The combination of rhetoric and philosophy appeared in the ancient world through Cicero, and revived as an ideal in the Renaissance. By a careful and precise analysis of the views of four major humanists-Petrarch, Salutati, Bruni, and Valla—Professor Seigel seeks to establish that they were first of all professional rhetoricians, completely committed to the relation between philosophy and rhetoric. He then explores the broader problem of the "external history" of humanism, and reopens basic questions about Renaissance culture. He (...) departs from the views held by such scholars as Hans Baron and Lauro Martines and expands the conclusions suggested by Paul Oskar Kristeller. The result is a stimulating, controversial study that rejects some of the claims made for the humanists and indicates achievements and limitations. Originally published in 1968. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Renaissance Project of Knowing:Lorenzo Valla and Salvatore Camporeale’s Contributions to the Querelle Between Rhetoric and PhilosophyMelissa Meriam BullardThe Journal of the History of Ideas has published two symposia devoted to examinations of Lorenzo Valla's place in Renaissance intellectual history, both of which sought to situate Valla in his appropriate contemporary context and to assess his contributions to developing tools of rhetorical analysis and textual criticism in (...) the fifteenth century. In the first JHI debate published in 1989, Salvatore Camporeale's foundational reexamination of Valla's views on language, rhetoric, and theology was frequently cited; and his assessment served as a fulcrum in the disparate interpretations offered by John Monfasani and by Richard Waswo and Sarah Gravelle.1 In the second forum published in 1996, Camporeale was invited to contribute an essay on Valla's famous critique of the false Donation of Constantine; therein the Roman humanist had appealed for Christian renewal inspired by an early Christianity, unburdened by medieval ontological discourse, and seeking to subvert the imperial (Constantinian) model of the church that had dominated since the fourth century.2More than half a century later in the early sixteenth century, reform-minded intellectuals such as Erasmus, More, Luther, and Melanchthon picked up Valla's pleas and used his insights and textual criticism to buttress their own calls for ecclesiastical reform, challenging the claims to authority of the [End Page 477] Roman church. But despite the popularity among the reformers of Valla's two most noted and provocative texts, his rhetorical and philological refutation of the Donation of Constantine and his annotations for a new translation of the New Testament from Greek, his legacy gradually faded from prominence after the sixteenth century. By then when the Protestants' split from Rome had become an accepted reality, and their battle to achieve a place in a divided Christian world won, the reformers' use of Valla's arguments no longer seemed so controversial. For its part, Catholic discourse in the Tridentine era had reverted to reassertions of papal hierarchy along the Constantinian model. Valla's other contributions to understanding rhetorical hermeneutics and philosophy gradually receded, especially from Anglophone intellectual consciousness and in some quarters even from the metanarratives of intellectual history.3 His legacy frequently goes unacknowledged in reconstructions of antecedents to modern intellectual history and philosophy despite the late twentieth century's lingering love affair with philosophies of language and the stress on contextualization pioneered by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, which share many of the same concerns Valla had plumbed for his day.4 The present group of essays attempts to address that lacuna in various ways, by revisiting Valla's contributions to the philosophy of language, by casting his story forward to understand the nature of his legacy beyond the Renaissance and Reformation, and by exploring why his and other Renaissance humanists' contributions to the project of human knowledge have been minimized or overlooked in more recent times. It is the contention of all the contributors that Valla, and to wit Camporeale's Valla, richly deserves our attention and that his overlooked legacy endures.Beginning in the 1970s Salvatore Camporeale, the leading modern Valla specialist, wrote and lectured widely to highlight the Roman humanist's place in the history of thought and to discuss him in an idiom reflective of modern sensitivities to issues of rhetoric, philosophy, language, and historical context.5 Camporeale's massive tome, Lorenzo Valla. Umanesimo e teologia (Florence, 1972) has only slowly made its fortune beyond Italy and Europe. The book, densely written and daunting for its close philological examination of variant texts and datings, has been more often consulted than read outside [End Page 478] the select circle of Valla devotees, this despite Eugenio Garin's clearly stated appreciation in his presentation of the volume. Garin lauded the depth and precision of Camporeale's scholarship and the lucidity with which he brought into focus the rich fabric of fifteenth-century theological disputes that engaged Valla and that invested his understanding of language and philology.6 Through careful and insightful analysis, Camporeale not only established Quintilian as the major inspiration behind Valla's rhetorical theory, but, logical step by logical step, he... (shrink)

Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance; Debora K. Shuger; Princeton University Press; ISBN - 9780691067360Rhetorics of Reason and Desire: Vergil, Augustine, and the Troubadours; Sarah Spence; Cornell University Press; ISBN - 9780801421297.

