The chapter explores the anxious cultural construction of women as intergenerational mediators that emerges from several epistles in Pliny’s collection (3.3 and 4.19; 4.2 and 4.7; 2.7 and 3.10). At once expected to be bearers of their father’s imprint and vehicle for the transmission of their husband’s identity, Roman women were the object of a discourse in which notions of biological filiation significantly intersected with issues of artistic reproduction and literary allusion. Building a typology of intra-, inter-, extra-, and alter-textual relations which connect Pliny’s topic and diction to relevant passages in Martial (6.37 and 38) and Tacitus (Dial. 28-29), my argument illuminates some crucial, common semiotic practices in his age.

Informal borrowings are used for several reasons. They are used to name things, providing alternative synonyms for things already named in English but also names for things yet to be named. More often, however, they are used instead of standard English to communicate additional information that is social, psychological, rhetorical, or cultural in nature. The social function involves group solidarity and social distancing. The psychological function includes expression of emotions via a repertoire of expressions for a variety of emotional states and emotive labels. The rhetorical function includes informality, conciseness, forcefulness, wordplay, and small talk. The cultural function involves expressing cultural identity and stylization; while expressing cultural identity is often the reason for using such expressions, stylization is another phenomenon accounting for their common use among larger segments of American society.

This chapter will focus on patterns repetition in speech fragments from Cato the Elder to C. Gracchus, as well as the speeches quoted in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, with a view to understanding their composition and intended effects. Repetition provides a systematic framework for many of the traditional rhetorical figures, such as anaphora, alliteration, homoeoteleuton, antithesis and polyptoton (see D. Fehling, Die Wiederholungsfiguren und ihr Gebrauch bei den Griechen vor Gorgias, Berlin 1969; cf. J. Wills, Repetition in Latin Poetry, Oxford 1996). Using repetition as a lens allows analysis not only of longer extracts but also of very short fragments. These patterns will be used to test the thesis that Roman oratory continued to respond to the ancient Latin form of the carmen even while being influenced by Greek rhetorical ideas (cf. on this point E. Sciarrino, Cato the Censor and the Beginnings of Latin Prose, Columbus 2011). The transmission of the fragments under consideration is itself heavily influenced by the rhetorical and grammatical tradition, and my discussion will accordingly take account of the screening effects which this transmission has on the evidence.

The Boston Massacre was a pivotal event in the radicalization of American colonists that led to the Revolution. Barely three months after the ‘massacre’ took place, the American Company advertised a performance of Julius Caesar that evoked the republican discourse surrounding the event. Indeed, the play would appear to present a perfect opportunity to foster the rhetoric of republican revolutionary fervour, and in fact Julius Caesar and its adaptations were often cited by revolutionary leaders such as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Yet, after this initial performance, the play was not produced very often during the revolutionary period. This essay explores the ideological conflicts within the Patriot movement that led to the relative scarcity of these productions, despite the drama’s centrality to the rhetoric of the revolution.

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

Though a priest at Delphi, Plutarch resolutely refuses to give us what we would most like to have: an insider’s view of the oracular shrine and an account of the religio sacerdotis. What he does tell us about varieties of religious belief is largely negative (On Superstition), and the corresponding positive account is difficult to reconstruct. He has, however, a commitment to inquiry and to the interrogation of the polyvalent symbols of religion and of myth. Reductive solutions are rejected, along with any interpretations that would lead to a decrease of piety. In the myths that he creates for his own dialogues, in imitation of Plato, he generates his most characteristic and memorable rhetorical exercises in the sublime. Once misleadingly branded "theosophical essays," these myths are in fact virtuoso display pieces that show Plutarch at his best as a writer and educator.

Plutarch considered content infinitely more important than style. He deprecated excessive attention to words by writers or by readers and believed that the right way to read classical poetry was to concentrate on its moral lessons and not so much on information (historia) or brilliance of language. Nevertheless, he was himself a master of the formal prose (Kunstprosa, in the idiom of German philology) of his day, and had enough versatility to vary his style not only according to genre but sometimes even within a work, especially in dialogue. At the same time, his writing always shows two very marked characteristics: abundance, and richness of imagery and allusion.

After rejecting as tendentious ancient and modern accounts of declamation that stress the difference between classical past and imperial present, this chapter explores the ways in which audiences could relate to declamation's classicism. It was the almost universal assumption of antiquity that history was useful, and declamation, which frequently uses the same materials and even the same language as contemporary biography and political oratory, was no exception; indeed, this was a natural continuation of educational practice. Declamation offered not simply examples to follow or avoid, but also helped in gaining a sense of the distinctive qualities of a situation, appreciating a situation’s true scale, and recognising abiding truths about human life. Many of the imagined speakers of declamations actually model these processes for us in their speeches, a phenomenon I term 'meta-exemplarity'. Finally, I consider what was distinctive about declamation's invocation of the past, vivid, oblique yet powerful, and open-ended. Imperial declamation accordingly represents an important development in the historiographical culture of ancient Greece.

This chapter focuses on rhetorical tools used to justify or legitimize sexual violence in militaries and defence forces. It oulines several rhetorical strategies used in media coverage.

This chapter considers John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, a poem in the mode of a universal chronicle that Lydgate composed for Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, during the 1430s. I suggest that, in Lydgate’s historical poetry, and particularly in the Fall, the poet fixates upon the “surplus” of literary matter that the forms of his poetry leave out or exclude. In its most immediate sense, this “surplus” consists of those aspects of the historical record that Lydgate cannot, or will not, repeat within his poetry. But in a broader way, it also figures Lydgate’s view of history itself, which he feels is too vast, and too self-conflicted, to represent in full. I begin by examining Lydgate’s debts to the artes poetriae manuals, the formes fixes tradition, and practices of monastic historiography, all of which lie behind his belief in the surplus and shape his use of the idea. I then consider how the surplus, both as a term and as a concept, motivates the poetics of the Fall, and in particular, the pointed but ambiguous way that it speaks to matters of contemporary political concern to Humphrey of Gloucester.

