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.

When did the emotions become political? It would be natural to view a formal political analysis of emotions as a classical phenomenon that was reprised under new and more decisive terms in late humanism and reimagined in the eighteenth century. In such a history we would expect to encounter the work of Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico. It would also be natural to take Hobbes and Vico at their word and read this recovery of the political dimension of emotion as a rejection of medieval philosophy. I will propose the opposite: the grounds for this political turn were laid in late medieval scholasticism. The precedent for humanist and Enlightenment-era political thought about emotion lies with a repudiated scholasticism and its reinvention of classical Greek thought. It is the history of rhetoric that reveals this turn to the political. The thread that links these transformations together is the political reception and re-absorption of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the modern assimilation of the Rhetoric began in earnest with the most influential statecraft treatise of the Middle Ages, De regimine principum, written about 1277 by the scholastic theologian Giles of Rome.

Classical and medieval rhetorical theorists had many names for the figure of thought that we call ‘personification’ or prosopopoeia. This fundamentally hybrid figure occurs at the confluence of different kinds of discourse; definitions range across a spectrum from the ‘animate abstraction’ to the ‘person introduced to speak’. The essay explores the diverse rhetorical theory behind this figure. It then discusses the hybridity of this figure, and in particular its striking capacity for multivalency, change and even disintegration (paradiastole), in medieval vernacular narrative allegory. It focuses on Langland’s Piers Plowman, with reference to the figures Clergie, Patience, Conscience, Wil, Haukyn and Piers Plowman. Finally, the essay investigates another aspect of this hybridity that might seem counter-intuitive to readers who assume that prosopopoiae/personifications should have surface or even naturalistic narrative coherence: the way that this figure of thought allows Langland repeatedly to cultivate an ambiguity about whether his prosopopoiae/personifications are lay or ordained. This telling ambiguity reflects the poet’s disengaged attitude to the institution of the church and even the priesthood.

This chapter examines the important cultural role played by early modern sermons in refining and developing the meaning of sympathy. The chapter begins by exploring how metaphors and concepts involving the human and social body were appropriated by religious writers in the 1580s, including Edwin Sandys, John Udall, and Christopher Hooke. It then explores a particular sermon by William James from 1589 that uses the term sympathy to describe a mutual suffering, in which James seeks to unite his listeners whilst excluding those of a different religious or political persuasion. The chapter goes on to argue that, by the mid-1590s, preachers such as Henry Holland were using the term to describe an active and imaginative engagement with the other, in ways that recall several contemporaneous dramatic works – including Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595). Finally, it examines Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604) and proposes that these questions about the performance and representation of sympathy recur across Protestant and Catholic cultures.

In a Confectionary Performance as that term is used in this chapter, the maker and the spectator will both appreciate that the performance is a deliberate one of making something by combining other things. ‘Synthesis’ and ‘articulation’ would serve as satisfactory synonyms for ‘confection’, but the advantage of ‘confection’ as a description of making processes that persuade spectators is the word’s association with pleasing sweetness. The very word persuasion originates in the idea that a person is moved ‘through sweetness’ (per-suade). Paying attention to the use of culinary and other sensory affective Confectionary Performances, this chapter highlights the significance in our post-truth age of political performances that bypass our logical thought processes in order to influence us through our feelings.

The Introduction interrogates the current critical view of early modern sympathy as a physical or occult process. It proposes that literary critics and historians have neglected the coexistence of the emotional and physical senses of the word sympathy in the early modern period. Exploring a broader range of intellectual frameworks – including religious culture, literary theories of imitation, and humanist pedagogy – complicates the idea that sympathy was primarily an automatic or a humoral phenomenon. The Introduction also argues that translations of European vernacular texts, including Du Bartas’s The Historie of Judith (1584) and Montaigne’s Essais (1603), played a significant role in introducing the affective meaning of sympathy to English readers. This expanding emotional vocabulary – along with other material and social changes in the period – led to an increased theorization of pity and compassion, whereby individuals came to be regarded as a connected network of distinct selves rather than a homogenous social group. In this way, the emergence of sympathy as a term and concept prompted a reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of early modern selfhood.

This book presents a new understanding of what ‘making’ means and argues for the centrality of crafting as a way of making sense of the world and the place of law, media, and politics within it. When Elaine Scarry recounted the great range of candidates that have been put forward for the category ‘artefacts’, she noted as possibilities that ‘nation states are fictions (in the sense of created things), the law is a created thing, a scientific fact (many argue) is a constructed thing’. Peter Goodrich writes similarly that ‘a significant part of the substantive law is comprised of fabulae, stories, plays, fabrications, images and fictions’. This book takes such possibilities seriously and considers how the notion of manufactured truth can inform our understanding of the tradition of making judgments in law and the trend of making judgments in society at large.