This volume examines the transmission and influence of Ciceronian rhetoric from late antiquity to the fifteenth century, examining the relationship between rhetoric and practices as diverse as law, dialectic, memory theory, poetics, and ethics. Includes an appendix of primary texts.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 298-302 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance. Cheryl Glenn. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1997. Pp. xii + 235. $19.95 paperback; $49.95 hardback. The past decade has produced a number of collections on women and rhetoric, women in rhetoric, and (...) feminist approaches to rhetoric. Reviewers of these collections have commended their contributions as pioneering works [End Page 298] in a new field while calling for book-length studies offering sustained appraisals of individual women figures and theoretical bases for approaching individual women and rhetorical issues, which must be approached differently if women and feminist issues are to be incorporated into the study of rhetoric. Ethos and audience, intention and identification, agonistic argumentation and collective narrative modes of argumentation--each of these takes on new shadings and nuances when women's practices are examined, and when various feminist theories are employed to assess those practices.Glenn's study is a welcome newcomer, a sustained analysis of rhetorical issues across periods, an analysis developed by spotlighting a series of women figures. Very deliberately, Glenn includes "heroic" figures such as Aspasia and Elizabeth I alongside their "lesser" sisters: the marginalized, until now unheard, and often uneducated women who developed rhetorics within severe restraints. The exposition illuminates a number of points in current feminist theory that are shaping rhetorical studies. Some may fault the selections in Glenn's study, and the inevitable omissions, and some may object that focusing on women's silence is yet another victim narrative. Careful readers, however, will find that the discussion of silence in women's rhetoric deftly reverses the traditional negative connotations: "Silence is perhaps the most undervalued and under-understood traditionally feminine rhetorical site" (175). Silence need not be read simply as "passivity. Silence may take many forms and serve many functions" (176), including "enlightened presence" (177).In "Cartographies of Silence" (The Dream of the Common Language, New York: Norton, 1978), Adrienne Rich writes, Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint to a life Do not confuse it with any kind of absence. (17) Rhetoric Retold begins and concludes by "mapping the silences" of women's presence in the history of rhetoric, and in the very conception of rhetoric. Like Rich, Glenn defines the subtle complexities of silence and absence: silence can indeed be a plan, rigorously executed. We should not confuse it with any kind of absence. Until recently, most histories of rhetoric have not given much attention to women as individual figures or as practitioners [End Page 299] of distinct rhetorical genres. Quite to the contrary, many histories have simply asserted, without proof or evidence, that women have always been forbidden to study or practice rhetoric. Strong assertions of absence belie the truth intimated by Democritus's rebuke: "A woman must not practice argument. This is dreadful. To be ruled by a woman is the ultimate outrage for a man" (Ancilla to the PreSocratic Philosophers, trans. Kathleen Freeman, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983, 103). Glenn's double starting point is the question, who left them out, and why? Their absence from our histories has been one among many sources of their silence. The historiographical discussion happily avoids simple charges of phallocentrism and misogyny and instead looks at how entire systems of culture, within different periods, constructed women's roles and voices. Deep background detail within each historical section provides a welcome context for thinking through complex questions of what is rhetorical among the many women's discourses presented for consideration.Although Glenn's study does not dwell on this point, some of the fault for the omission of women from histories of rhetoric, and evidence of the rigorous deliberateness of that omission, can be found in the robust maleness of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century classical philology, and the neoclassical educational systems it underwrote. The quip in Pope's "Epistle 2: To a Lady" of The Moral Essay, "Nothing so true as once you [Martha... (shrink)

