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17-07-2015, 22:27

The Renaissance and Its Antecedents

Rhetorical manual-writing and lecturing continued into the Renaissance, which we may define here as the cultural movement manifested first in fifteenth-century Italy, and later in the rest of Europe. This period witnessed a much more rigorous recovery of Greco-Roman cultural texts and models, and the continued interest in manuals produced such notable compositions as the Rhetoricorum Libri Quinque (Five Books of Rhetoric) of George of Trebizond (published in Venice 1433/4), and the lectures by Pedro Nunez (‘‘The Art of Public Speaking’’) on the imperial Greek rhetorician Hermogenes of Tarsus, compiled for delivery to law students at the University of Lisbon about 1530 ce.

In terms of prose and epistolary style, a more intense, even ‘‘antiquarian’’ study of Ciceronian writings developed in Italy from the beginning of the fifteenth century, stimulated by the finding in 1421 of an important (but now lost) manuscript of

Cicero’s rhetorical writings - including the De Oratore and the Orator (both complete) as well as the Brutus, hitherto not known - at the cathedral of Lodi, southeast of Milan. The older epistolary style, however, lasted well into the century: Guarino da Verona, who taught rhetoric based on the Ad Herennium at the princely studium (‘‘university’’) in Ferrara from 1430 to 1460, was among the first to introduce courses based on Cicero’s epistolae (letters) into his teaching, and among the last to adopt in his own writings the ‘‘strictly Ciceronian’’ sentence forms and stylistic modes that were increasingly fashionable. His continued use of the stylistically limited Ad Herennium contrasted with the challenge thrown out by his contemporary George of Trebizond, who, as we have just seen, produced his own textbook and introduced the use of new rhetorical sources, such as the writings of Hermogenes.

The Italian Renaissance developed out of the interest in language practice and theory in Dante’s Italy. There advanced lecturing on the Ad Herennium (by, among others, Jacques de Dinant, Giovanni di Bonandrea, and Bartolinus de Benincasa de Canulo) resumed after faltering north of the Alps at the beginning of the thirteenth century. In addition, classical rhetorical theory seems to have gained a renewed relevance in the judicial courts of the Italian republican magistrates, in magistrates' councils and before popular political assemblies. As the fourteenth century wore on and turned into the fifteenth, the elite appetite for classical rhetorical performance (speeches for a wide variety of social, legal, diplomatic, and ceremonial occasions) expanded. Aspirants to fame and riches were capable of performing extraordinary compositional tasks (consult, for example, the writings of Filelfo and Alberti), and women came to be included in the humanist (Renaissance Latin) composition phenomenon, if only in a tokenistic manner. Stylistic standards were slowly pushed back toward classical norms and a key classical rhetorical text such as Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, now known in its complete state, came into fuller and more generalized study even to the extent of suggestions that the Rhetorica ad Herennium could not have been written by Cicero (since Quintilian never cites it as such and yet does cite all the other known works of Cicero). This new view of the Ad Herennium, advanced at the end of the fifteenth century by Raffaello Regio in Padua, among others, as much for the purposes of discrediting rivals for salaried chairs of rhetoric and grammar as for reasons of historical accuracy, seems not to have impaired the attractiveness of that text as a major instructional tool, though its popularity probably began to fade before the popularity of rival manuals and the universal appetite for the letters of Cicero in the rhetorical schools of towns, universities, and courts.

