One thread in the American nineteenth-centuryi f discourse of sentiment wraps itself around women's bodies.1 This essay is about those bodies, women's writing, and sentimental rhetoric. The three intersect in corsets-and not just in those torso-squeezing contraptions that assured a woman's hourglass figure in Western bourgeois Figure I Coat advertisement, culture from at least the 1750s to the early twentiMcLure's Magazine (1896). eth century. In this article I address a number of cultural constructions, formal matters that perform a kind of poesis shaping a woman writer's heart, spirit, and body back in the nineteenth century, and now, too. The Canadian National Film Board ad quoted above views the corset and its culture only as restraint. But sentimental rhetoric puts those corsets and cultural bodies in a different light. Rhetorical codes map a particular significance of

Review Article| August 01 2000 Short Reviews: The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, by Edward Schiappa, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England, by Anne W. Astell, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, by Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe and Rhetorical Figures in Science, by Jeanne Fahnestock Edward Schiappa,The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), x + 230 pp.Anne W. Astell,Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1999), xii + 218 pp.Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe eds. The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999), vii + 279 pp.Jeanne Fahnestock,Rhetorical Figures in Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xiv + 234 pp. Janet M. Atwill, Janet M. Atwill The University of Tennessee Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Sybil M. Jack, Sybil M. Jack University of Sydney Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Wendy Dasler Johnson, Wendy Dasler Johnson Washington State University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Jean Dietz Moss Jean Dietz Moss The Catholic University of America Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2000) 18 (3): 343–354. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.3.343 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Janet M. Atwill, Sybil M. Jack, Wendy Dasler Johnson, Jean Dietz Moss; Short Reviews: The Beginnings of Rhetorical Theory in Classical Greece, by Edward Schiappa, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England, by Anne W. Astell, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric, by Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe and Rhetorical Figures in Science, by Jeanne Fahnestock. Rhetorica 1 August 2000; 18 (3): 343–354. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2000.18.3.343 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 2000, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviews 349 different levels of spiritual understanding may be debatable. Given the likelihood that an open text can serve to stimulate reflection on all these levels, too precise an attempt at political closure may be counterproductive. Sybil M. Jack University of Sydney Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe eds, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999), vii + 279 pp. This new collection brings back the excitement of the 1997 Saskatchewan conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, where its essays were delivered. There scholars of women's issues from such countries as Canada, France, the Netherlands, Romania, Australia, England, and the U.S. sized up others' perspectives, questioned assumptions, and pushed for clarity, but came away assured of women's place in a field that has notoriously excluded them. Restive fractiousness was not much evident in discussions about women, like the productive dissension arising for instance at the first Rhetorics and Feminisms conference later that summer, when differentials of power, economic means, and race tensions came to the fore. Differences like these are mostly missing, too, from this volume; nevertheless, Mason Sutherland and Sutcliffe's volume encourages and supports an array of scholarship about women that today still lacks ready access to print. Mason Sutherland's own essay opens the collection, a place due it as a plenary address for the gathering of international scholars, and also as "overview of the field" from the editors' stance. "Women in the History of Rhetoric: the Past and the Future" asserts that far from a margin, women have been "a matrix" for rhetoric. "[O]ur part in it has been to feed it, to support it, to enable it", says Mason Sutherland. Referring to all women's work as "maternal" has lately rankled many, but situating it as "anterior" to the rhetorical tradition can strike a resonant note (p. 10). Yet the author worries that a "world view of our own time can come between us and a clear understanding of" past women (p. 350 RHETORICA 27), and she pleads for a complexly ambivalent, but "sympathetic listening to ...voices of the past" such as Mary Astell’s (p. 14). Mason Sutherland presents Astell (1666-1731) as a rationalist and high church monarchist who nevertheless vigorously defended women's education and capacity for public service. The goal of Mason Sutherland's address and of the co-edited collection, then, is "to promote good in our present without doing the past the injustice of misunderstanding and misrepresenting it" (p. 29). The book's sixteen essays (one in both French and English) are arranged as they address ways women were (or are) excluded from, alongside, participating in, emerging into, and engaging the rhetorical tradition, five locations the editors also suggest for future studies of women in rhetoric. The first section, on exclusion, offers C. Jan Swearingen's essay, "Plato's Women: Alternative Embodiments of Rhetoric", which questions the ethics of dismissing such figures as Aspasia and Diotima by claiming that evidence for them is literary and thus suspect. "Directing the announcement selectively at studies of women in antiquity", Swearingen concludes, "is an act of pseudo­ objectivity that should not go unremarked" (p. 44). A wonderfully weird counterpoint is Jody Enders's text, "Cutting Off the Memory of Women", testifying against medieval torture that was designed explicitly to undercut and erase what were codified by the fifteenth-century Malleus Maleficarum as the notoriously unruly memories of women. These essays represent both thoughtful and provocative scholarship, and yet I wonder, looking back at the conference program, why for example Mary Garrett’s "Women and the Chinese Rhetorical Tradition" is not here. The collection focuses, as scholarship about women has, on studies that recover in rhetorical terms the work of particular women: Catherine of Sienna, Hester Ann Rogers, Lady Mary Wroth, Flora MacDonald Denison, and Gertrude Buck to name some honored here. I must confine myself here to a very few essays from this useful volume that even more broadly open up studies about women in rhetoric. One of them, from the "alongside" section, is Helene Cazes's "Verbum inuisiblile palpabitur: The Sibyls in the Second Half of...