Gentry Rhetoric: Literacies, Letters, and Writing in an Elizabethan Community (Early Modern Cultural Studies) 9781496221186, 9781496234285, 9781496234292, 1496221184

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Gentry Learning
2. Gentry Literacy
3. Letters and Presence
4. Places of Argument
5. Gentry Style
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Gentry hetoric

Early Modern Cultural Studies Series Editors Carole Levin Marguerite A. Tassi

Gentry Rhetoric

Literacies, Letters, and Writing in an Elizabethan Community

Daniel Ellis

University of Nebraska Press Lincoln

© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved The University of Nebraska Press is part of a land-­grant institution with campuses and programs on the past, present, and future homelands of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-­Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those of the relocated Ho-­Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.

Publication of this volume was assisted by grants from St. Bonaventure University through the Leo E. Keenan Jr. and James J. Martine Faculty Development Endowment and the School of Arts and Sciences. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Ellis, Daniel, 1972–­author. Title: Gentry rhetoric : literacies, letters, and writing in an Elizabethan community / Daniel Ellis. Description: Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2022] | Series: Early modern cultural studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2022008997 isbn 9781496221186 (hardback) isbn 9781496234285 (epub) isbn 9781496234292 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: English language—­Early modern, 1500–­1700—­ Rhetoric. | Letter writing—­England—­History—­16th century. | Letter writing—­England—­History—­17th century. | Gentry—­ Language. | Gentry—­England—­Norfolk—­Social life and customs. | Norfolk (England)—­Social life and customs—­16th century. | Norfolk (England)—­Social life and customs—­17th century. | bisac: literary criticism / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh Classification: lcc pe1081 .e44 2022 | ddc 420.9/031—­dc23/eng/20220803 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022008997 Set and designed in Arno by N. Putens.

Con ten ts

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Gentry Learning 13 2. Gentry Literacy 33 3. Letters and Presence 67 4. Places of Argument 101 5. Gentry Style 135 Notes 165 Bibliography 189 Index 203

Illu str ations

Following page 100 1. Map of Norfolk by Cristopher Saxton 2. Letter from Mary Holland to Muriel Knyvett 3. Detail from the same letter 4. Detail from a letter to Muriel Knyvett from her son Edmund 5. Detail from a survey 6. The same survey in full view 7. Letter from Muriel Knyvett to her brother Thomas Fortescue

Ack nowled gm ents

Many thanks to Matt Bokovoy, Heather Stauffer, and everyone at the University of Nebraska Press, and to Carole Levin and Marguerite Tassi, Early Modern Cultural Studies Series editors. Thanks to them, this process has been smoother than I realized it could be. Lois Agnew’s and Mark Longaker’s insightful critiques as readers benefited this project immensely. I am enormously grateful to them for their time and investment in my project. St. Bonaventure University made travel to conferences and archives possible; the School of Arts and Sciences and the Keenan Martine Grants in particular provided essential support for many years of research. Thanks to colleagues at Freidsam Memorial Library: Mary Ellen Ash, Tami Atwell, Cathy Maldanado, and Anne Tenglund. Thanks to staff and administrators, including Sharon Godfrey and David Hilmey. Thanks are due to colleagues past and present in the English department. Many students have talked me through ideas in this book. I owe thanks in particular to Anahiz Rivera and Sarah Sefried, undergraduate research assistants who provided invaluable editing and research work. Gabriel Bernhard Jackson, Carole Levin, Lauren Matz, John Mulryan, and Megan Walsh have modeled scholarship for me. Any shortcomings I may have in that regard are despite their best efforts. Presenting at the following organizations helped shape this project: the Rhetoric Society of America, American Society for the History of Rhetoric, Queen Elizabeth I Society, Shakespeare Association of America, International Society of the History of Rhetoric, and the short-­lived Gloriana Society. I am indebted to the generous listeners who asked hard questions. Thanks are very much also due to the staffs of the Archive Centre in the Norfolk Records Office, the manuscripts reading room of the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the University of Chicago 

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Special Collections Research Center. My study of Norfolk families could never have happened without their expertise and guidance. The following individuals have helped me as keen readers and listeners who interjected their thoughts at pivotal moments: Kathleen Biddick, Hillary Ecklund, Megan Farrell, Greg Foran, Eli Goldblatt, Richard Graff, Kenneth Graham, Kaplan Harris, Ekaterina Haskins, Susan Jarratt, Donika Kelly, Matt King, Shannon Miller, Janet Neigh, Steve Newman, Dan Schank, Daniel Seward, Dave Tell, Mary Anne Trasciatti, Megan Walsh, Art Walzer, and Susan Wells. On a more personal level, I want to also thank George Ellis, Eleanor Ellis, all my family, the staff at the Olean ymca, my friends at St. Stephen’s, and the staff at the Olean ymca Early Learning Center. I want to thank Megan Walsh again because I cannot thank her enough. Many thanks to the people of Norfolk, the gentlest of hosts.

x Acknowledgments

Gentry hetoric

Introduction Gentry Rhetoric examines how the gentry of late sixteenth-­and early seventeenth-­century Norfolk learned to write to each other about some of the things that mattered to them the most: family, law, and land. The rhetorical training of their formal education must have influenced their rhetorical practice, but to focus on this training exclusively, as scholars have generally done, limits our understanding of the strategies this class developed to negotiate, argue, and conciliate with one another. Gentry Rhetoric takes account of this rhetorical training, but considers the practice of negotiating matters of family, land, and law as equally influential on the way members of the gentle classes wrote to one another outside the confines of the court. Through this seemingly mundane writing, the gentry imagined themselves as a coherent entity and became the primary shapers of how writing in English would work (see fig. 1). Built at Henry VIII’s orders and designed by the likes of Thomas More, John Colet, and Desiderius Erasmus, the humanist educational system in England shaped public discourse in the Elizabethan age and set some of the founding assumptions of the public sphere of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As Peter Mack explains, “Royal aspirations to absolutism could not easily overrule the culture of debate formed in Elizabethan grammar schools and universities.”1 Whether the culture of debate helped conquer absolutism, such a defeat was certainly not part of Henry VIII’s plan to create an obedient administrative class for a monarchical government. And whether because of or in spite of the discourses their Latin curriculum helped to generate, the Tudors (and their aristocratic clients) ruled for the entirety of the sixteenth century. The curriculum’s focus on the poetics and rhetoric of ancient Rome was meant to instill Romanesque virtue, including stoic service to the state. But as the administrators themselves increasingly 

1

conducted their affairs in English, rather than Latin, they came to adapt those Latin techniques and strategies, designed around the high culture of Rome, to useful rhetorical practice in everyday English. The areas of family communications, land sales and purchases, and legal disputes and transactions were all undergoing fundamental changes throughout the period. New technologies and new structures were increasingly being described and arranged in English, which influenced the language in the same ways and to the same extent as rhetorical theory and pedagogy. Ascribing the rhetoric of the gentry entirely or even primarily to grammar school and university curricula risks ignoring the complexities of gentry life and the employment of rhetoric—­the art and science of persuasion—­in daily practice both to further individual aims and to foster a sense of communal identity. The educational system certainly provided a foundation and frame, but a host of other practices and kinds of knowledge of everyday life had to go into building the world of gentry life as well, and a wide range of additional rhetorical understandings was required to negotiate that world and that life. Early modern English rhetoric was not just practiced in the houses of Parliament, the royal councils, or the law courts, but in the seemingly uneventful exchanges of the gentry as they bought and sold land, loaned and repaid money, organized pageants, arranged marriages, set up and ran households, organized their parish churches, and generally conducted their lives. Social developments influenced these families’ rhetorical practice as much as if not more than rhetorical theory did. The gentry were formed by the humanist curriculum, but the humanist curriculum was also formed according to them and their needs. In the pages that follow, I look at the gentry’s use of written language to negotiate the relationship between the material world, the social world, and the self in order to build prosperous households. I analyze the texts the gentry most regularly wrote by combining methods from three related but distinct “new” schools of English study: new rhetoric, new historicism, and new literacy. All three are new in the sense that each of these fields looks to the sixteenth century as a turning point in the historical narratives that define their areas of study. The implication of adapting such methods is not 2 Introduction

