English 5361: Week 10 Post – Enlightenment

One of the movements in the field of Rhetoric during the Enlightenment period was the ill-fated Elocutionism. This movement moved Rhetoric far afield from the views of Aristotle and other who included invention of arguments as part of Rhetoric. Elocutionism focused on presentation. According to Herrick, this was an ultimately practical movement, focusing on the "performance side of rhetoric" and on "rhetoric's use as a method for refining the public manners, poise, and expressiveness of men and women" (p 180).

Rhetoric seems to move in circles from an art of display to invention to display to invention, continuing endlessly. The Elocutionary movement was one of those movements of display. Perhaps not the proudest stage in Rhetorical History, but it was there. And, when people say of politicians "that is only empty rhetoric," it may be a reference to one of these periods of display.

For the scope of this movement, Rhetoric was more like acting than the Rhetoric of old. "Good delivery was intimately connected with convincing the audience of the urgency and truthfulness of one's message" (Herrick, p 181). This statement perhaps sums up the Elocutionary movement. Presentation is key to acceptance and may perhaps be more important than content. How do you think that this performance Rhetoric impacted today's Rhetors or at least the perception of today's Rhetors?

English 5361: Week 9 Post – Erasmus

Bizzell and Herzberg note that Erasmus "seems to encourage a sort of superabundant verbal play" (p. 583). When reading Copia, I picked up on that playfulness. Erasmus seemed to truly enjoy words and presenting these words. Although the work categorizes words and breaks them down, much of the usage of these categories is left to the reader to decide. When should one use an archaic word? When is a word vulgar and when is it appropriate?

These struggles with word usage follow us to this day. When writing a blog, which words do i choose to express my thoughts on the topic? Which words will I use when writing my contemporary dialectic and will I need to use different words when analyzing it? Which words are appropriate for that work e-mail? Am I speaking to colleague or client?

Though we have may more or fewer categories for the words in our personal repertoire, we do indeed categorize them and decide when to use them. Perhaps not in any formal manner, as described in the text, but we do make a decision. That decision is based on our analysis of what is appropriate to the situation, much in the same way described by Erasmus.

English 5361: Week 8 Post - Women Rhetors of the Renaissance

While the female rhetors of the Renaissance do not, for the most part, have the big names that are known today, like Artistotle, Cicero, Erasmus, and Ramus, they did contribute to the rhetoric of the Renaissance, although in a somewhat limited fashion.

I chose to focus on the female rhetors of the Renaissance, principally because I was shocked that they existed. In a time when Henry VIII of England got rid of wives like women were disposable and men bartered their daughters away as parts of peace treaties or land bargains, it would seem unlikely that any women exorcise the power of rhetoric.

Women of the time, however, were more likely to be educated than in previous years, perhaps hearkening back to the ideal that educated mothers were more likely to produce educated sons. Despite this increase in education, Herrick notes "women's access to education, and especially the social mobility such education afforded women, should not be overstated" (p 153).

The female rhetors listed in Chapter 7 of Herrick were Joanna Vaz, Publia Hortencia de Castro, Christine de Pisan, Margaret Cavendish, and Madame de Scudéry. Each one of them broke through some boundary or provided something to the field of rhetoric. Joanna Vaz "enters the history of the Renaissance based on her reputation for eloquence" (Herrick, p 153). At the time, there was "considerable opposition to women actually speaking in public" (Herrick, p. 153). Vaz served as a tutor to a princess of Portugal. Like Vaz, Publia Hortencia de Castro was known for speaking, though no written record of either Vaz or de Castro's speeches remain for us today.

Christine de Pisan was well-educated, and she read a great deal. According to Herrick, de Pisan's "life was unusual for a woman of her day" (p 154). She used her writing to defend women against the woman bashing prevailing during the day (original sin and leading man astray). de Pisan wrote in French so that her work was more accessible to the women she was defending. Unlike Vaz and de Castro, de Pisan's works were available in the written record.

Margaret Cavendish was the Duchess of Newcastle. Like Vaz, de Castro, and de Pisan, she was educated and could read and write. Cavendish wrote and published her works, something almost unheard of for a woman. She published works outside the realm of women and stretched the boundaries of what was permitted for a female rhetor.

Madam de Scudéry "was a novelist and essayist of the mid-seventeenth century, a late Renaissance woman withe a decided interest in the interpersonal and social potential of rhetoric" (Herrick, p 164). de Scudéry, according to Jane Donaworth, wrote "the first fully elaborated early modern theory of rhetoric by a woman" (Herrick, p 164). She opened the door for later female rhetors and added to the theory of rhetoric for both men and women.

Each step these women took helped to ease some of the bonds constraining women to the home and the background and cracking the door for future female rhetors.

English 5361: Week 7 Post - Medieval Letter Writing

Letter writing was an art form in the medieval period. Bizzell and Herzberg note, "The art of letter writing was generally regarded as a rhetorical art, not, perhaps, because classical rhetorician such as Cicero influenced mature Italian versions of these treatises, but because the treatises dealt with verbal compositions—that were intended to move people to action, to persuade in a special sense." (p 494) As such an important form of rhetoric for the time, texts and education were devoted to the art of letter writing.

Imagine the shock of those who perceived letter writing to be an art upon discovering the fate of communication today. Letter writing has gradually fallen out of favor over time, since the dawn of the telephone. Even though we communicate more by written media today than we have in the recent past, the communication does not much resemble an art form. Text messages can be barely decipherable, written without thought as to form or persuasive technique. Bloggers communicate with a wide range of skills, and while some e-mails are carefully thought out and edited, others are random conglomerations of thoughts and words.

How would our medieval letter writers react to the thoughtlessness of much of today's communication? Would today's letters still pass as a rhetorical art?

English 5361: Week 6 Post – Middle Ages and Christian Rhetoric

The middle ages brought about the dominance of Christian rhetoric. Indeed, according to Murphy, “the middle ages did not produce any major original works on secular speaking…” (Herrick, p 132). In fact, the Church served as the guardians of knowledge in the middle ages. The church has the single highest concentration of literate individuals, and it was up to these literate individuals to read and interpret documents and then relay them to the uneducated masses.

The educational system that developed in the Middle Ages was referred to as Scholastism, which according to Herrick "was a closed and authoritarian approach to education centered on disputation over a fixed body of premises derived largely from the teachings of Aristotle" (p 124). This technique involved lifting bits of the old classical works out of context to use in arguments. These single statements were called sententiae. The sententiae lost of the original context of the work, but they may also have helped to preserve the art of rhetoric.

The church was not know for high levels of tolerance of pagan created things. Just as it co-opted some pagan traditions and holidays, the church needed rhetoric to spreed its message, so it had to adapt the pagan documents with mentions of Greek and Roman deities to suit its needs. Sententiae may have helped in this purpose. With the statement lifted out of context, there is little risk that the undesirable parts of the manuscript would be read and incorporated into the educational system.