Most of the medieval arts of poetry and prose were written before the middle of the thirteenth century, but their dissemination was not uniform in all parts of Europe. In England, the surviving copies of a work such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova taper off notably toward the end of the thirteenth century, and the numbers do not begin to pick up again until the last quarter of the fourteenth century. This pattern is no accident of preservation but reflects (...) a significant revival of interest in Latin rhetoric and literature, centered at Oxford in the late fourteenth century. The characteristic literary materials and rhetorical methods of this renaissance resonated beyond the university environment and are reflected with striking precision in the references to rhetoric scattered throughout the vernacular poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004) 191-211 [Access article in PDF] Oratory and Rhetoric in Renaissance Medicine Nancy G. Siraisi Hunter College In Renaissance medical practice rhetoric had an ambiguous reputation. Many authors warned physicians against use of persuasion or repeated some version of the truism that patients are cured not by eloquence but by medicines. On the other hand, physicians were also reminded that (...) by speaking well they helped patients to have confidence in their advice and to understand directions, which in turn facilitated cure.1 Yet some aspects of medical culture of the period between 1450 and 1600 seem profoundly attentive to rhetoric, at least as regards the use of language, performative elements, and the influence of these features in ancient models (most notably Galen himself).2 One area in which rhetoric had an unambiguous, acknowledged, and essential place was in the medical orations pronounced at university ceremonies. A sample follows: Pursuit of all these different things by study, investigation of obscurities with ingenuity, conquest of difficulties with industry, and—after penetrating into the very fibers of the earth and searching everywhere into the arcana of the whole of nature and from all herbs, fruits, trees, animals, gems, and even poisons—inquiry after remedies and the proper way to use them for all the ills of human life from so many authors, so many disciplines, and even from the very stars: these things, I say, [End Page 191] have uncovered so many hidden cures, been attained with such arduous powers of the mind, completed with so much effort of memory, offer so many things necessary for the health of the entire human race in common, that does not indeed [the entire enterprise of medicine] seem to have been superhuman and really in a certain way divine?3This nicely exuberant example of Renaissance medical rhetoric exemplifies the genre in several respects. The oration to which it belongs was originally delivered to an academic faculty of medicine by a physician; it shows the impact in medical settings of the revival of epideictic rhetoric, and its author drew on learned sources and commonplaces about medicine that belonged to a store of broadly humanistic erudition, shared both in and outside the medical profession. In fact the only truly distinctive feature of this passage is its author. It comes from Erasmus's Encomium medicinae, which he wrote in 1499 for a friend—a physician named Gysbertus—to deliver to the medical faculty of the University of Paris.4If Gysbertus was exceptionally fortunate in his ghost, many other surviving medical orations are internal products of medical faculties, the work of university masters or students of medicine. But whoever their authors, orations delivered in or written for an academic medical setting offer some telling illustrations both of the way in which certain kinds of humanistic interests and requirements came to penetrate medical learning and of the reaction of humanistic rhetoric to medicine. "Medical humanism" is usually understood to encompass both the core enterprise of intensive philological study, editing, and translation of Greek medical texts—never the occupation of more than a handful of hellenist scholars—and also the reception and scientific influence of the fruits of their labors among a wider medical audience. But Renaissance medicine was also a humanistic discipline in a much broader and more inclusive sense; that is, it both fostered and provided ample scope for the development among learned physicians of interests characteristic of humanistic culture in general: rhetoric, history, biography, fascination with remote peoples and places, and antiquarianism. At the same time, as the passage from Erasmus quoted [End Page 192] above demonstrates, humanists outside the medical profession interested themselves in medicine and controlled a stock of rhetorical commonplaces on the subject. To be sure, the penetration of terminology and concepts from medicine into the general culture long antedated the Renaissance.5 But the revival of rhetoric together with attention to ancient sources and commonplaces provided humanist observers with new tools for commenting, sometimes in quite specific and detailed terms, on the contemporary medical scene, a phenomenon... (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, after centuries of neglect, a revival of interest towards Aristotle’s Rhetoric took place in 12th century Constantinople, which led to the production of a number of commentaries. In order to give an overview of the commentary tradition on the Rhetoric, I examine first the surviving extant commentaries themselves, then the information that the commentators offer regarding their preceding interpretations, and last the traces of commentaries on the Rhetoric found in other treatises. This examination will (...) show that, at least within a specific group of scholars, the Rhetoric was studied and commented upon like never before. Finally, I attempt to explain this revival of interest, especially with respect to the role that philosophical and rhetorical education played in 12th century Byzantium. (shrink)