that these narratives necessarily ought to be reconsidered, but that they can be better understood. I consider as rhetorical those quotidian moments in which individuals and groups within the Elizabethan Norfolk gentry used English-­language writing to manipulate the material and social worlds to their own purposes and advantages. My method of analysis is influenced by rhetorical scholarship that reconstructs the rhetorical theory of the early modern period as it emerged in particular moments and particular places by considering the social elements of biography and culture in which that theory played out. I also describe as fully as possible the range of influences on day-­to-­day rhetorical practice in English by considering individual pieces of writing and trying to give as complete an account as possible of the social and material elements that would have shaped the choices the writer made—­a method of “thick description” that is a mainstay of new historical work in literary history. A final method draws on literacy studies to consider the dynamic between a formal curriculum and the social forces that shape it by considering reading and writing as activities that involve the whole self and its relationship with the social and material worlds.2 Most studies of English writing in the sixteenth century have come from literary scholars.3 Even scholarship that explicitly takes up questions of language instruction have thought of this instruction in relation to literary works or literary methodologies, whether as focused on rhetorical training (as with Jenny C. Mann’s Outlaw Rhetoric or Jennifer Richards’s Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern England) or, more specifically, on letter writing ( Jonathan Goldberg’s Writing Matter) or literacy (Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters). Rhetorical training’s application in English remains understudied, given that it represents the heart of the educational experience, and what scholarship there is focuses on the court, the universities, the Church, and Parliament. These are obviously sites where that training would come into effect, as indeed the training was designed to produce speakers and writers specifically for these sites. Other scholars have examined the genre of the letter or the relationship of letters and quotidian writing to the ways that individuals shaped their identities ( Johnathan Daybell, Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing; Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters; Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity). Amid a growing interest Introduction3

in nonliterary approaches to letter writing and other forms of everyday writing (as with the editions prepared by the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters or Wendy Wall’s Domesticity), Gentry Rhetoric places such writing in the context of the very beginnings of explicit instruction in and theorizing about the English language in use. My study looks at how the gentry communicated with one another away from court, where most of their lives (and their fortunes) were built. In many studies of the Elizabethan gentry, letters and writing become ways of gaining insight into those lives and the elements that make them up. This book adds to this conversation, but primarily concerns itself with how the gentry wrote to each other outside of the formal educational sites that attempted to dictate (in Latin training) how matters of law, family, and land ought to be addressed. The result is an argument about the way that the gentry used writing to formulate a group identity, incorporating the centralized educational training that was meant to direct their identities from above. This is the vernacular ground out of which would grow the specific language that eventually led the gentry to political and educational revolution in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The Rise of the Gentry

“Gentry” is not a clearly defined term, nor was it in the Elizabethan era. I approach the gentry as a specific group following in part a narrative first laid out by economic historian R. H. Tawney in his 1941 article “The Rise of the Gentry,” and a thesis subsequently developed at greater length—­and more comprehensively—­by Lawrence Stone in his 1966 book, The Crisis of the Aristocracy.4 Tawney argues that, over the course of the seventeenth century, the gentry, “neither a noblesse, nor a bureaucracy, but mere bons bourgeois,” had “become . . . the dominant force in English life.” Tawney’s breezy eloquence carries this argument, which, in its particulars, was almost immediately challenged by fellow historians, but then comprehensively reinforced by Stone. But what Tawney did provide, aside from his prose, was an argument that members of both the aristocracy and the gentry recognized the gentry’s “rise,” including Walter Raleigh’s Observations of the Magnificency and Opulency of Cities (published in 1651 but written no later 4 Introduction

than 1618, Raleigh’s death year) and James Harrington’s Common-­wealth of Oceana in 1656. Tawney’s thesis ultimately attempts to account for the causes and outcomes of the civil wars of the seventeenth century, but in doing so it asserts (or assumes) a communal identity of prosperous families and individuals who also considered themselves (and whom others considered) as a cohesive group, members “holding a position determined, not by legal distinctions, but by common estimation.”5 Historians’ objections to Tawney’s thesis emerged from problems of defining the class and explaining its power, rather than to its existence or influence. These objections, in general, fell along lines that “questioned the validity of Tawney’s statistics; cast doubt upon the conceptual significance of the undifferentiated categories ‘aristocracy’ and ‘gentry’; . . . and advanced . . . a distinction between a rising or ‘Court’ gentry, who were nourished by Court office and mercantile or legal wealth, and a mere or ‘country’ gentry who, starved of such sustenance, stagnated and plotted in their rural discontent and emerged as the Independents.”6 Many of these objections were answered, particularly by Stone, and then raised again later in different forms. But, at least in the families discussed in Gentry Rhetoric, there was an easy and frequent transit between gentry members in the country and those at court. Furthermore, I take it that the necessities of writing and reading in the execution of the gentry’s daily affairs played more of—­or at least as much as—­a role on where rhetorical education would end up than any of the theories of language, knowledge, or pedagogy to which we usually ascribe these developments, all of which are thought to have been directed primarily by the centralizing force of the court and Crown. The gentry used writing and reading to construct the boundaries and markers of their group, even as they asserted a universality to the values they shared exclusively. These assertions, of universal “man” and a universal order, have been described by E. M. W. Tillyard for whom “the Elizabethans pictured the universal order under three main forms: a chain [as in a hierarchical “chain of being”], a series of corresponding planes, and a dance.”7 Tillyard asserts that that this order unified and was universal to the Elizabethans: “It is what everyone believed in Elizabeth’s days.”8 This “order” can be found throughout the writing of the age, in the writings of Introduction5

poets and playwrights like Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, courtiers like Thomas Elyot or Walter Raleigh, and theologians such as Richard Hooker, who, as Tillyard explains, wrote for “the general educated public of his day” and who “has the acutest sense of what the ordinary educated man can grasp and having grasped ratify. It is this tact that assures us that he speaks for the educated nucleus that dictated the beliefs of the Elizabethan Age.”9 Despite believing too easily that it “dictated . . . what everyone believed in Elizabeth’s days,” Tillyard imagines a “general educated public” that sounds a lot like Tawney’s gentry. And the everyday writing and reading practices of the gentry influenced—­or dictated—­the course of rhetoric (a program distinctly for “the educated” or those who wished to appear so) in the following centuries.