Despite the impression given above that ‘‘Renaissance humanism’’ flourished in a scholarly environment, many modern interpreters have stressed that the ‘‘Renaissance humanists'' pursued their interests largely outside the established schools of the day, in courts and as secretaries to potentates. They developed a novel attitude toward the Greco-Roman past, which took the form of a profound respect for what one scholar (Tinkler 1987) has called the ‘‘sermocinal literature’’ of antiquity: the casual, ‘‘public’’ forms of discourse (letters, public speeches, poetry, history, conversation, dialogues, and similar genres). These contrasted with the forms appropriate to (the medieval) schools: commentaries, lectures, questions ( quaestiones) and disputations (disputationes), treatises - especially the summa or ‘‘sum’’ of all pertinent knowledge, almanacs and lists, etc. They were also characterized by a tendency to see rhetoric less as a practical, vocational art and more as an important feature of Greco-Roman paideia - educational attitudes - which Renaissance scholars and writers wished to study and reconstruct more accurately than medieval users cared to, as a means of carving out for themselves an identity ‘‘between established institutions.’’ Thus the letters of Petrarch (1304-74), some addressed directly to the long-dead figures of antiquity, exercised a powerful influence over the shape and pattern of Renaissance humanism, both in the sense that they showed how a ‘‘larger work’’ could be made up of (in this case semi-autobiographical) literary pieces, and in the sense that they valorized extrascholastic literature. It remained a conviction of the humanists that all learning should make life better: it should not be locked away in the classroom.

This was, of course, a key aspect of Cicero’s own attitude toward his studies and his literary skills. Much of the debate here has been over the role of ‘‘leisure’’ (versus vocational employment) in Renaissance literary culture, and whether the humanists were indeed the successors of the professional dictatores (‘‘writing teachers’’) of the medieval period. One influential scholar (Struever 1970, 1992) sees a contrast between the schoolroom cliches of medieval rhetoric, and Renaissance awareness of the contingent nature of language, of the moral dimensions of rhetoric, of rhetoric as access to virtue and law-abidingness, as the ‘‘master science,’’ with an important focus on social usage. A figure such as the Italian Lorenzo Valla (1407-57, secretary, courtier, and university teacher), the Dutchman Erasmus (1466?-1536, the first man to self-consciously fashion his identity and ‘‘career’’ on the basis of the printed circulation of his works), the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540), the Germans Martin Luther (1483-1546) and Philip Melanchthon (1497-1560) took much more than any medieval thinker or writer from Quintilian in this respect. Scholars today however, stress the dissimilarity between the Roman intellectual and social environments, and those characteristic of medieval and Renaissance times. Nevertheless, the often stressed medieval religious ‘‘distaste’’ for rhetoric in fact echoed the original Roman aristocratic reaction (92 bce, in Cicero’s youth; see chapter 3) to what it saw as the corrupting influences of Greek scholastic rhetoric. This attitude has a curious later echo in Augustine’s own abandonment of Roman ‘‘preceptive’’ rhetoric for Christian emphasis upon behavior and ‘‘imitation’’ of approved (biblical) models.

It is also no accident that Petrarch, a pioneering cultivator of the ‘‘familiar’’ letter, as an alternative to the genres more characteristic of the medieval schoolroom, should himself have possessed and valued a copy of the letters exchanged between Abelard and neloise. In these letters and in other ‘‘familiar’’ texts (rhythmic poems and intimate prose for example, or classicizing poetic exchanges originally confided to wax tablets and passed secretly between themselves), these two sought to create a discourse of emotional exploration and comfort that would operate outside and in the interstices between the institutions that they were both, in a sense, exiled from or unhappy within (the monasteries and proto-university cathedral schools). Scholars have also recently stressed the way that some eleventh - and twelfth-century monks and cathedral school teachers read Quintilian carefully and cultivated the pattern of literary ‘‘leisure’’ that Cicero himself displayed at critical times of his life.

Furthermore, the ‘‘extracurricular’’ aspect of Renaissance rhetorical interests has encouraged some modern scholars to see the period as one in which the ‘‘relativism’’ of‘‘truth’’ (‘‘truth’’ is whatever persuasive discourse can construct or convince of) recovered some ground (having been in recess in the medieval ‘‘theological’’ period) and touched base again with the interests of the Greek sophists and their Roman students. Such emphases have led some to link Renaissance interests with the culmination of secularism, rationalism, and humanism in our own day: marketing, advertising, semiology, discourse theory, and postmodernism; ‘‘the medium is the message.’’ Likewise, such approaches have resulted in the stressing of a ‘‘breach’’ between medieval and Renaissance attitudes toward Greco-Roman rhetoric, and the consequent argument that, for example, the ‘‘civic’’ context of Cicero’s rhetoric was ignored until the precocity of urban developments in late medieval Italy came to stress such a context again. Others, however, have commented upon the continuity between medieval and Renaissance rhetorical attitudes, stressing the attention to the Ciceronian rhetorical juvenilia and the overwhelmingly ‘‘judicial’’ nature of rhetoric in both periods.