Offering a re-reading of Erasmus's works, this book shows that emotion and affectivity were central to his writings. It argues that Erasmus's conception of emotion was highly complex and richly diverse by tracing how the Dutch humanist writes about emotion not only from different perspectives-theological, philosophical, literary, rhetorical, medical-but also in different genres. In doing so, this book suggests, Erasmus provided a distinctive, if not unique, Christian humanist emotional style. Demonstrating that Erasmus consulted multiple intellectual traditions and previous works in (...) his thoughts on affectivity, The Renaissance of Feeling sheds light on how understanding emotions in late medieval and early modern Europe was a multi-disciplinary affair for humanist scholars. It argues that the rediscovery and proliferation ancient texts during the so-called renaissance resulted in shifting perspectives on how emotions were described and understood, and on their significance for Christian thought and practice. The book shows how the very availability of source material, coupled with humanists' eagerness to engage with multiple intellectual traditions gave rise to new understandings of feeling in the 16th century. Essary shows how Erasmus provides the clearest example of such an intellectual inheritance by examining his writings about emotion across much of his vast corpus, including literary and rhetorical works, theological treatises, textual commentaries, religious disputations, and letters. Considering the rich and diverse ways that Erasmus wrote about emotions and affectivity, this book provides a new lens to study his works and sheds light on how emotions were understood in early modern Europe. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mikhail Bakhtin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and the Rhetorical Culture of the Russian Third RenaissanceFilipp SapienzaAlthough Mikhail Bakhtin figures centrally in multiculturalism, community, pedagogy, and rhetoric (Bruffee 1986; Welch 1993; Zebroski 1994; Zappen, Gurak, and Doheney-Farina 1997; Mutnick 1996; Halasek 2001, 182; see also Bialostosky 1986) many of his major ideas remain enigmatic and controversial. The elusive aspects of Bakhtin's theories exist in part because rhetoricians know little about Bakhtin's own (...) rhetorical culture. Theorists recognize this problem and call for a reworking of Bakhtin more on his own terms. This call has been made to resolve concerns about Bakhtin's ambivalence toward rhetoric. Since Bakhtin disliked rhetoric, any use of Bakhtin in rhetorical theory is largely a hybrid synthesis of his distinct ideas on poetics, prose, satire, the epic, the novel, and so forth. John Murphy proposes a reconception of Bakhtin closely built around his ambivalence and guided by the question, "what do we [rhetoricians] mean by the concept of a rhetorical tradition?" (2001, 259). The suggestion encourages rhetoricians to take Bakhtin more on his own terms than has been done in the past. Unfortunately, as the word "we" indicates, Murphy reworks Bakhtin primarily in terms of Western ideas about rhetoric. Slavists and "Bakhtinologists" in Russia argue that when talking about Bakhtin, "we" has often meant Western, obscuring the Russian cultural roots of his theories (Kozhinov 1993; Miller and Platter 1993, 118). The privileging of Western perspectives has also been criticized by scholars of other discourse cultures. Discussing American Indian rhetoric, Malea Powell argues that "we" means a Rhetorical Tradition that begins "with the Greeks, goes Roman, briefly sojourns in Italy, then shows up in England and Scotland, hops the ocean to America and settles in" (2002, 397). Differences in interpreting Bakhtin also proceed from translation difficulties between Russian and English. The Russian reader views Bakhtin in more essentialist ways as opposed to the "post-modern give-and-take" theorist of many Western [End Page 123] interpretations (Emerson 1990, 113). Read in the Russian language and from that cultural context, Bakhtin's vocabulary contains "conspicuous" elements of Orthodox Christianity and Slavic nationalist ideas (Kozhinov 1993; Mihailovic 1997) that reveal a Russian theological subtext to his ideas about community and dialogue.In this essay, I provide a reading of Bakhtin against the background of his own rhetorical culture. More specifically, I offer an analysis of an intertextual dialogue about language and community between Bakhtin and the symbolist writer Vyacheslav Ivanov. Scholars identify Ivanov as a poet, philosopher, and teacher who profoundly impacted Bakhtin (Mal'chukova 1992, 55). The Russian symbolists upheld strong nationalist ideals and a linguistic theory rooted in metaphysics (Mirsky 1972, 188). Many Slavists and Russian readers of Bakhtin suspect that Ivanov strongly influenced Bakhtin's rhetoric even though, for reasons unknown but that are suspected to be political, Bakhtin understates his debt to him (Ivanov 2001, 3). Bakhtin was not unlike his contemporaries in sharing an interest and vocabulary that addressed the major threads of symbolism. Read side by side with Ivanov's essays in Russian, Bakhtin's rhetoric displays a mixture of the European, Slavic, and Christian ideals that were in parlance among many Russian theorists in early twentieth-century Russia. Bakhtin and Ivanov give us a glimpse of this rhetorical culture. More specifically, they help us to better understand our appropriations of Bakhtin based on an elucidation of the meaning of specific terms as they existed among Bakhtin's contemporaries.The method that I use requires translation of specific Russian passages into English. Terms and phrases are interpreted against the usage background of others in early twentieth-century Russia. Bakhtin's Slavic-theological connections become evident through the elucidation of these intertextual references. Through this method, a common and accepted practice in Slavic literary studies, the use of key words and phrases are traced in and among texts to identify a discourse among authors and explicate its meaning.1 As Steven Mailloux points out, a "rhetorical hermeneutics" focuses on "the historical sets of topics, arguments, tropes, ideologies, and so forth" that give meaning to rhetoric (1988, 15-16). The approach is necessary due to the unique political and artistic circumstances during the early... (shrink)