Social and Material

This study’s methodology depends on the idea that a distinction can be made between a social world and a material world, and that gentry rhetoric functioned by managing that distinction to the advantage of the group and its individual members. By “social” I mean the worlds of the gentry that consisted of words, habits, relationships, and other insubstantial things that nevertheless were important parts of daily life, including each individual’s sense of themselves and the immaterial worlds of soul and mind. By “material” I mean elements of the physical world like sheep, dirt, plows, buildings, and clothing that were important parts of daily life; these were the things that could not only be described, talked about, and agreed upon but also observed, touched, and measured. Such a division is complex. Words provide one easy place to see the complexity, as they almost invariably take some sensible form (sound, print) but in their role in language serve a primarily social function.10 For early modern literary studies and for composition, rhetoric, and writing studies (i.e., for English departments), the significance of language’s role between social and material worlds has been that the “subject” and “subjectivity” are formed as much by relationships to “objects” in the material world as by any psychological or spiritual or otherwise exclusively “social” developments, and this subject is a product of language.11 The endeavor is noble: to broaden our conception of what 6 Introduction

it means to be human, to recognize the constructedness of that concept, and to argue for a less anthropocentric view of the world. Such endeavors are also not without risks. Katharine Eisaman Maus has warned contemporary scholars of early modern literature that one danger of its turn to “the material” is to conflate subject and object altogether, so that the moral line against turning people into things collapses.12 In one sense Maus’s concern seems reactionary, an urgent, belated effort to reassign boundaries, to put things back in their proper places. But the risks are very real. As Ian Smith has noted, white early modern actors blackening their faces and hands to play the role of Othello would have been drawing on a tradition in which white actors were turned into Black characters by wrapping up in black cloth. The handkerchief that plays such a central role in the play, though usually assumed by critics to be white, much more likely in original performances would have been black. Writing in a literary scholarly tradition of “material culture studies,” in which the “interest of cultural artifacts has clarified our perspective on objects as things,” Smith notes that such a stage appearance of material blackness “circulat[es] the abject notion of a black man as a thing.”13 A gentry rhetoric based in teaching its members how to read and write the significance of the material world, and to define their social identities in relation to that material world, as I will argue, would lead Shakespeare’s audience to just such an understanding. Kim Hall, Ania Loomba, and Smith have demonstrated how the language of race gets used even before the modern concept is fully formed. Here I apply their method to the rhetoric that determined gentry identity.14 Maintaining a shared understanding of the relationship between social and material worlds required negotiating how to measure and discuss and value the material world, while at the same time negotiating the interests of the group and one’s own interests. Jennifer Richards has described negotiation as an approach to community “in which the play between the conflicting interests of men of similar and different estates is seen as productive and sociable.”15 Richards’s discussion of negotiation examines behavior at court. For the gentry in the country, particularly an interconnected set such as in Norfolk (or any other limited region), the element of sociability became even more significant, and interests might just as often Introduction7

have been complementary as competing—­if one person wanted to sell a piece of land and another to buy it, that negotiation was as much a site of cooperation as of discord. Negotiation, rather than argument, guided the uses of rhetoric among the gentry in the country in their approaches to building estates in places like Norfolk. The Elizabethan gentry did not just recognize each other’s status through their use of shared rhetorical conventions; those conventions could be employed to maintain relationships and community while exercising individual wills.16

Family, Land, Law

The chapters that follow are arranged by first laying out the relationship between rhetoric and gentry identity and then examining the way that relationship manifests in some of the central concerns of the gentry: family, land, and law. Each chapter reads archival and print materials in which members of the gentry discussed, debated, and negotiated matters relating to these three topics and couples them with two different streams of printed sources: instructional texts in reading, writing, and rhetoric (generally in the vernacular) and in the rapidly evolving practices, technologies, and theories governing each of the three areas of concern. Through this comparison I argue that these more mundane practices and more specialized popular texts had as great an influence on the rhetorical strategies of the gentry as did the specific rhetorical instruction in which they were trained. Taking as its working definition the Aristotelean understanding of rhetoric as searching out all available means of persuasion, Gentry Rhetoric traces an explosion of these available means that would influence all aspects of rhetoric and that helps to account for and revise a narrative in which the rhetorical curriculum itself entered a sharp period of decline even as vernacular literacy began to grow. My method is to offer a rhetorical analysis of the gentry in their everyday negotiations concerning their own estates, rather than occasions of high statecraft. I begin in chapter 1, however, with a bit of a digression to consider rhetoric in two moments of high statecraft: Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII’s marriage, and the impeachment of Robert Walpole. As precisely the kind of rhetorical moments that provided examples for the rhetoric textbooks, they 8 Introduction

ought to have clearly exemplified the principles of those texts. And while they certainly do, these incidents also bring their own specific concerns to the fore—­managing the relationship between the social and material worlds to their advantage. The chapter then goes on to consider the work of Francis Bacon not as parent of a new rhetorical theory, as he is often regarded, but as child of one of the moment’s great rhetorical practitioners, Nicholas Bacon, and the rhetorical environment of the gentry. The gentry was a distinct group or class, but one whose boundaries were maintained through social conventions. Such social constructions necessarily depended on language. Chapter 2 considers the kinds of language uses by which the gentry defined and maintained its boundaries and borders. I examine two printed accounts of Elizabeth I’s 1578 visit to Norfolk. In these texts the authors, Thomas Churchyard and Bernard Garter, work to both position themselves as members of the gentry and to lay out an argument for the exemplarity, if not the superiority, of the gentry of Norfolk, so that the behavior and bearing of Norfolk’s gentry might serve as an example to gentry elsewhere. For a class that was in some ways fluid, managing oral, written, and printed texts allowed them to maintain the boundaries of the class itself. These texts represent a literacy of being in the gentry in the sense that knowing how to read those texts in the proper ways allowed people to access both the material resources and the social resources that being in the gentry required. Chapter 3 examines how some of the key families in Norfolk, such as the Bacons, Knyvetts, and Pastons, used letters as the primary medium through which they built connections with one another and negotiated their own desires and needs. As they did so, they relied on a variety of techniques of making themselves and their material worlds present to their readers that, taken together, form what would come to be called by twentieth-­century rhetoric “presence.” This seemingly modern rhetorical innovation, however, was rooted in these early modern letter exchanges, which, in their own innovative use of classical techniques, set expectations for style that resonated throughout the next centuries. Chapter 4 examines the ways that rhetorical training facilitated land negotiations between members of the gentry alongside the new surveying Introduction9

techniques and manuals that were changing the ways that land was comprehended. In an economy where land was the foundation of revenue and wealth, the ability to successfully negotiate its boundaries required understanding how to use these techniques and approaches successfully in arguments and to do so in a way that would maintain relationships in relatively close-­knit communities. Their education set them up to think of the immaterial in material ways, specifically through the “topics”—­that is, “seats” or “places” in which arguments could be discovered. In the history of rhetorical and logical education, the sixteenth century marks the beginning of the end of the topics as a subject for serious study, replaced by a “new science” of observation, measurement, technology, and experiment. As they negotiated over land and property, however, gentry writers used the topics precisely in light of these new scientific methods. In this way their topical training created a mindset that far outlasted its practical use in discovering things about the material world—­primarily because it enabled writers and orators to make the “facts” uncovered by the new science amenable to their own argumentative and negotiating positions. Chapter 5 looks at the ways that members of the gentry adapted the resources of style to their negotiations with one another over property, debt, and the customs and laws that governed them. The sixteenth-­century focus on style in rhetorical training has often been seen as an obsession with, as the common expression suggests, style over substance. In legal questions, however, style became an indispensable resource for successfully negotiating conflict. While many members of the gentry had legal training, many did not, and even those who did were often required to employ legal counsel themselves in matters of contracts and agreements. As with surveying this meant that writers were often required to make arguments based on other people’s expertise about matters beyond their own technical knowledge. To account for the law, and to invoke it as advantageously as possible, required carefully balancing when and how to appeal to the law and when and how to appeal to other relationships and the good (or bad) will that existed outside of the law through other ordinary social relations. By examining written exchanges of business dealings, I show how knowing the style in which to talk about the law was more useful than knowing the 10 Introduction

law itself, and one of the chief ways the gentry both got things done and also constituted themselves as a group. The three areas on which I focus—­family, land, and law—­by no means make up all of the specialized discourses with which a member of the gentry needed familiarity, nor all of the resources necessary to communicate and to persuade. Even so they were certainly vital to the life of the gentry. Examining the ways that they contributed to a unique practice of rhetoric can help us understand how, despite theoretical and pedagogical developments, rhetoric became more, not less, important as the early modern period unfolded.

