls "rhetorical anthropology" It assumes that individuals operate in the transient historical world where cognition is always radically contingent; that people cannot truly know others; and that what they experi­ ence as their selves are the changeable products of rhetorical interactions. Orators can be persuasive in this world, not because their words reference realities, but because they create emotionally compelling heterocosms out of language for their audience. Altman distinguishes two kinds of rhetorical identities that get produced. Adapting Raymond Williams' terms for ideolo­ gies, he calls one "emergent," the identity that gets produced...

Abstract: Historically, the Renaissance marks a transformation in wfiich the elite classes come to define themselves by their aesthetic refinement, taste, and good manners. Accompanying this change is a special vision of the human body which is distinguished from that of artisans and peasants. This opposition has been described by Bakhtin as one between the classical body and the grotesque one, and it appears in the most unportant book for the Renaissance redefinition of the upper classes, Castiglione's II libro del cortegiano. Castiglione's view of the body actually derives from the rhetorical tradition of antiquity, in particular from Quintilian and Cicero's De oratore. A similar view appears in the works of Renaissance rhetoricians and can usefully be illustrated by analysis of Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), although the latter also retains a vision of the grotesque body as a result of the ambiguous social position of its author.