This book aims to help readers interpret, and reflect on, their reading more effectively. It presents doctrines of ancient and renaissance rhetoric (an education in how to write well) as questions or categories for interpreting one's reading. The first chapter presents the questions. Later chapters use rhetorical theory to bring out the implications of, and suggest possible answers to, the questions: about occasion and audience (chapter 2), structure and disposition (3), narrative (4), argument (5), further elements of content, such (...) as descriptions, comparisons, proverbs and moral axioms, dialogue, and examples (6), and style (7). Chapter eight describes ways of gathering material, formulating arguments and writing about the texts one reads. The conclusion considers the wider implications of taking a rhetorical approach to reading. The investigation of rhetoric's questions is interspersed with analyses of texts by Chaucer, Sidney, Shakespeare, Fielding and Rushdie, using the questions. The text is intended for university students of literature, especially English literature, and rhetoric, and their teachers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance PrefaceSteven RendallPretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface, by Kevin Dunn; xii & 198 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, $32.50.This study is of broader interest than its title might suggest; it engages many of the current issues in literary and cultural studies, and does so with exceptional intelligence. Drawing on Jürgen (...) Habermas’s notion of “the public sphere” and recent research on the history of private life, Dunn focuses on prefatory rhetoric in order to study the ways in which writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries struggled to establish their authority, to define themselves as authors and to regulate their relations with their readers. As they challenged collapsing medieval models of authority, Dunn argues, Renaissance writers had to invent different strategies of self-presentation and discursive legitimation, developing in the process the Renaissance conception of authorship, and eventually a new model of intellectual activity in the service of the public good. [End Page 181]The first part of the book discusses Luther’s effort to ground an oppositional discourse in a personal narrative of suffering and redemption, and Milton’s later recognition of himself as a “member incorporate” of a (Puritan) body for which he can speak as a representative; these represent two termini of the development of Protestant prefatory rhetoric. The second part traces a parallel development in “scientific” writers (Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Sprat), moving from the Cartesian effort to ground science in a personal narrative of discovery to Bacon’s institutionalization of science and Hobbes’s theory of representation based on “common sense.”These chapters offer many insights that deserve close attention. However, since I lack space here to discuss each of them in detail, I will mention only a few points that suggest the wider implications of Dunn’s study. First: he is alive to the role of the body in prefatory rhetoric, as a “private” proof of spiritual authority (in Paul), as a flawed textual corpus (in Luther), and as a model of the body politic (in Hobbes and others). Second: he challenges—correctly, in my view—Foucault’s famous claim about the role of “penal appropriation” in the development of the modern conception of the author, arguing that “texts, books, and discourses begin to need authors at the moment when their transgression itself seeks institutionalization. In other words, it is when the subversive discourse finds itself on the brink of empowerment, of articulating something more than a negative critique of reigning orthodoxies, that the authority of the author becomes necessary” (p. 10). Third: he describes the conflict in Renaissance authors between self-authorization and the desire to prevent readers from following their example—that is, they strive both to open up and to shut off a discursive potential—and offers a subtle account of the persistence of this desire, in the form of the claim to authorial ownership, in writers fully involved in the literary marketplace. Fourth: most of the authors examined here are not traditionally regarded as “literary”; Dunn is casting a broader net, including theological, philosophical, political, and scientific writing, and this is, of course, very much in the spirit of the times—both of our own, and that of the writers discussed. For as Dunn observes, the modern notion of “literature” arises sometime around the end of the Period with which he is concerned in this book—and, perhaps, as a result of the development he describes in it. He argues that “with science having secured its discursive boundaries through the complementary myths of objectivity and public utility, literature became the new site for working out the completing claims of public and private. It is at such a site that literature begins to emerge as an independent category, a place crucial for cultural and political negotiations” (p. 16). As Dunn shows, this is reflected in the way late seventeenth-century French and English prefaces abandon advocacy for critical judgment, handing down sentences based on publicly accepted, secular norms.This fine, illuminating, readable book makes a stimulating contribution to our understanding of the history of cultural authority.Steven RendallUniversity... (shrink)

