Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric

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Wayne A. Rebhorn
Cornell University Press, 2000 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 322 pages

Throughout the European Renaissance, authors famous and obscure debated the nature, goals, and value of rhetoric. In a host of treatises, handbooks, letters, and orations, written in both Latin and the vernacular, they attempted to assess the central role that rhetoric clearly played in their culture. Was rhetoric a valuable tool of legitimation for rulers or a dangerous instrument of resistance to political and religious authority? Would its employment maintain the social hierarchy or foster social mobility? Was rhetoric merely the art of lies or was it a means to arrive at the only form of truth available to human beings? In this fascinating volume, Wayne A. Rebhorn enables modern-day readers to follow Renaissance thinkers as they struggle with these and other crucial questions about rhetoric.

Arranged chronologically, the twenty-five selections in this anthology, most of which have never before appeared in English, include key texts by Petrarch, Valla, Erasmus, Vives, Melanchthon, Ramus, Wilson, Amyot, and Bacon. All the selections have been fully annotated and have headnotes providing essential background information. In addition, the volume features a biographical glossary of frequently mentioned historical and mythological figures, a comprehensive index, and a detailed bibliography.

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Contents

Coluccio Salutati
18
George of Trebizond Trapezuntius
30
Rudolph Agricola
42
Juan Luis Vives
82
Philip Melanchthon
97
Sperone Speroni
111
Jacques Amyot
128
Anton Maria de Conti
140
Michel de Montaigne
218
Juan de Guzman
233
Guillaume du Vair
244
Francis Bacon
261
Nicholas Caussin
273
JeanFrançois Le Grand
284
Biographical Glossary
295
Bibliography
309

Peter Ramus
152
John Jewel
161
Thomas Wilson
173
Francesco Patrizi
183
From The Art of English Poesy
204
Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
310
Index
315
Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa
321
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About the author (2000)

Wayne A. Rebhorn is Celanese Centennial Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of several books, including The Emperor of Men's Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric, also from Cornell.

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