Introduction 11

Chapter 1 •

T

Gentry Learning

he sixteenth-­century rhetorical curriculum in England, based on Cicero and Quintilian, was concerned with five areas of composing speech and writing, called canons.1 In invention writers and speakers sought out the elements and ideas that would allow for compelling arguments to be made and compromises to be reached. Arrangement covered the ways that these arguments might be organized and connected for maximum effectiveness in terms not only of being easy to follow, but in seeking out the best answer to a given question. Style then referred to the ways that words could be ordered to present ideas. Memory dealt with the techniques speakers could use to remember the arguments they wanted to make, the way those arguments would be arranged, and the style in which those arguments would appear. Finally, delivery referred to presentation of voice and gesture, the physical components through which the composition would be articulated. But, as with Quintilian’s Institutes, all such training was infused with principles and models of virtue in speech and action, which guided future such compositions and created the interpretive framework against which other people’s speech and action would be judged. In the classical period rhetoric functioned as an entire system not only for producing fine or even effective speech but also for interrogating the very nature of questions of ethics and of action—­any question in fact in which probability, rather than certainty, governed the best possible resolution. Renaissance scholars like Francesco Petrarch and Lorenzo Valla in fifteenth-­century Italy and Desiderius Erasmus in early sixteenth-­century northern Europe built theories and devised a curriculum in order to instill these classical virtues through rhetoric. This was a system for studying not simply how to speak and write but how to be a good person and how to advance the best, most noble, and most virtuous interests of a society. 

13

Despite this commitment to a complete system of speech, thought, and virtue, however, by the end of the sixteenth century the curriculum had begun to shift to an ultimately exclusive focus on style. Several theoretical forces drove this stylistic focus. The early part of the century was dominated by a debate over a belief that best way to imitate Cicero was to imitate his Latin style as closely as possible. In the later part of the century, Peter Ramus and Omer Talon argued that for pedagogical reasons considering invention and arrangement in rhetoric was confusing and counterproductive for students because these were also part of the study of dialectic, or logic, which was their proper home.2 Whether as cause or effect, the shift to style was accompanied by a decay of rhetoric’s efficacy and usefulness, so that, as Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg have argued, “the power of the individual public man diminished,” and rhetoric “became the province of the courtier or government functionary.”3 Lois Agnew, who has done as much as anyone to complicate and challenge this narrative, has nevertheless offered a convenient summary: by the seventeenth and certainly by the beginning of the eighteenth century, rhetoric’s power as a system of argument or debate had completely disappeared into an academic pursuit of “doctrines of ‘taste’ and ‘propriety,’” with such a pursuit punctuating the entirety of the early modern period “as a moment that signals rhetoric’s nadir.”4 Rhetoric became by the eighteenth century not a method of inquiry and virtue but an ornamental marker of, at best, group belonging, and this decay began in the sixteenth century.5 The people who wrote English-­language rhetorical texts became primarily concerned with style over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and taste and propriety by the eighteenth century.6 This development meant that rhetoric as a field abandoned the rich array of writings and of commentary and analytical methods rooted in the curriculum’s study of Latin (which was for most students the bulk of the experience); students would read many different kinds of texts and hear many different voices participate in deliberative processes.7 Students of Latin, although perhaps expected to be able to speak it with some fluency, would not speak it in their daily affairs.8 This being the case, a vernacular education built to teach style’s role in crafting the social and material worlds provided a 14

Gentry Learning

powerful way for its students to help shape those worlds toward the ethical system that was rhetoric’s ideal end.9 For historians of rhetoric, however, the concern has been that rather than being a means to allow students to both prosper and challenge the things that needed challenging, this stylistic evolution was simply a powerful way for a ruling class to establish and keep its hold on power.10 Because this power had to be put into effect through language (text and speech), those in power hoped to centralize and control the educational, scholarly, and artistic forces that shaped the taste of the vernacular in its daily employment. This book suggests, by contrast, that, at the end of the Elizabethan era, curricular change was motivated not by great moments of oratory or literature, nor by scholarly developments, but by the ways the curriculum best met the needs of its clients—­the gentry of sixteenth-­century England. Historians analyzing the practice of rhetoric in this period have offered alternative narratives within this larger history, while literary and literacy scholars have likewise suggested competing accounts of language in the period.11 In this chapter I consider a generally accepted narrative of early modern English rhetoric.12 I then outline the terms and methods through which I will examine examples of gentry rhetoric, discuss how I will employ them, and consider how this examination affects and contributes to that larger historical narrative of English-­language rhetorical instruction during and since the early modern period.13

Latin or English

By the eighteenth century, writing increasingly was taking place in a print environment where the great social and political debates of the day were carried out through print publications like magazines and newspapers, the conditions of both Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities.14 The work of Hugh Blair and other rhetoricians associated with this eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century work—­most prominently George Whately and George Campbell—­was explicitly intended to produce writers who could take their place as citizens and subjects in the world of politics and economics. What they were creating was the language that allowed for the emergence

Gentry Learning

15

of what is now thought of as the modern subject, an invention with roots in the humanism of the sixteenth-­century European tradition but that evolved into an Enlightenment and post-­Enlightenment creature that in large part determined the shape of modernity. Blair and his colleagues worked outside the circle of Oxford and Cambridge, and the literary tradition of rhetoric also developed outside those universities. Indeed it emerged outside of England as whole, in places like Scotland and America, while in England’s school curricula Latin instruction in classical authors remained the order of the day.15 In these other places education was offered in the vernacular (though obviously with some expectation that Latin would be learned) and instructed students in proper English along with other skills and sciences that would allow students to succeed in a growingly commercial and technological socioeconomic environment. The parameters of “taste” and style that Blair and his colleagues sought to inculcate were established in the daily life of the gentry. This style, especially in its connection to virtue and duty, scholars now understand to be a construction central to Enlightenment values of the subject and of the social. While these phenomena are then associated with mass communication in the form of print publications, a number of the characteristics of this style and its promises can be found in the gentry letter writing of the sixteenth century: attention to repetition, reinforcement, and saturation of message as a key to persuasion; the use of image and description to enhance the feeling of connection between writer and reader; and the creation of a persona through voice. To this style, however, were added the concerns that made up gentry life: measurement, calculation, negotiation, and, in fact, all the elements that Jane Tutoft laid out in a plain style in her appeal to Nathaniel Bacon to educate her daughter: “Let her lern to wryt & to rede, & to cast account, & to wash, & to bru, & to backe, & to dres meat & drink, & so I trust she shal prove a great good huswyf.”16 And, while Tutoft obviously referred to women’s roles in the gentry distribution of labor, the gentry man was similarly responsible for all these elements, even as he relied on other people’s labor to meet those responsibilities. Writing’s purpose was to facilitate these other elements of usefulness but writing also drew on these elements both to be 16