Chapter 2 turns to the role of language in the context of strategy, specifically investigating how rhetoric and persuasion can open and close spaces for the airing of opinions freely amongst speakers. It is in creating and expressing opinion (and not truth) in the polis – the space of appearances – that the question of who one is receives its full disclosure. We then turn to the appearance of strategy in ancient Greece, first in the figure of Pericles, then Alcibiades, and in particular the latter’s skilful performances in the polis, and a gifted if contested career blighted, we suggest, by a failure to apprehend the distinction between the polis (rhetoric) and oikos (sophistry and instrumentality). The failure of Alcibiades also hints at some of the difficulties of language as the means of self-disclosure and so also for Arendt’s idealized association of action with talk, for it is in Alcibiades’ struggle as a strategos that opinion becomes twisted into event: Things get done, even if the action is consumed by failure and ruin. The case of Alcibiades takes us from talk to the body, and back to the polis in which the everyday is suspended so that action, freed from instrumentality, can occur and recur, each time alive and enlivening.

The introduction defines the two key terms of the book, “matter” and “making.” For the early English court poets, “matter” was a relative term. In its most concrete sense, it denoted the pre-existing textual sources that a poet used as the basis for his poetry, but it also referred, in a broader and Aristotelian sense, to whatever materials a poem was understood to be made from. “Making referred to the set of techniques that early writers used to rework matter into poetry, and it had its origins in classical rhetoric: a poet was said to begin by “inventing” (or identifying) matter on which to work, and only afterwards to “dispose” (or restructure) that matter into a new form and shape. “Making” differs from the Scholastic model of authorship, which stresses the authority (or auctoritas) of the writer, and it also differs from early modern theories of authorship, which stress the autonomy of the literary work. It persists as the prevailing method for writing poetry even to the reign of Elizabeth I, although literary attitudes towards matter in particular begin to shift during the sixteenth century.

Scholars have long debated the origins of John Skelton’s idiosyncratic form of verse, the so-called “Skeltonic.” In this chapter, I suggest that the action and effect of Skeltonics are best understood through the lens of one of Skelton’s long-standing preoccupations: the attempt to simulate, in writing, the presence of a living thing. During the early sixteenth century, Humanist intellectuals argued over the proper way to represent liveliness in verse, particularly in their discussions of imitatio and enargeia. Where Skelton differs from his contemporaries, however, is in his conviction that proper imitatio requires the use of copia, an abundant style that (in his hands) aims to depict a physical thing, not merely as it appears frozen in a single moment, but as it moves and breathes through time. After putting Skelton’s work into conversation with contemporary theories of imitatio and copia, I turn to two of his best-known poems, “Speke Parott” and “Phyllyp Sparowe,” which attempt to replicate living bodies in predcisely this way while also expressing some skepticism towards the politics of this procedure.

8. Disgrace is read in its relation to numerous unacknowledged narrative influences, including Richardsons Clarissa and Tolstoys Resurrection.

In this chapter Kinch Hoekstra analyses the particular understanding of time and history characteristic of ‘politic history’, identified by scholars as a distinctive genre in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, where it flourished as a historiographical version of ‘reason of state’. At its heart, Hoekstra argues, was an epistemic question: whether it is possible to derive political lessons from empirical, historical truths. Influenced by Italian discussions of how political knowledge could be drawn from historical experience, politic historians looked in particular to Machiavelli and Guicciardini. It was Philip Sidney, in his Defence of Poetry, who posed the epistemic question most sharply, and Francis Bacon who offered the fullest response. In turn, Hoekstra suggests, a Guicciardinian and Baconian conception of the value of history informs Hobbes’ preface to his translation of Thucydides, whom he famously characterised as ‘the most politique historiographer that ever writ’. Hoekstra ends by rejecting the scholarly consensus that Hobbes’ turn to ‘civil science’ marked his repudiation of a historical politics.

After considering On Breaths’ “Gorgianic” style and the disputed attribution of this text to Hippocrates, this chapter argues that the author’s attribution of all diseases to pneuma is not as revolutionary as it initially appears. By relying on widely attested views about what pneuma tends to do within the body, this author is in fact remarkably conservative when constructing his own theories of pathogenesis. This chapter then turns to the more important question of why this author felt compelled to identify a single cause of all diseases. On the one hand, we can point to the same interest in remote and proximate causes that we see in On the Nature of the Human Being. At the same time, this author seems to be driven by a separate “cosmological impulse,” the belief that high-level commonalities, whatever their applicability, are inherently desirable and directly relevant to the medical art.

This chapter explores the influence of the rhetorical tradition on the early modern common law of interpretation. It focuses on William Fulbecke’s A Direction or Preparative to the Study of the Lawe (1600), a guidebook that instructed law students on principles of legal interpretation. Fulbecke was writing at a time when interest in interpretation was particularly intense, but his discussion is striking for its unusual sophistication. The chapter argues that Fulbecke’s account was strongly influenced by works on rhetoric, the art of speech and persuasion. Fulbecke was a pioneering comparative lawyer, and would have known that rhetoric was often used to aid interpretation by lawyers of the ius commune. The chapter demonstrates that rhetorical ideas also pervaded the English law of interpretation. Their influence is clear in Fulbecke’s work: Fulbecke aimed to set out a clear method of legal interpretation for beginners, based on the rhetorical works that students encountered at school and university. This chapter broadens our understanding of the relationship between the common law and the rhetorical tradition, demonstrating the importance of understanding the history of English law in its wider intellectual context.