International Studies in the History of Rhetoric – serie

The present study provides an extensive treatment of the topic of enargeia on the basis of the classical and humanist sources of its theoretical foundation. These serve as the basis for detailed analyses of verbal and pictorial works of the Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age. Their theoretical basis is the tradition of classical rhetoric with its principal representatives (Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian) and their reception history. The ‘enargetic’ approach to the arts may be described as rhetoric of presence and display, or aesthetics of evidence and imagination. Visual imagination plays a major role in the concepts of effect in oratory, poetry, and drama of the Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age. Its implementations are manifested in the Second Sophistic and in the Early Modern Age, there above all in the works of William Shakespeare.

Sixteenth century Elizabethan treatises on rhetoric in the vernacular are relatively rare. Guillaume Coatalen offers annotated editions of Richard Reynolds’s The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), which has not been edited since the 1945 facsimile edition, and of William Medley’s unknown Brief Discourse on Rhetoricke which survives in a single manuscript dated 1575. While Reynolds’s work is an English adaptation of Aphthonius's Progymnasmata and a preparation for Thomas Wilson’s influential Arte of Rhetoricke (1560), Medley’s is broader in scope and contains the only full treatment of periodic prose in English in the period. Both works are essential to understand how Elizabethan rhetoric in the vernacular evolved, in particular in aristocratic circles, and its links with Continental developments, notably German.

Classical Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: The Medieval Rhetors and Their Art 400-1300, with Manuscript Survey to 1500 CE is a completely updated version of John Ward’s much-used doctoral thesis of 1972, and is the definitive treatment of this fundamental aspect of medieval and rhetorical culture. It is commonly believed that medieval writers were interested only in Christian truth, not in Graeco-Roman methods of ‘persuasion’ to whatever viewpoint the speaker / writer wanted. Dr Ward, however, investigates the content of well over one thousand medieval manuscripts and shows that medieval writers were fully conscious of and much dependent upon Graeco-Roman rhetorical methods of persuasion. The volume then demonstrates why and to what purpose this use of classical rhetoric took place.

Persuasion has long been one of the major fields of interest for researchers across a wide range of disciplines. The present volume aims to establish a framework to enhance the understanding of the features, manifestations and purposes of persuasion across all Greek and Roman genres and in various institutional contexts. The volume considers the impact of persuasion techniques upon the audience, and how precisely they help speakers/authors achieve their goals. It also explores the convergences and divergences in deploying persuasion strategies in different genres, such as historiography and oratory, and in a variety of topics. This discussion contributes towards a more complete understanding of persuasion that will help to advance knowledge of decision-making processes in varied institutional contexts in antiquity.

Classical Rhetoric in English, 1650 - 1800 features English translations of the era’s most cherished Greek and Roman orators, rhetorical philosophers, and rhetorical critics. The publication history reveals how a distinctive British canon emerged from selected works by Plato, Isocrates, Demosthenes, Aristotle, Theophrastus, Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, Tacitus and Longinus. Works by these ten authors, especially Cicero and Longinus, were widely disseminated, becoming key texts in the formation of British rhetorical culture. At the core of the volume, annotated selections offer the twenty-first century reader a sampling of these classical rhetorical works in translation. The glossary of rhetorical criticism elucidates the now archaic meanings of words that enabled citizens to communicate their moral and rhetorical taste.