In France fifteenth-century figures like Jean Poulain and Guillaume Fichet expanded the classical rhetorical curriculum on the basis of Cicero’s juvenilia. The twofold focus of classical rhetoric, namely legal and poetic compositional contexts, proved continuously influential across all of Europe, eastern and western, as well as in England. Struever (1970, 1992) has stressed, however, that Renaissance rhetoric was not merely a matter of increased attention to classical argumentative or persuasive theoretical precepts, but a conviction based on a deep study of the classical paideia and its world, a conviction that language created ‘‘truth,’’ and that all things were amenable to persuasive presentation, which would stand for ‘‘truth.’’ She argues that Renaissance thinkers effectively grasped the relativity inherent in classical thinking and its attitudes toward language; they saw rhetoric no longer as a dry list of rules and figures for ‘‘ornamenting’’ compositions, but as a mode of constructing probable discourse in a variety of fields, especially historiography, where medieval importations of rhetorical narrative shaping were expanded to cover new visions of statecraft, liberty, and other social goals. This anticipation of postmodern theory was already present in the thinking of figures like Peter Abelard (Heloise’s lover); it stressed the public world outside the school (in which most medieval rhetoric had flourished or at least commenced its career), greatly affected the writing of history, and led to thoroughgoing revivals of Quintilianic ideas about rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar (particularly in the Elegantiae of Lorenzo Valla).

The much more complicated diplomatic and political world of the early modern period, coupled with the growing sophistication of scholarly study of ancient texts, reached a climax with works such as the Discorsi (Discourses on Livy) of Machiavelli and his rhetorically influenced Prince; the commentaries on Cicero’s De Oratore, Orator, and De Partitione Oratoria by Jacques-Louis D’Estrebay (1481-ca. 1550); and the rhetorical works and ideas of the Dutchman Rudolf Agricola (1443-85), of Desiderius Erasmus (famous for his nonscholastic ‘‘letters’’ and the collection of classical proverbs to which he gave the name of ‘‘Adages’’), and of Peter Ramus (1515-72). The latter proposed an important separation between rhetoric and dialectic: the former was no longer to contain an abridgement of the latter (under the heading of ‘‘invention’’) but to consist of its proper elements, elocutio and pronuntiatio (style and gesture or ‘‘delivery’’). Despite his attention to Quintilian, Ramus’s ‘‘reforms’’ did not permanently alter the nature and shape of Greco-Roman rhetorical theory as it lasted on through early modern European history.

In all this we recognize not only powerful models for effective expression, and an enormous appetite for the best classical writings on the topic, stimulated by the advent of printing (in the second half of the fifteenth century), but also an acute recognition of the social context for effective expression and communication (see, for example, the Italian Castiglione’s Courtier, 1528 ce, the most important and popular Renaissance treatise on education in manners and behavior). At the same time we recognize the growing encroachment of the academy upon intellectual life and endeavor, supplementing and then replacing the court as the fashionable site for advanced research in the humanities. Scholars and intellectuals from all walks of life were increasingly familiar with a renovated classical rhetorical system of persuasion, and substantial advances were made in the time of Galileo, with the system itself influential down to the time of Descartes, Hobbes, Vico, and even Friedrich Nietzsche, who lectured on Greek and Roman rhetoric at the University of Basel in the 1870s. Entrenched in schooling at all levels, and offering an overview of verbal persuasive practice that had few rivals, the classical system of rhetoric and its derivatives was influential so long as face-to-face oral, persuasive situations predominated in intellectual and elite life. Not everyone may have been persuaded that the Ciceronian oratorical ideal was the dominant educative force, and some could criticize Ciceronian schoolroom rhetoric, but few could escape the formative influence of a verbal persuasive system that, having originated in the field of judicial speech, came in the end to influence literature and thinking across a wide and varied spectrum.

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The Renaissance and Its Antecedents