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comprehensible to a gentry audience and to be effective in negotiating that audience. The elements of use provided the vocabulary, structure, style, and topics—­in short, the rhetoric—­the gentry used to recognize and connect with each other, to fit whatever role they held in a household, and to address the members of other households. This concern with the purpose and content of education was widely acknowledged. Miles Coverdale’s The Christian State of Matrimony, a 1548 translation of Heinrich Bullinger’s Christlich Eestand, laid out a general course that a head of household ought to follow to ensure the education of the young. Coverdale expresses an anxiety that “many men now adaies, albeit they see their children apt unto letters and good learning, having substance enough to find them thereat, yet wyll they not suffer them to continue thereat, because themselves cannot favour it, or els they see no advantage worldly to follow.”17 Heads of household not sending their children to become scholars would therefore impoverish the state, as “no publike wealth, towne, city, or parish can be well governed, without the Prince, Ruler, Priest, or Bishop be learned in God’s law,” and all the ills of such entities are to be attributed to “the blynd ignorace of unlearned rulers.”18 Nevertheless, “no man is glad to have hys childe learned unto such unprofitable and laborious endes.”19 By the end of the seventeenth century, a change had occurred in that heads of households were gladly sending their children to school, but, as John Locke emphasized in his Some Thoughts concerning Education, the laboriousness and inutility was still a problem. Locke’s concern was deeply wrapped up with the structure of families—­Latin was essential for a gentleman, but younger sons of gentlemen (i.e., members of the gentry who would not be primary heirs of an estate and who were thus destined for trade) were, at least in Locke’s description, ignoring the practicalities of good writing in lieu of a Latin literacy that would not only be useless to them, but that would be resented by them. Latin, Locke explained, was “a Language which your Son, ’tis a thousand to one, shall never have an occasion once to make a speech in, as long as he lives, after he comes to be a Man.”20 Meanwhile, the instructional process itself, he thought, would breed resentment of the language and all the supposed value it was meant

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to instill, “wherein he having no use of Latin, fails not to forget that little, which he brought from School, and which ‘tis Ten to One he abhors, for the ill-­usage it procur’d him.”21 Coverdale and Locke obviously differed in their desire to see the sons of the gentry educated in a humanist-­classical Latin model. But they were united in understanding that English, not Latin, provided the tools for success in the world. They also shared the belief that the heart of education, whatsoever form it was ultimately to take, lay within the household. Not only was the extent of the education and the purposes to which it was to be put within the remit of the householder, but so, too, was the concern with the fundamentals that would prove most essential, they believed. These were precisely the elements that Locke eventually called the “Qualifications requisite to Trade and Commerce, and the Busines of the World.”22 The time wasted in grammar school and beyond, according Locke, in the begrudging, poor, and soon-­forgotten acquisition of Latin came at the expense of “writing a good Hand, and casting Account, which are of great Advantage in all Conditions of Life, and to most Trades indispensably necessary.”23 And, despite his insistence that those who could ought to pursue scholarship, Coverdale, too, placed precisely these skills at the foundation of an education. According to him a young person’s education should begin with being trained on English primers and dialogues, so that “when they can reade both printed and written letters, and can wel commit that which they have learned to memory saying it distinctly and perfectly by hart, then let them learne to write, to cast an account, to cipher, adde, subtrah, etc.”24 Whereas Locke stressed the necessity of writing and accounting, for Coverdale the essential nature of these activities was emphasized by its placement in the educational process, as the very next thing to be done once reading and recitation were in hand. Short of reading itself, then, and that in the vernacular, writing in English was fundamental.

An Analysis of Two Famous Rhetorical Moments

In the remainder of this chapter I deviate from my main focus to specific texts by Anne Boleyn and Robert Walpole, whose careers form useful endpoints for the timeline of early modern English rhetoric described above, 18

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and the rhetorical careers of Sir Nicholas Bacon and his now more famous youngest son, Francis, which mark that timeline’s center. Although this book examines rhetoric in practice by describing how the gentry organized the social and material worlds in their routine writing, it is useful to situate their actions in the more familiar territory of famous members of the gentry and their famously (and infamously) public rhetorical moments. The rhetorical events generated by these people—­Boleyn, Walpole, and the Bacons—­were the kinds of occasions that creators of early modern rhetoric textbooks sought to get down in lectures and in written and printed treatises and thus served as an important backdrop to the lived rhetorical experience of these political celebrities’ families, friends, and neighbors. Across these two hundred years, rhetorical practice became more dynamic and realized more and more of its democratic potential. Anne’s time in power saw the English language’s cultural and political force radically expand, as England’s churches switched from Latin to English for the services and texts they and their congregations used, and the government began actively shaping both the educational system and the print industry. The Bacons’ moment ushered in the century of the “new science” that would culminate in the work of Locke and Newton, while Walpole began his four-­ decade parliamentary career in 1701, ushering in the century in which the new science produced the Enlightenment and the public sphere.25 Boleyn lived in a time that celebrated rhetoric’s usefulness and power, but it was only by Walpole’s time that rhetoric had become a powerful force for the sort of state building that the sixteenth-­century humanists envisioned. The same tendencies that account for the rise of the gentry can also account for both the rhetorical theory and practice of the early modern period: concern with the creation of the individual and with structuring the ways that language can give significance to material and immaterial things. Anne Boleyn, Nicholas Bacon, Francis Bacon, and Robert Walpole all came from well-­established gentry families; all had good educations in the humanist model; and the careers of each occupy pivotal moments in the history of rhetoric. While Nicholas and Francis’s rhetoric exemplifies gentry rhetoric, it is also true that their careers can be seen as models of what the rhetorical curriculum sought to produce, which was men enlightened

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by rich Latin erudition. For various reasons, though Boleyn and Walpole also exemplify gentry rhetoric, they do not follow this educational model so neatly, or at all. Nevertheless, though all enjoyed different fortunes, all enjoyed fortunes, and all were equally good at using language to get what they wanted. Such success requires rhetorical prowess, by any definition of rhetoric.26

Anne Boleyn as Rhetor

Anne Boleyn was born around 1501 at Blickling Hall, in Aylsham, Norfolk. Anne’s family had been in Norfolk for many generations and had slowly made its way up the social ranks. Her great-­grandfather was born and lived in Salle, Norfolk, where he was a yeoman, a landowning farmer from the class below the gentry but above the peasantry. His son, Anne’s grandfather, went to London to serve an apprenticeship, becoming a member of the powerful Mercers’ guild and eventually being made lord mayor of London; he bought the estate of Blickling back in his home county of Norfolk, marking his ascension into the gentry. Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, was an ambassador and a Crown servant who became an Earl.27 Her marriage to King Henry VIII would mark a zenith in this family’s long rise from landholding Norfolk farmers to prominence and power through the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the early modern.28 The perceived need for a male heir meant that Henry would probably have engineered a break from the Catholic Church and ushered in a Protestant England, regardless of who his wife was to be after Catherine—­but Anne was able to successfully negotiate this situation to see herself crowned as Queen of England. Anne would not have received the kind of grammar school and university education that a man would have; her rhetorical training would have come privately and mostly informally. Anne is not usually remembered primarily for her rhetoric, but her political successes served as a sure sign of her rhetorical abilities. It is possible that simple physical attraction could account for her initially drawing the attentions of the king, but it was certainly through rhetorical skill that Anne was not only able to increase his own interest in allying himself with her, but was also successfully able to resist efforts to make her his mistress rather than his wife. 20

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Such maneuvering required managing the series of letters and other verbal exchanges between herself and Henry as well as a host of other relationships with powerful and interested figures. To get a sense of how Anne employed rhetoric to further her interests, we can look at a letter she wrote to Cardinal Wolsey, Henry’s most powerful minister, who was often thought responsible for most if not all of Henry’s political and economic successes to that point. Wolsey was tasked with securing Henry’s divorce from Catherine in order to clear the way for his marriage to Anne—­a task at which he would ultimately and spectacularly disappoint. In the course of the negotiations, however, before Wolsey’s failure had become apparent, Anne wrote to him seeking an update on the progress of the Pope’s legate, the legal officer who was to come to England to determine the possibility of Henry’s claim for divorce. This request for an update was also, of course, meant as a spur to action, as well as an indication of Anne’s power in this situation. My Lord, in my most humblest wise that my heart can think, I desire you to pardon me that I am so bold to trouble you with my simple and rude writing, esteeming it to proceed from her that is much desirous to know that your grace does well, as I perceive by this bearer that you do, the which I pray God long to continue, as I am most bound to pray; for I do know the great pains and troubles that you have taken for me both day and night is never likely to be recompensed on my part, but alonely in loving you, next unto the king’s grace, above all creatures living. And I do not doubt but the daily proofs of my deeds shall manifestly declare and affirm my writing to be true, and I do trust you do think the same. My lord, I do assure you, I do long to hear from you news of the legate; for I do hope, as they come from you, they shall be very good; and I am sure you desire it as much as I, and more, an it were possible; as I know it is not: and thus remaining in a steadfast hope, I make an end of my letter. Written with the hand of her that is most bound to be Your humble Servant, Anne Boleyn



