Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature

This book explores the early modern interest in conversation.

Jennifer Richards (Author)

9780521824705, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 May 2003

220 pages
23.7 x 15.9 x 2 cm, 0.5 kg

'The argument of Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature is an elegant if complex one. …[this book] is a discriminating and careful work of literary and cultural history.' Criticism

Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature explores the early modern interest in conversation as a newly identified art. Conversation was widely accepted to have been inspired by the republican philosopher Cicero. Recognizing his influence on courtesy literature - the main source for 'civil conversation' - Jennifer Richards uncovers alternative ways of thinking about humanism as a project of linguistic and social reform. She argues that humanists explored styles of conversation to reform the manner of association between male associates; teachers and students, buyers and sellers, and settlers and colonial others. They reconsidered the meaning of 'honesty' in social interchange in an attempt to represent the tension between self-interest and social duty. Richards explores the interest in civil conversation among mid-Tudor humanists, John Cheke, Thomas Smith and Roger Ascham, as well as their self-styled successors, Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser.

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Types of honesty: civil and domestical conversation
2. From rhetoric to conversation: reading for Cicero in The Book of the Courtier
3. Honest rivalries: Tudor humanism and linguistic and social reform
4. Honest speakers: sociable commerce and civil conversation
5. A commonwealth of letters: Harvey and Spenser in dialogue
6. A new poet, a new social economy: homosociality and The Shepheardes Calender
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]