Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Rendering Shakespearean Rhetoric Visible In The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, Katherine Kickel

Quidditas

Traditionally, the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery is considered an important moment in England’s art history narrative. In this essay, I argue that the Boydell collection also reflects a new preference for reading Shakespeare’s plays in the eighteenth century via its editorial illustration of parts of the plays that would not normally be emphasized in theatrical productions.

Reading Beyond The Words: Material Letters And The Process Of Interpretation, Sara Jayne Steen

Quidditas

Until recently, early modern letters, and women's letters in particular, have been neglected as a source of information about early modern life and literary culture, although they have much to say, especially about the manuscript culture of which we now have become aware. In the 1990s, scholars began to cross the traditional disciplinary lines between literature and history and examine letters for indications of social and linguistic interrelationships and of personal artistry. Scholars of historical pragmatics now are treating issues such as how forms of address shifted across time; Lynne Magnusson is completing a book that explores early modern Englishwomen’s …

Review Essay: John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon And The Rhetoric Of Nature, Thomas Willard

Quidditas

John C. Briggs, Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature, Harvard University PRess, 1989, xii, 285 pp., $35.00.

Narrative Description In Marco Polo's Travels: A Nonfictional Application Of Bakhtin's Chronotope, Ute Margarete Saine

Quidditas

Throughout the text of Marco Polo's Devisement du monde, the reader is repeatedly enjoined to believe the narration. Such a captatio benevolantiae – the rhetorical convention inviting reader interest – typically takes the form of assertions, such as "I am telling nothing but the truth"; "Everybody ought too believe this"; "This is how it was"; "This is how Marco Polo saw it," and the like. The narrator even proposes to uphold the sophisticated distinction between eyewitness information, gathered firsthand, and accounts obtained from others:

We will set down things seen as seen, things heard as heard, so that our …

Intertextuality In The Anglo-Norman Lyric, Carol J. Harvey

Quidditas

The rhetorical formulae that permeate the poetry of the Middle Ages are not always used in a conventional or consistent manner. On the fringes of the main literary movements are works that raise doubts as to the very nature of medieval poetics. Some texts challenge accepted criteria with respect to genre, tone, or interpretation; others appear unfamiliar and heterogeneous in comparison with accepted poetic concepts; still others use the language and imagery of established poetics as a polemic strategy. Such problematic texts are found among the lyric poems composed in England during the Anglo-Norman era, particularly among the macaronics. These …

John Skelton: Courtly Maker/Popular Poet, Nancy A. Gutierrez

Quidditas

The eight poems in Latin and English written at the time of the English victory at Flodden Field in 1513 are various combinations of praise, vituperation, satire, and polemic, reflecting the attitudes of their authors. John Skelton, Thomas More, Peter Carmelianus, and Bernard André. These courtly makers, homogeneous in both their humanist background and court employment, see the battle essentially the same way–as an occasion to celebrate their royal employer and to abuse his enemy–thus the differing verse forms and slanted treatments are grounded in a common point of view. However, John Skelton, as author of three of the eight …