Moving Rhetorica

Abstract

Native to ancient dialogues, medieval allegories, and early modern iconologies, Rhetorica has come to represent rhetoric as an area of academic inquiry. In this essay, we consider how contemporary rhetorical scholars and organizations have used Rhetorica and explore the potential of other personifications of rhetoric and persuasion, drawing on rhetoric’s histories to supply new inventive resources for rhetorical inquiry. First, we introduce lesser-known depictions of Rhetorica. Her range gives historical grounding to a scholarly imaginary that has moved beyond yet still uses Mantegna’s Rhetorica. We do not urge rhetoricians to select a new face for the discipline but instead to recognize Rhetorica’s own diversity and history as an on-going aid and asset to rhetorical thinking and theorizing. Second, we advocate a shift from an exclusive focus on Rhetorica to a shared focus on her less disciplinarily profuse predecessor, Peithō (persuasion).

Keywords:

• feminism
• historiography
• Peithō
• rhetoric
• Rhetorica

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to editor Susan Jarratt, the anonymous reviewers, and Damien Smith Pfister for their helpful feedback on this project and to Joshua Ewalt for his research assistance.

Notes

¹ Several friends of ours bear tattoos of Mantegna’s Rhetorica.

² As we will detail below, art historians doubt it was actually Mantegna who was behind the engravings in what is now known as the “so-called Mantegna Tarocchi.” Still, the name remained, so, accordingly, we refer to this visual depiction of Rhetorica as Mantegna’s Rhetorica.

³ In order to best capture uses of Rhetorica and Peithō by rhetoric scholars in the disciplines of English and Communication, we reviewed visual and textual references by rhetoric scholars in academic scholarship and organizations over roughly the past thirty-five years. We searched for references to Rhetorica and Peithō between 1980 and 2016 on the following electronic databases: JSTOR, Project Muse, Communication and Mass Media Complete, and GoogleScholar. Here, co-authoring is a benefit, because it allowed us to develop a reading strategy to determine a substantial engagement versus a cursory invocation in the literature. Furthermore, because we are most interested in scholarly commentary that engages with Rhetorica and Peithō as gendered icons, we excluded references that solely engaged them as translations or synonyms for rhetoric and persuasion (i.e., “Rhetorica” as it appears in the Rhetorica Ad Herennium). While this survey was by no means exhaustive, it allowed us to understand the historical arc of how Rhetorica has moved and been understood as a gendered figure within rhetorical studies.

⁴ We thank Jens E. Kjeldsen for this detail.

⁵ Just as we do not trace Rhetorica back to her ancient beginnings, so we also do not follow Persuasione into early modern emblem books. Such a framing accords with the discipline’s focus on early modern Rhetorica and ancient Peithō as well as respects the constraints of article-length inquiries.

⁶ All translations are done by Michele Kennerly.

⁷ Nam velut potens rerum omnium regina et impellere quo vellet et unde vellet deducere, et in lacrymas flectere, et in rabiem concitare, et in alios etiam vultus sensuque convertere tam urbes quam exercitus proeliantes et quaecumque poterat agmina populorum.

⁸ Since Mantegna’s Rhetorica is from the early modern period, we opted to find other Rhetoricas from that same period. We located the images discussed here using the digital catalog of the British Museum. We chose them based on date range and variety of contents.

⁹ RHETORICAE GRATOS SERMONI ASTVTA COLORES, QVO DVLCIVS FLVAT IS AD AVREIS, ADVCIT.

¹⁰ SAPIENTIAE, ET FILIA, ET SOROR / ELOQVENTIA / DOMINA CORDIVM, ANIMORVM REGINA / DOCENDI ARTIFEX, OPIFEX DICENDI / OTII COMES, AVCTRIX NEGOTII; / ALVMNI PACIS, BELLA ADMINISTRA / FLVMEN AMORIS; TERRORIS FVLMEN / LVMEN POLITICAE, SVADAE NVMEN.

¹¹ For a full study of peithō in fifth- and fourth-century BCE Greek texts of many genres, see Buxton. A deified or personified Peithō appear in some of his examples, and he describes the difficulty of discerning the abstract noun form from a personification (30). We occasionally use p/Peithō here to emphasize the difficulty of disambiguating the abstract noun from the personification within ancient Greek texts.

¹² […] alla mallon tēn tēs poleōs dunamin kath’ hēmeran ergōi theōmenous kai erastas gignomenous autēs […].

¹³ Qu’il est difficile, et même peu souhaitable, de dissocier la peitho <<profane>> de la peitho <<religieuse>>.

¹⁴ Zeus’s rape of Leda results in Helen, whose capture by Paris initiates the Trojan War. Competing with the tragedians, the sophist Gorgias imagines Helen as caught in circumstances where fate, force (bia), persuasion (peithō), and love (erōs) slide and elide into one another with irresistible effect (Helen).

¹⁵ Peitho se place du côté positif, en regard de la violence.