At any time, basic assumptions about language have a direct effect on the writing of history. The structure of language is related to the structure of knowledge and thus to the definition of historical reality, while linguistic competence gives insights into the relation of ideas and action. Within the framework of these ideas, and drawing on recent work in linguistic theory, including that of the French structuralists. Professor Struever studies the major shift in attitudes toward language and history which the (...) Renaissance represents. One of the essential innovations of Renaissance Humanism is the substitution of rhetoric for dialectic as the dominant language discipline; rhetoric gives the Humanists their cohesion as a lay intellectual elite, as well as the force and direction of their thought. The author accepts the current trend in classical studies, the rehabilitation of the Sophists which finds its source in Nietzsche and includes the work of Rostagni, Untersteiner, and Buccellato, to reinstate rhetoric as the historical vehicle of Sophistic insight. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This critical edition of Nikola Vitov Gučetić’s (1549–1610) _Commentary on the First Book of Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’_, with an introduction and supplementary material, shows how Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ influenced lesser-known thinkers who depended on the art of persuasion in their careers.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Renaissance Crisis of ExemplarityFrançois Rigolot“Every example is lame” (Tout exemple cloche), acknowledged Montaigne in the last chapter of his Essais. 1 Was this the moaning of a lone, disillusioned skeptic or the idiosyncratic formulation of a widely shared attitude of mistrust at the end of the sixteenth century? To answer this question one must first examine the epistemological status of examples at the end of the period (...) we still conventionally call the “Renaissance”; and this is the purpose of this group of papers. 2In his work on the notion of exemplum in early modern France and Italy John D. Lyons helped restore the concept of exemplarity to its central place in the history of rhetoric. 3 From Aristotle’s paradeigmata—simple case stories at the orator’s disposal (Rhetoric 1.2. 1356b)—to Montaigne’s “lame” exemples—contingent instances unfit for demonstrative purposes (Essais III, 13, 1070)—the rhetorical impulse has followed strangely circuitous ways. Part of the confusion is probably due to the transformation of technical language under the pressure of common usage. Throughout the early modern period, while the Latin word exemplum continued to refer to rhetorical practice (an illustrative anecdote with a moral point), its vernacular derivatives (esempio, ejemplo, exemple, etc.) generally had a broader, looser, and less didactic meaning, as the emphasis was displaced to the “narrative” aspect of instances, regardless of their intentionality. In other words, although examples were often used to illustrate a didactic point, they differed from exempla inasmuch as they were not always meant to serve a demonstrative purpose.Of course, to the extent that choosing an example necessarily involves some form of selective process from a larger quantity of material, every instance is [End Page 557] bound to entertain a metonymic relation with a greater whole. But, etymologically, an example (essample, in Old French spelling) is a sample, one thing merely alleged to resemble another one, not a demonstrative tool. Yet in his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), Randle Cotgrave gave polysemous English equivalents for exemple and exemplaire:Exemple: 1) An example, sample, patterne, or president [sic] to follow; 2) a copie, or counterpane of a writing; 3) one thing alledged to prove, or inforce another that resembles it.Exemplaire: 1) A patterne, sample, or sampler; 2) an example, president [sic] or precedent, for others to follow, or to take heed by; 3) also, the copie, or counterpane of a writing. 4There is an odd mixture of demonstrative and non-demonstrative connotations. The two seemingly interchangeable words receive tripartite definitions, with the three meanings of exemple corresponding to the three of exemplaire.In Renaissance humanistic oratory the evocation of examples was often a simple matter of style. For better elocutory purposes public speakers were encouraged to use graphic case stories to make their speeches more appealing and enjoyable, but orators also used what they called exemplars (Latin exemplaria) to provide their audience with models of conduct to imitate. Worthiness was the ultimate criterion for exemplarity. Cato and Socrates were living symbols of moral determination and courage. They became powerful exemplars of ancient “virtue,” or moral fortitude (Latin virtus; Italian virtù). In the selective process of arguments (inventio), they were chosen because they exemplified a specific attitude or line of conduct: they were, by definition, exemplary examples. 5In the Renaissance the uplifting reading of ancient exemplars was closely related to the doctrine of imitatio, the sacrosanct recourse to inherited cultural models. At the same time the appeal of mimesis, characterized by the actual experience of the real world in reaction to scholastic insularity, greatly problematized the reception of ancient models. Whereas a long-held reverence for the imitative power of traditional exempla offered compelling patterns of moral conduct, the new attractiveness of a more “natural” mimetic discourse [End Page 558] tended to turn the study of models away from duplication. 6 In the face of the inexhaustible diversity and unpredictability of human actions, how can we choose a proper model after which to pattern our own behavior? This is one of the many questions raised by the humanist’s disenchantment with imitative symbols of moral conduct.In recent years the concept... (shrink)

Alan R. Perreiah - Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.2 319-321 Ann Moss. Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. 306. Cloth, $74.00. Ann Moss offers an exciting and informative history of humanism from Johannes Balbus through Melanchthon, who completed the "turn" from scholastic to humanistic Latin. She marshals considerable evidence from lexicography and letters that (...) scholastics and humanists cultivated two idioms of Latin that created "two different mind-sets" , two "orders of truth-values" , and "two Latin speech communities that talked past one another" . While her main thesis that the "two linguistic universes" were "incommensurable" is questionable, it is a useful heuristic device to highlight differences between the two traditions. Moss illustrates many of her claims by controversies surrounding the legend of St. Ann, mother of Mary. Whether she is misled by the rhetoric of those heated debates on religious folklore, or whether they support her claim of "incommensurability" must be.. (shrink)