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Postscript The writer of this letter would not cease, till she had caused me likewise to set my hand, desiring you, though it be short, to take it in good part. I ensure you that there is neither of us but greatly desireth to see you, and are joyous to hear that you have escaped this plague so well, trusting the fury thereof to be passed, especially with them that keepeth good diet, as I trust you do. The not hearing of the legate’s arrival in France causeth us somewhat to muse; notwithstanding, we trust, by your diligence and vigilancy (with the assistance of Almighty God), shortly to be eased out of that trouble. No more to you at this time, but that I pray God send you as good health and prosperity as the writer would. By your loving Sovereign and Friend, H. R.29

The letter, though brief, exhibits skill in at least three of the classical canons, or subject areas, of rhetoric: invention (the material of persuasion), arrangement (its organization), and style (its expression). These canons worked together, at times indistinguishably, to move audiences and individuals. In this case Anne’s chief material of persuasion is the cardinal’s own interest in her case—­and presumably in the maintenance of his own power thereby—­as she suggests, subtly, by writing that “I am sure you desire it as much as I.” The material’s organization is also expertly handled, as Anne opens with an address that establishes her humility and her position in a manner that reads as deferential to the cardinal’s own position. That this opening takes up the bulk of the letter (about eight lines) while the actual request takes up the least space (about three lines) is not only effective for maintaining their relationship and goodwill, but also demonstrates the kind of indirection that Erasmus, whose theories of rhetoric formed the basis of the English curriculum, suggested could be appropriately used to good effect in a letter.30 The point of such indirection is to create a tone of conversation between friends, allowing for a wider and more flexible style (in comparison to an oration) and making the recipient more receptive to requests for favors. Finally, the manner of expression represents classical, 22

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effective practice and theory, as Anne downplays her own worthiness (“I desire you to pardon me that I am so bold to trouble you with my simple and rude writing”) in order to win her audience’s favor. The letter’s postscript, written by Henry himself at Anne’s insistence (“The writer of this letter would not cease, till she had caused me likewise to set my hand, desiring you, though it be short, to take it in good part”) serves to add additional authority to her request while emphasizing the material point of the letter, which is that news regarding the papal legate is wanting. Through its use of these canons, the letter successfully appeals to ethos (the character of the author), pathos (the emotions of the audience), and logos (intellectual matter)—­the three types of appeal or proofs as described by formal rhetoric—­and does so in a manner effective for the form of the letter in accordance with the most current humanist principles. This short letter on a matter of great consequence is a representative example of the ubiquity of rhetorical understanding among the gentry. Rhetoric provided the ideas and the language for the members, like Anne, to make their way in the world. The ending of this story, however, is not a happy one. Anne Boleyn, an effective rhetor, wrote to Cardinal Wolsey, an equally skilled rhetor, as part of a larger strategy to apply pressure on him to in turn apply pressure to the Church so that Henry might be granted an annulment from Catherine and be free to marry Anne. All of this had to be done through persuasion and negotiation undertaken by the cardinal. However, these persuasions and negotiations were unsuccessful, and the cardinal was unable to secure an annulment for Henry. Anne’s aim of marriage to the king would had to be effected by other means. She then began to rely on Thomas Cromwell, yet another gifted rhetor, who in the process engineered a break from the Roman Catholic Church, with Henry installed as the Supreme Head of the Church of England. These steps were ultimately opposed by the lord chancellor Sir Thomas More, not only another effective rhetor, but in fact the good friend of Erasmus. Together More and Erasmus would be central figures in the European culture of Renaissance humanism, while in England, Erasmus, More, and John Colet would revolutionize the education system, ushering in an ideal humanist rhetorical curriculum. In the unfolding of events, however, the effects of this quantity of rhetorical talent to shape a

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society that was just or deliberative were negligible: Wolsey would die in disgrace, and More would be executed for his opposition to the split with the Catholic Church that Henry deemed necessary. When that marriage failed to produce a male heir, Cromwell’s rhetorical talents were employed to make sure that Anne was found guilty of treason and executed. Cromwell was shortly thereafter himself executed for his own missteps in Henry’s later marriages. These ideal rhetors were not mere government functionaries, but men and women of principle whose identities had been shaped by an ideal humanist training—­and they were ultimately powerless to resist the authoritarian rule of Henry VIII. A century before the era of European absolutism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in an age that respected classical rhetorical training, the monarch ultimately made decisions of life and of death, no matter how learned speakers were in protesting them.

An Eighteenth-­Century Norfolk Family

In the early sixteenth century, the humanist revival of classical learning meant that rhetoric functioned as a complete system of argument, discourse, and even ethics. By the eighteenth century, however, the study of rhetoric had become essentially a study of style. Another member of the Norfolk gentry, Robert Walpole, exemplifies this change.31 While Walpole, who would come to be considered the first prime minister of England, had a good education and was a promising student, he was by no means a scholar of More’s caliber. Indeed, unable to speak German well enough to communicate effectively with King George I, who was unable to speak English well enough for business purposes, he and the king communicated in “very bad Latin.”32 Nevertheless, Walpole could arguably be thought of as one of the most effective English rhetors in that country’s history, controlling power in the House of Commons for nearly forty years. Born in the late 1670s in Houghton, Norfolk, Walpole was descended from long-­standing members of the Norfolk gentry, his grandfather having been granted the honor of Knight of the Bath for his support of the royalist cause during the civil wars, and his father being a member of Parliament. It is worth noting that Walpole left Cambridge after only two years to return 24

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to manage the Norfolk estate left to him upon his father’s death, at least part of which he would successfully turn into one of the earliest of England’s great houses, and where he would also build his most loyal and steadfast political support. Walpole was first elected to Parliament in 1701, and the substantial Norfolk estate he inherited provided him a solid foundation for his career, even if it was his own rhetorical ability that ultimately led to his more spectacular successes. Walpole had a great many talents, not the least of them being an exceptional mind for the politics and finances of statecraft, but these ultimately all depended on his ability to build consent and agreement through rhetorical means. Known for a simplicity and directness of speech, Walpole’s rhetoric demonstrates a mastery of the technical elements of style. Toward the end of his career, in response to a motion appealing to the king to dismiss him from office—­essentially, an impeachment—­Walpole delivered a lengthy speech, refuting the charges point by point, demonstrating argumentative inconsistencies, and impugning the motives of his accusers. As the opening to his speech shows, it is style as much as substance that drives these points home: It has been observed by several gentlemen, in vindication of this motion, that if it should be carried, neither my life, liberty, nor estate will be affected. But do the honorable gentlemen consider my character and reputation as of no moment? Is it no imputation to be arraigned before this House, in which I have sat forty years, and to have my name transmitted to posterity with disgrace and infamy? I will not conceal my sentiments, that to be named in Parliament as a subject of inquiry, is to me a matter of great concern. But I have the satisfaction, at the same time, to reflect, that the impression to be made depends upon the consistency of the charge and the motives of the prosecutors.33 The speech itself is an example of the refutation exercise from the training manuals known as progymnasmata that were standard in every school and university in England and on the continent.34 In this case Walpole’s style dominates his opening, centering the question on his own honor and the

