Episodes of Anti-Quintilianism in the Italian Renaissance: Quarrels on the Orator as a Vir Bonus and Rhetoric as the Scientia Bene Dicendi

Abstract

talian Ranaissanca humanists were a contentions lot. They quarralad among themselves. They assailed politicians, philosophers, and clerics. They even turned on the ancients. Valla attacked Aristotle; George of Trebizond, Plato. Antonio da Rho did not spare a Church Father in his Dialogus in Lactantium. But one current of criticism has not received sufficient attention. I mean the strain of anti-Quintili anism which one can document from the early Quattrocento to tha close of the Renais­ sance in Italy. The history of Quintilian in the Renaissance waits to be written. It will bave to cover a large array of topics, ranging from broad issues in padagogy to arcane rhetorical precepts such as the status doctrine; and it will bave to take into account cul­ tural developments in ail of Europe and avan the Americas. My goal in this paper is much mora humble. I wish to call attention to reactions in Renaissance Italy to two specifie points of Quin­ tilian's teachings, namely, his definitions of rhatoric and of the orator.