A fundamental reappraisal of Plutarch’s attitude towards rhetoric. Plutarch was not only a skilled writer, but also lived during the Second Sophistic, a period of cultural renaissance. This book offers new insights into Plutarch’s seemingly moderate attitude towards rhetoric. The hypothesis explored in this study introduces, for the first time, the broader literary and cultural contexts that influenced and restricted the scope of Plutarch’s message. When these contexts are considered, a new perspective emerges that differs from that found in (...) earlier studies. It paints a picture of a philosopher who may not regard rhetoric as a lesser means of persuasion, but who faces challenges in openly articulating this stance in his public discourse. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Foucault’s Renaissance Episteme Reassessed: An Aristotelian CounterblastIan MacleanThere seem to me to be two good reasons for looking at Foucault’s Renaissance episteme again, even though specialists of the Renaissance have given it short shrift and Foucault himself does not seem to have set great store by it in his later writings. 1 The first is that in general books on Foucault accounts of it are still (...) given in a neutral or even approving way, as though neither the concept of episteme (which suggests both that mind-sets or paradigms or epistemes are all-constraining) nor the account of the Renaissance episteme in particular (which is given a predominantly Platonic and hermetic character) require modification, if not refutation. 2 I shall suggest that although in some sense we are all prisoners of our mind-sets, there are ways in which we can escape from this prison 3 ; and with respect to the Renaissance in particular, I shall claim that Aristotelianism, not Platonism, is the appropriate context in which to see the dominant universe of discourse of the day and that this philosophy can be shown to possess the resources for escaping its limitations. To do this I shall [End Page 149] give a brief resume of Foucault’s episteme in general and the Renaissance episteme in particular. Then I shall show first, that the Platonist features which he cites as typical are actively refuted at that time and cannot be described as dominant without severe qualification; second, that the versions of Aris-totelianism widely taught in universities and schools give quite different accounts of these features; and third, that this form of thinking can be shown to have the freedom of self-critique in the very areas in which Foucault chooses to see Renaissance philosophy as both constraining and constrained.In 1969 Foucault produced his “theoretical work” L’Archéologie du savoir as the methodological systematization of his earlier historical writings, L’Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (l961), La Naissance de la clinique (l963), and Les Mots et les choses (1966). In this work man is described as a modern self-invention, fashioned from a particular configuration of knowledge and destined soon to disappear. Foucault’s history of man is a story about the way he constituted himself as a subject and then made his body, his behavior, his reason, and his consciousness the object of his study and a field to be controlled, regulated, trained, and coerced. In this analysis man’s “rationality” becomes not a faculty but an authoritarian straitjacket. What Foucault sets out to investigate is a very fundamental form of ontology but not one associated with profound knowledge; it is a superficial and finite, if largely invisible, field, which is discontinuous, not defined by the agenda of the modern state of any associated discipline, and peopled by “utterances” (énoncés) which are only graspable in their differences and their dispersion. If coagulations of these “utterances” (formations discursives) occur at all, they appear only in the form of consistent relations: the objects to which they “refer” are no more than objectifications whose scientific status cannot be established and whose meaning cannot be recovered by semantic or rhetorical analysis. In calling his previous book Les Mots et les choses, he was being explicitly ironic, for neither the words nor the things of the title have any substance to them: they are not presences but absences. The description made by the historian is remote from his object, indirect, incomplete; it describes a “preconceptual field” in which the “preconcepts” are no more than organizing operators or functions revealing relationships of dependence, processes of validation, contingent theories of truth. The “utterances” which these “preconcepts” inform come together in “discourses” which are neither systems nor mere aggregations of knowledge; archaeological history as practiced by Foucault uncovers not a “mentality” but an “episteme,” which he defines as follows:By episteme we mean... the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the discursive practices that give rise to epistemological figures, sciences, possibly formalized systems.... The episteme is not a form of knowledge or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries [End Page 150] of the most... (shrink)

The Legacy of Aristotelian Enthymeme provides a historical-logical analysis of Aristotle's rhetorical syllogism, the enthymeme, through its Medieval and Renaissance interpretations. Bringing together notions of credibility and proof, an international team of scholars highlight the fierce debates around this form of argumentation during two key periods for Aristotle's beliefs.Reflecting on medieval and humanist thinkers, philosophers, poets and theologians, this volume joins up dialectical and rhetorical argumentation as key to the enthymeme's interpretation and shows how the enthymeme was the source (...) of a major interpretive conflict. As a method for achieving the standards for proof and credibility that persist across diverse fields of study today including the law, politics, medicine and morality, this book takes in Latin and Persian interpretations of the enthymeme and casts contemporary argumentation in a new historical light. (shrink)

In the closing moments of Phaedrus, Socrates announces rhetoric's last gasp: "And now the play is played out; and of rhetoric enough" (2006, 69). Of course, news of rhetoric's death has been greatly exaggerated. Indeed, the death and subsequent rebirth of rhetoric have been declared countless times, and debates surrounding the nature and character of rhetoric— from antiquity through the renaissance and even into the modern day— seem to continue almost interminably. In the contemporary context, such debates often flow (...) inexorably from a constitutive indecision that marks rhetorical studies's complicated relationship to a foundational definition of rhetoric. More often than not, after a brief foray into debates .. (shrink)

The classical conception of rhetoric as the method of reasoned political judgment survived into the Renaissance but was reduced to academic critiques of style and "empty" public rhetoric with the rise of modern science and its representationalist theories of language. Recently, however, rhetoric, textuality, and the "linguistic turn" generally, have become central metaphors in the human sciences. This renewed rhetorical perspective not only fosters a critique of positive philosophy and of scientism in public discourse, it also offers affirmative methods (...) by which persons can construct their civic lives. (shrink)

The Renaissance witnessed a proliferation in medical discourse, pedagogical illustration, and popular rhetoric – what I refer to here as “metaphoric botanies” – comparing the human fœtus, or embryo, to a plant. Far from being a mere linguistic inheritance from ancient medicine, such “metaphoric botanies” not only allowed early moderns to conceive of the unobservable development of the human fœtus, but also emphasized the relation of the mother to the unborn child. Much of the “metaphoric botanies” surrounding the fœtus (...) throughout the Renaissance analogize its development to that of a plant “rooting” itself in the mother’s uterus, through which it receives sustenance. Though feminist scholarship has made the important argument that such language has historically been utilized in debates surrounding abortion, these “botanies” might also be placed within a certain representational tradition, through which it might be understood as a meditation on species-being and -continuation in a period fraught with epistemological and metaphysical uncertainty. (shrink)

