Oratory and representation: the rhetorical culture of political assemblies, 1300–1600

Abstract

EDITOR'S NOTE In recent years, a new interest in political culture has been reflected in the pages of this journal. We are now pleased to publish a group of three articles on early modern parliamentary oratory. They bring together four scholars who spoke at a panel on this subject at the ICHRPI conference in St Andrews in 2007 and introduce the journal's readers to the theoretical and methodological underpinning of an important research project on ‘Parliamentary oratory in the late medieval and early modern period’ at the Humboldt University in Berlin. A strong case is made for reversing the traditional assumption that parliamentary speeches were overloaded with inconsequential paraphernalia, detracting from the real business of studying the history of parliaments. Instead, speech acts such as parliamentary speeches can be demonstrated to be major linguistic tools in power games between rulers or other participants in early modern representative assemblies. The collected papers of a conference organised in 2006 by Professor Helmrath and Dr Feuchter are now available in print (see note 1) and a review of the book will appear in the April 2010 issue of Parliaments, Estates and Representation. A further conference on parliamentary oratory is to take place in Berlin in July 2010 in association with the International Commission. The two substantive articles, by Kolja Lichy and Tim Neu respectively, represent work by young scholars at two other German universities. They develop the Humboldt University project in two contrasting directions. One compares parliamentary oratory in the Reichstag and the Polish Sejm in the sixteenth century, while the other focuses on the writings of the seventeenth-century political orator and theoretician, Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff.