Chapter 7
Rhetoric in the Renaissance
Chapter Overview
Rhetoric achieved its greatest prominence during the Renaissance. Humanists promoted rhetoric between 1300 and 1700. The attention paid to rhetoric by intellectual luminaries such as Petrarch, Pico, Vives, and Valla enhanced rhetoric’s status substantially. Humanism revered newly retrieved classical sources. A revived classical rhetoric—largely Ciceronian—grounded a new way of thinking about culture and education, indeed, a new social order. The Renaissance orator—the uomo universal—elevated the liberal arts and diligently pursued Cicero’s model of uniting wisdom and eloquence. Petrarch advocated the vita activa—the active life of civic involvement. Rhetoric was the key to self-discovery, refinement, and effective government. New conversational forms of rhetoric were explored by innovative figures such as Madeleine de Scudéry.
Review Questions
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Christine de Pisan can be understood as a polemical writer because she was a fierce advocate who was actively involved in controversies of the day. As a powerful writer and active rhetorician, she wrote several outspoken defenses of women in a time when many popular books portrayed women as immoral and incompetent. Christine used her immense rhetorical ability to encourage women to find meaning in their lives and pursue worthy acts.
Rhetoric was an aid to contemplation and moral refinement, as well as a path to political power. Rhetorical skill was the sign of an educated person, surpassing the prestige of philosophers, as rhetoric was able to combine both eloquence and wisdom. Over 2,500 books on rhetoric were published during this period. Students had large numbers of rhetorical strategies and terms.
Humanism emphasized the importance of getting texts right, which necessitated knowledge of classical languages. The second characteristic was to put texts in their historical context. This was a reaction against the Medieval splintering of classical texts. The third characteristic is an emphasis on ascertainable facts in writing history. These characteristics led to a revived interest in secular history which highlighted politics, war, and biography.
The Italian Humanists were advocates of political and civic involvement. This concept is rooted in Ciceronian ideas of orators using their skills for the good of the state. The humanists saw speech as a civilizing and constructive ability. Rhetoric then must be used in the public sphere to aid in creating society. The vita activa was opposed to the concept of the vita contemplativa which held that rhetoric and reason should be used in solitary reflection or contemplation. This view was part of the earlier Christian model which emphasized personally contemplating divine truth within the monastic tradition.
The Italian Humanists’ emphasis on a vita activa made them naturally opposed to the idea of Scholasticism and the vita contemplativa. They believed that to use ones rhetorical and intellectual abilities away from society was selfish and suspicious. The humanist view went against the monastic tradition of the medieval period which emphasized prayer and self-reflection and advocated instead for wisdom and eloquence focused on bettering civilization.
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Essay Questions
- During the Renaissance, arts known as the studia humanitatis became important to education in Europe. What were some of these studies, and what shift from a medieval orientation to study and to life do they reflect? What role did rhetoric play in Renaissance education? Why would rhetoric have been of such universal interest and importance in Renaissance education? What writer was particularly important to shaping and securing the place of rhetoric in the Renaissance Curriculum?
- The Italian Humanists placed rhetoric at the very center of their studies. What were the marks of Italian Humanism as an intellectual movement. Why was rhetoric so important to the Italian Humanists? What important practical skills did rhetoric impart? What did it reveal about human beings, their thoughts, their activities, their capacity to build societies? What art did not give an adequate view of human beings and their activities?
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The first printed classical texts
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US Army commercial – “Be All You Can Be”
Recommended Readings
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On The Renaissance
Gene Brucker. Florence: The Golden Age 1138–1737. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984.
Lauro Martines. Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy. New York: Knopf, 1979.
Renaissance Thought and its Sources. Ed. Michael Mooney. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.
J. H. Plumb. The Italian Renaissance. New York: Mariner Books, 2001.
Ferdinand Schevill. History of Florence: The Founding of the City Through The Renaissance. New York: Frederick Unger Publishing, 1961.
On Rhetoric in the Renaissance
Gene Brucker. Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Ernesto Grassi. Rhetoric as Philosophy. University Park, PA: Penn State Press,1980.
Wilbur Samuel Howell. Logic and Rhetoric in England: 1500–1700. New York: Russell & Russell, 1961.
Victoria Kahn. Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Raphael Lyne. Shakespeare, Rhetoric and Cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Peter Mack. Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Tradition of Rhetoric and Dialectic. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993.
Izora Scott. Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero in the Renaissance. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1991.
Ryan J. Stark. Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England.Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009.
Brian Vickers, “On the Practicalities of Renaissance Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric Revalued, ed. Brian Vickers (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982b), 133.
Garry Wills. Rhetoric and Rome: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
On Humanism
The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Cornelis Augustijn. Erasmus: His Life, Works, and Influence. Trans. J. C. Grayson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.
Morris Bishop. Petrarch and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963.
Gene Brucker. Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
Erasmus: His Life, Works and Influence. Trans. J. C. Grayson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986.
Erasmus. “The Right Way to Speak.” Collected Works. v. 4. Ed. J.K. Sowards. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe. Ed. Anthony Goodman, Angus McKay. London: Longman, 1990.
Donald R. Kelley. Renaissance Humanism. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers,1991.
Nicholas Mann, “The Origins of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1.
Charles Nauert. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995.
Jerrold Seigel. Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968.
On Women and Rhetoric in the Renaissance
Jane Donawerth. Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Rhetorical Tradition, 1600– 1900. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.
Anne R. Larsen and Colette H. Winn. Renaissance Women Writers: French Texts/American Contexts. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994.
Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford. Pittsburgh, PA: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.
Jenny R. Redfern, “Christine de Pisan and The Treasure of the City of Ladies: A Medieval Rhetorician and Her Rhetoric,” in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, ed. Andrea A. Lunsford (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 73–92, p. 74.
Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation. Ed. Katharina M. Wilson. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1987.
On Ramus
Walter J. Ong, S.J. Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Peter Ramus’s Attack on Cicero. Trans. Carole Newlands. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1992.
By Ramus
The Questions of Brutus. 1549. Trans. Carole Newlands. Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1992.
On Margaret Cavendish
Anna Battigelli. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1998.
Jacqueline Broad. Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Paul Salzman. Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
By Margaret Cavendish
Observations Upon Experimental Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
On Vico
Joseph Mali. The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s “New Science”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Richard Manson. The Theory of Knowledge of Giambattista Vico. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1969.
Robert C. Miner. Vico, Genealogist of Modernity. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.
Michael Mooney. Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.
Giambattista Vico: Keys to the New Science. Ed. Thora Ilin Bayer and Philip Verene. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.
By Vico
Giambattista Vico’s Science of Humanity. Ed. G. Tagliacozzo and D. P. Verene. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1976.
Vico: Selected Writings. Ed. Leon Pompa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.