We are in Florence and Ferrara, between 1300 and 1600 A.D. At the beginning of this period the subjects of petty Italian potentates dream of a universal Empire and Church: a universal confined to the Latin world. Over the next three centuries this dream gradually fades; the idea of a universal Church is largely replaced by a discourse addressed to the individual conscience while in the political world sovereignty becomes synonymous with local power. The universal is progressively dissolved within a (...) multiplicity of separate regimes, each rooted in its own territory; in other words, individual societies achieve spiritual legitimation by a transfer of sovereignty. Thus linked with the absolute, territorial sovereignty, rehabilitating the idea of the local, becomes the foundation of the many-sided flowering of the Renaissance. A reading of the poets is helpful in grasping the full complexity of this historical transformation. How were Dante, Petrarch and those poets who imitated the poets of Antiquity, the so-called Petrarchists, understood? This study will focus on the way in which the texts were created. By comparing them we will try to elucidate what makes for the importance and urgency of these poems. (shrink)

This essay argues that in overlooking the assault on the autonomy, unity, and tenacity of the classical world underway in Europe after 1880, historians have failed to appreciate an important element of historiographical reorientation at the fin de siècle. This second "revolution" in humanistic scholarship challenged the conviction of the educated elite that European culture was rooted exclusively in classical antiquity in part by introducing as evidence non-textual forms of evidence; the testimony of artifacts allowed writers to reach beyond romantic-nationalist (...) histories toward the identification of cultural areas, defined by morphological similarities, and to disrupt the traditional categories of the civilized and the barbaric. The essay focuses on a relatively obscure Austrian art historian, Josef Strzygowski, whose insistence upon Europe's dependence on Oriental forms and upon the superior historical value of material, over textual, evidence provided critics of philologically-based humanism with two important argumentative avenues. Strzygowski also represents a para-academic type, whose rise to power and prestige contributed to the so-called "decline of the German mandarins." In sketching his career, the essay attempts to show how this "decline" is bound up with the waning institutional and popular status of Renaissance humanism--and a corresponding rise of biologistic Germanophilia--in the two intellectual milieux Strzygowski inhabited . A final section suggests that this antihumanist crusade contributed not only to the articulation of racist historiography, but also to the eventual transference of politico-moral legitimacy to a non-elitist, anthropological definition of culture. (shrink)

By looking at rhetoric and politics, this book offers a novel account of Juan Luis Vives' intellectual oeuvre. It argues that Vives adjusted rhetorical theory to a monarchical context in which direct speech was not a possibility, demonstrated how Erasmian languages of ethical self-government and political peace were actualized rhetorically and critically in a princely environment and, finally, rethought the cognitive and emotional foundations of humanist rhetoric in his late and famous De anima et vita (1538). Ultimately, towards the end (...) of his life, Vives epitomized a distinctively cognitive view of politics; he maintained that political concord was not a direct outcome of institutional or legal reform or of the spiritual transformation of the Christian world (an optimistic Erasmian interpretation), but that concord could only be upheld once the dynamics of emotions that motivated political action were understood and controlled through responsible rhetoric that respected decorum and civility. (shrink)

Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his two classical Roman plays. Garry Wills, focusing his attention on _Julius Caesar_, here demonstrates how Shakespeare so wonderfully made these ancient devices vivid, giving his characters their own personal styles of Roman speech. In four chapters, devoted to four (...) of the play’s main characters, Wills shows how Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cassius each has his own take on the rhetorical ornaments that Elizabethans learned in school. Shakespeare also makes Rome present and animate by casting his troupe of experienced players to make their strengths shine through the historical facts that Plutarch supplied him with. The result is that the Rome English-speaking people carry about in their minds is the Rome that Shakespeare created for them. And that is even true, Wills affirms, for today’s classical scholars with access to the original Roman sources. (shrink)

For authors Jean Dietz Moss and William A. Wallace, we can better understand Galileo’s choice of argumentation by examining the intellectual climate of the era and the academic training that helped form Galileo’s literary and scientific genius. In their book, Rhetoric and Dialectic in the Time of Galileo, Moss and Wallace contend that in the late Middle Ages dialectic and rhetoric were distinct areas of learning, but in the late Renaissance period of Galileo’s time, the boundaries of these two (...) arts were shifting. Concepts of argumentation that were popular among the intellectual elite of northern Italy undoubtedly influenced Galileo’s writings and the subsequent judgment of his works. (shrink)

In the study of the history of philosophy, there is a long-standing question as to whether works produced between the mid-fourteenth century and the end of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance, can be rightly understood as philosophy or as primarily literary and rhetorical in character. The latter view is prominently held by Paul Oskar Kristeller but has precedent in Hegel’s treatment of this period in his History of Philosophy. That the works of major figures of this period are essentially (...) philosophical is a view held, in quite different ways, by Ernst Cassirer and Ernesto Grassi. This essay examines the origin and nature of these views and advances a general perspective through which they may be brought together. (shrink)