The contributions of rhetoric to literary criticism

Abstract

The importance of rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries results, in the first place, from the attention given it in formal education, beginning in grammar schools for students at the age of about ten and continuing into studies at universities. Late medieval scholasticism had much reduced the emphasis on rhetoric in higher education, but the humanists brought it back, first in Italy, by 1500 in France, Germany, the Low Countries, and Britain. Most of the hundreds of books on rhetoric published and republished throughout the Early Modern period were intended as school texts, from elementary to advanced levels, or represent lectures given in universities. Though rhetoric was always intended to teach composition (often including verse composition) and public speaking, its teachers regularly engaged in rhetorical analyses of literary texts, including the poets, and required their students to do so as well. Directly or indirectly, the study of rhetoric provided the general literate public with a theoretical basis for reading, interpreting, and evaluating texts, including theories of the nature and uses of language, a formidable technical vocabulary, and concepts of style and genre, and it constantly coloured the writings of critics whose major interests were in poetry and drama. In approaching the literature of the Renaissance and Early Modern period, we need to remember that for most readers of the time the most important literary genre was oratory, specifically Christian preaching: thousands of sermons were not only heard but published and subjected to intensive criticism, both theological and aesthetic.