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value he places on it, and casting doubt on the honor and motives of his accusers. The examples of erotema, or rhetorical questions, serve to emphasize to the audience that Walpole does indeed take the reputation of his character seriously—­an important move as his character was in no small part a point of contention. These work, in turn, through several different stylistic approaches. To begin with they are grammatically sophisticated: the assertion to which Walpole is responding is given as three elements (“neither my life, liberty, nor estate will be affected”), while his questions responding to this assertion also rely on a listing of qualities, but with two elements each: Do the accusers “consider my character and reputation as of no moment?,” and is there no damage done in having “my name transmitted to posterity with disgrace and infamy?” In the structure of the sentences, each listing comes near the end of the sentence, so an association of these elements is tacitly asserted by the speaker and understood by the hearers. This pattern operates through colon, the management of the grammatical elements in a sentence for emphasis. In this case Walpole emphasizes a subtle shift that distances his name from the charge of dishonor. In the first clause, the elements are nouns and each of them names a material condition (life, liberty, estate). Further, he arranges these in a passive construction—­ they “will [not] be affected.” In the second clause, the two nouns are social qualities, rather than material conditions (character and reputation), and have shifted from passive subject to object, but the object in this case is not about the nouns (whether or not they will be affected), but instead about the accusers (whether or not they consider reputation as a meaningful thing, the implication being that, despite their accusations, they do not really consider character and reputation as important things at all). In the final clause, the nouns are again immaterial (disgrace and infamy) and opposite qualities from the two preceding (character and reputation). They have moved to the very end of the sentence, and are objects not of the verb in the clause but of a preposition—­now only distantly associated with Walpole’s “name,” which is to be “transmitted to posterity”—­to emphasize that, through his own service to the country for the past forty years, his name will most certainly be transmitted to posterity (as opposed to the names of his accusers, perhaps) but it will not be so easy to attach 26

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disgrace and infamy to it. Walpole then closes this pattern of sentences with a direct claim not about his accusers, as in the past three sentences, but about himself: “To be named in Parliament as a subject of inquiry, is to me a matter of great concern.” Again he contrasts himself with his accusers: matters of reputation may not make any difference to them, but even to be “named” in such a matter is “a matter of great concern” to Walpole. Here the word “name” is used in an example of polyptoton, where it is repeated but as a different part of speech—­name as noun that will be transmitted to posterity, and name as verb (or verb form, precisely as infinitive serving as a subject in this case). Through these stylistic elements, the other elements of Walpole’s argument (the question of invention as he draws on arguments about his attacker’s character and his own, and arrangement as he uses the exordium to establish his own character) are brought to their fullest possible effectiveness, to the extent that the three canonical elements themselves are nearly indistinguishable. Unlike Boleyn’s chapter in the history of rhetoric and the Norfolk gentry, this one has a happier conclusion. Walpole found fame in an age of rising political parties and factions, adhering at least in principle to a policy of moderation that would have impressed the most rigorous humanist. At the same time, the presence of such factionalism and party strife serves as a good indicator of the extent to which debate and discourse helped to construct the social and political state. What was urged and negotiated through rhetorical means mattered, and policy and social structures could change as a result of that rhetoric, not with complete disregard for the will of the monarch, but certainly independently of the monarch.35 As an example of forensic rhetoric carried out in a deliberative body, Walpole’s speech and the ensuing vote that determined his innocence and continued service in Parliament are not only a model of the power of rhetoric envisioned in the traditional history, they are also representative—­that is, they were not uncommon, but, rather, the norm for the English political system. Walpole’s first speeches to Parliament, forty years earlier, were reported to have been poor, but more than one political figure predicted that he would become a great speaker; his career was also followed earnestly by his former teachers.36 People believed in rhetoric: it was the means through which

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a political system that resisted absolutism and authoritarianism would flourish, and whatever the failings of that political system, that it would be built, maintained, and improved by rhetoric was a given.

A Third Norfolk Family and the Development of a Gentry Rhetoric

Two Norfolk-­connected figures in particular play key roles in this book: lord keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon and his youngest son, Francis. Though Francis is certainly the better known of the two both generally and in rhetorical history today, this would not always have been the case, and certainly not in the sixteenth century. As lord keeper of the privy seal, Sir Nicholas Bacon served as one of Elizabeth’s chief councilors and her spokesperson in Parliament. Nicholas Bacon was also one of the wealthiest landowners in Norfolk and perhaps in the country, at least outside the nobility. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, himself secretary of state and lord treasurer, wrote in complaint to Bacon that “I lack the wit, the great wealth, the credit that you easilier get then I can.” Bacon built great Norfolk and Suffolk estates that he was able to leave to five of six sons; he died before he could do the same for Francis, the youngest. To this twist of fortune, or misfortune, Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart attribute Francis’s drive toward fame, which, when he was through, outstripped that of his father.37 Nevertheless, Nicholas was accounted one of the great orators of his day and indeed was seen as something of a rhetorical monument. George Puttenham said of Bacon that he was one of those few “from whose lippes I haue seene to proceede more graue and naturall eloquence, then from all the Oratours of Oxford or Cambridge.” But Puttenham also noted the diligent study on which that practice was based, explaining that he had “come to the Lord Keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon, and found him sitting in his gallery alone with the works of Quintilian before him.” In sum, Puttenham explained of Bacon, “in deede he was a most eloquent man, and of rare learning and wisedome, as euer I knew England to breed.”38 Such a sentiment was echoed by several other eulogists, such as George Whetstone in his verse “Remembrance” of the lord keeper, printed shortly after Bacon’s death in 1578: “He Speaker was, long of the Parlament, / And as he saied the matter alwaies went.”39 People also went to lengths to collect his 28

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speeches in manuscript. His speech opening Elizabeth’s first Parliament was copied at least twenty times, with every possibility that additional copies have since been lost. By contrast the speeches of the lords from that same Parliament on the question of religious supremacy (i.e., the doctrinal nature of the Christian Church in England under the new monarch—­easily Parliament’s most central question) average two or three copies, indicating that the reason for collecting Bacon’s speech was not limited to the nature of the question or the moment. Even the Queen’s own speech from that Parliament, reprinted multiple times in the coming centuries, was not copied with the same vigor, as only seven copies exist. In addition to individual speeches, however, there exist at least five manuscript collections in a single hand dedicated to the lord keeper Nicholas Bacon’s speeches and other rhetorical performances, all dating from the twenty years or so after his death. This is on par with or in excess of the number of manuscripts dedicated solely to the work of John Donne, for instance, one of the most famously circulated so-­called coterie poets of the end of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, or Philip Sidney, who would became the exemplar for eloquence in poetry and fiction.40 There are extant only three manuscript collections dedicated primarily to Sidney’s poetry.41 Of course counting extant copies of manuscripts is not ultimately probative—­there may well have been hundreds of manuscript collections of John Donne, Philip Sidney, Walter Mildmay, and the like that did not survive. But, based on the same extrapolation by which it is claimed that Donne or Sidney were widely circulated in manuscript, we can make the same claim for Bacon, if not to the same extent. Furthermore, the circle of collectors was elite, to say the least: Sir Christopher Hatton, one of Bacon’s successors as lord chancellor, owned what seems to be the earliest collection of Bacon’s speeches, at the British Library, from which, it seems, numerous copies may have been taken. The first page of the volume even includes Hatton’s name, which was, according to the catalog information, inscribed there by Queen Elizabeth herself. In the certainly respected venue of publication that was manuscript circulation, Bacon was, by any modern estimate, a success. As Puttenham’s reference to Quintilian suggests, Nicholas Bacon was esteemed in his day as a model of humanist oratory; Francis, on the other