This chapter investigates the function of speeches in Thucydides’ work. It shows how speeches are used to advance the action of the story (using the examples of Brasidas’ speeches in Book 4 to illustrate this) and how they play on the expectations and assumptions of Thucydides’ rhetorically aware audience. The function of messengers is also discussed, along with the ‘soundscape’ evoked by less formal speech. Finally, the long-standing debate about of the composition and selection of the speeches is addressed, along with the question of how the speeches (and what Thucydides claims for his speeches) bear on the wider problem of the purpose of the work.

This chapter explores Thucydides’ depiction of leadership in the Greek city states. For Thucydides, the association between leader and led is an essential determinant of the direction taken by a state; his text often explores the ways in which the thought and rhetoric of an individual are converted into the actions of a citizen group. Thucydides’ portrait of Pericles’ leadership is central to this question; the characteristics and behaviours that he embodies are replicated, with variations, in other political leaders who appear in the work. After analysing Thucydides’ representation of Pericles, therefore, this chapter goes on to discuss how other leaders in the work – Hermocrates, Archidamus and Brasidas – relate to this Periclean template.

Ch 1: The first chapter centers on three classical authors’ representations of the descent of Orpheus into the underworld to retrieve his wife. It focuses not on the myth of Orpheus or its abundant allegorical interpretations but on the workings of the representations themselves. In the Virgilian version, irony and pathos work together to produce an empathy that allows for the reader’s judgment and provides elements that prepare a case for equity. The Ovidian version places rhetoric at the foreground, on the one hand (specifically, a rhetoric of compelling respect), and privileges a different case for pardon, one based on the physical movement of the couple, on the other. The Senecan versions elide pathos and rhetoric entirely, in order to allow the reader to understand what is lacking in the gods unable to pardon.

Though Cicero offers his most explicit, detailed critiques of Epicureanism in De Finibus and De Natura Deorum, his anti-Epicureanism consistently works itself into a wide swath of his theoretical writings over the last 13 years of his life. Therein Cicero consistently uses a rhetorical strategy whereby he avoids naming the Epicureans outright. Instead he employs a series of shorthand descriptions to attack the Epicureans for what he understands to be their basic tenets. In employing this tactic Cicero both slights the Epicureans by leaving them unnamed and reduces their philosophy to a set of behaviors that he thinks best encapsulate their beliefs. They fail by believing the soul to be mortal, by prioritizing an animal-like desire for pleasure over ratio and oratio, and by using quasi-commercial calculations to make ethical decisions. In each of these ways they fail most of all in Cicero’s eyes by representing a threat to the social fabric of the republic.

The purpose of this chapter is to offer a sketch of the relation between rhetoric and dialectic as Cicero sees it, and to identify a problem internal to his account. Cicero argues at length in the Tusculan Disputations in favor of the idea that the good and wise person does not experience any form of emotional disturbance. That being so, how can one who signs up to the idea that emotional disturbance is ideally to be eliminated then in good conscience recommend a practice – namely, rhetoric – one of whose principal objectives is to arouse the emotions? There looks to be a clash here between the objective of the philosopher and that of the orator. I explore Cicero’s resources for tackling this tension, and suggest how his conception of the relation between rhetoric and dialectic may thereby illuminate some distinctive aspects of his philosophical approach.

An introduction to the key themes and arguments of the volume as a whole.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Cicero’s choice of dialogue form serves to support his preferred position of Academic Scepticism in the Academica. From the letters Cicero wrote to Atticus while composing this work, we know that he was particularly interested in the verisimilitude of the conversation presented in his text. Yet, in the dedicatory letter that accompanied this text, Cicero is at pains to point out that this conversation is, in fact, fictitious, presenting to the reader speeches that never took place. The contention of this chapter is that Cicero’s apparently paradoxical focus on both the credibility and the fictitious nature of his dialogue can be explained by the epistemological stance advocated in this text. By creating a dramatically convincing (in rhetorical terms, enargēs, or ‘evident’) account of a conversation that never took place, Cicero is providing his reader with a further counter example to the Stoic theory of the kataleptic impression, which holds that true impressions can be distinguished from false impressions by virtue of their unique enargeia (or ‘evidentness’). Consequently, then, the form of the dialogue itself serves to reinforce the Academic claim that we have access to no clear criterion of truth.

This chapter explores the relationships among Cicero’s three pre-Civil-War dialogues, De oratore, De re publica, and the incomplete De legibus, both in terms of their relationship to Plato and in terms of their connections with one another. While some important recent scholarship has emphasized the links between De re publica and De legibus, I concentrate on the links between De oratore and De re publica, in terms of their attitudes to Plato and to Hellenistic learning, the relationship they establish between Greek thought and Roman practice, and their construction of the interrelated histories of philosophy, rhetoric, and politics. I also suggest that De legibus is strikingly different from the other two works in these respects and also in the relative weight it places on the role of individuals and institutions in creating a moral and successful public world.