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hand, would be esteemed by posterity as a revolutionizer of rhetoric. Most famously Bacon defined rhetoric’s “dutie and Office” as “to apply Reason to Imagination, for the better mooving of the will.”42 The general estimation of Francis’s rhetorical innovation is his incorporation of a faculty psychology, dividing the mind into various elements—­in this case, reason, will, and imagination—­and then describing the relationships among these three parts and the additional elements that facilitate these relationships. Thus the role of rhetoric was to serve as one of these facilitators. Scholarship has for some time held that Francis Bacon’s conception of rhetoric was not necessarily itself decisive in affecting the course of rhetorical theory, but rather that his importance comes in the way he captured in his prose his intellectual moment. Even so his writing about rhetoric focused on the individual’s mind, rather than a set of public events, like a trial or a funeral oration. Though he sees Bacon’s work as largely lagging behind that of thinkers like Descartes on the continent, Thomas Conley notes that “rhetoric was conceived by Bacon, as it had begun to be by Continental rhetoricians, in terms not of the occasions on which it was used but of its relation to and effects upon a given set of human faculties: imagination, affect, and will.”43 Despite the current difference in their reputations—­the quickest way to meaningfully describe Nicholas is by saying he was Francis’s father—­one would be hard pressed to say that Francis was a more successful political or social operator than his father. He certainly understood the power of a speech in Parliament, having been able to attribute serious career setback to a poor performance. Nevertheless, for Thomas Conley as for Brian Vickers and others, Bacon’s understanding of rhetoric ultimately emerges from “what Bacon saw and heard as a member of Parliament and as Lord Chancellor.”44 The rhetoric Francis Bacon envisioned, however—­and the rhetoric that would influence the training, theory, and teaching of rhetoric for the next two centuries—­was not a rhetoric of the grand occasion, but of the everyday exchange of members of a class bred not to nobility, but to gentry life and its constant concern for material and social status. This is suggested by Conley’s use of the word “occasion” to capture what differentiates Bacon’s innovation (or at least the innovation he is mirroring). 30

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In his 1597 essay, “Of Discourse,” Bacon wrote, “The honorablest part of talk, is to give the occasion.”45 Here occasion is not something received, analyzed, and responded to by a rhetor, but something that, ideally, the rhetor controls. The term occurs three times in Bacon’s short essay—­in one instance the reader is advised to vary their speech according to the occasion, but in the other two instances, as above, occasion is not only something that is given, but something over which control and agency are exerted. The reader is thus advised to create the occasion where their speech may have most effect, rather than to reactively frame her speech to the occasion.46 Bacon identifies rhetoric as a pliable art, as opposed to the more rigid logic: “The Proofes and Demonstrations of Logicke, are toward all men indifferent, and the same: But the Proofes and perswasions of Rhetoricke, ought to differ according to the Auditors . . . if a Man should speake of the the same thing to severall persons: he should speak to them all respectively and severall ways.”47 This concern with private conversation in relation to public oratory reflects a more general concern with these categories in relation to duty, where the same bifurcation of private and public occurs: “The term of duty is more proper to a minde well framed & disposed towards others, as the terme of vertue is applied to a mind well formed & composed in it selfe, though neither can a man understand vertue without some relation to Society, nor duety without an inwarde disposition.”48 From this set of connections, then, it becomes apparent that the way a person composes him-­or herself will reflect the composition of her society with others; likewise, the way that she addresses these different levels of society is intricately related to the ways she and they compose themselves. Bacon was at pains, however, to make clear that this relationship is complex. Throughout his treatment of the various fields of his developing science, a dialectic emerged between individuals and more universal elements of a society. Later, in The Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon asserted that an individual’s relation to his or her family in relation to the concept of “duty” is relevant to the nature of a state—­not as a model for the governance of that state, but as both formative and indicative of the mindset of the people who would be ruled within that state: “Unto this part touching

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Respective duty, doth also appertayne the dutyes betweene husband and wife, parent and childe, Master and Servaunte. So likewise, the lawes of friendship and Gratitude, the civile bond of Companyes, Colledges, and Politike bodies, of neighbourhood, and all other proportionate duties: not as they ar parts of Government and Society, but as to the framing of the minde of particular persons.”49 Here Bacon is not claiming that the individual or the family mirrors the state, or that the individual is simply a building block of society. Instead we can read him as making an argument that the ways that individuals are composed will affect the ways the state is composed in some way that combines these two possible positions—­ neither individuals nor a state, nor any of the multiple communities in between these two levels are inevitably formed. He offers a psychological mechanism to determine the relationship of the individual and society. The composition of individual rhetorical events and productions could affect the larger discursive spheres, even if the events and productions are not of the landmark variety.

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Chapter 2 •

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E

lizabethan poets and writers seem to have suffered no little anxiety about their own status as writers and the status of the English language itself.1 Latin was the language of formal education and thus a requirement for statecraft, and it functioned as the vehicle for culture and knowledge. As such a good bit of justification was required to argue that writing in English had social value. These justifications often looked to the national, monumental scale even as they lamented the reputation of writing in the nation, a conundrum summed up in two of celebrated courtier Sir Philip Sidney’s complaints. In his Defense of Poesy, Sidney wondered “why England, the mother of excellent minds, should be grown so hard a stepmother to poets,” echoing a long-­standing humanist and poetic concern about the fitness of the English language for artistic and intellectual achievements. And yet the need for such language was so very urgent because of the imaginative powers it promised: “Nature never set foorth the earth in so rich Tapistry as diverse Poets have done . . . her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden.”2 Sidney and his cohort were concerned with an English of the imagination, a contrast to nature and, by extension, to English in its prosaic, everyday use. Across time and space, the Latin language had proven itself able to deliver such golden worlds not only through poetry but also through all the arts. The anxiety of gentleman writers like Sidney was that English might not deliver the same power to its readers, that English was simply not sophisticated enough a medium to deliver the kind of society required of a godly nation. Accounts of progresses, pageants, and masques put on for the Queen were meant to serve as evidence in this argument for the legitimacy of English, but the immediate goal of the argument was to impress the Queen as a maneuver for privilege and advancement. George Gascoigne, who 

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wrote one of the earliest analyses of the possibilities of English achievement in poetry, produced the Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth, an account of the elaborate pageants offered during the Queen’s progress to the Earl of Leicester’s estate in 1575. Like his other works, Gascoigne’s account functioned as a part of a larger pattern of attempting to impress the monarch through the performance of English language art. Indeed, the closing event in this account has the poet himself running desperately (and presumably breathlesssly) alongside the Queen, reciting elaborate English verses as she departs homeward from Kenilworth. These poets and writers were not envisioning an English nation in the modern sense of imagining a nation. Benedict Anderson has described the modern nation as an “imagined community” marked by distinguishing conditions: it is articulated in a vernacular language and defined by borders, rather than by a central point, such as a court. The modern nation is a conceptual community imagined in terms of shared culture, space, and language rather than by allegiance to a centralized, dynastic monarchy. The imagining itself does not make the community modern. What makes it modern is that those who ruled had been using multiple languages to do so, but slowly the shared language of daily use, made uniform through an economy of scale that was based in print technology, became the medium through which individuals imagined themselves part of a nation. Whatever the differences between them, however, for rulers and those they rule the problem is the same: How are different smaller communities bound together toward shared identity and purposes? How does one articulate and promote one’s individual interests without disrupting that community, and thus violating its rules? Language has always allowed such a community to imagine itself as connected across time and space, but print (and later media) changed the potential scale and quality of the largest collection of people who identified themselves as belonging to a specific group. The other aspects of Anderson’s definition have to do with imagining a nation defined by borders, rather than by a central point, and as a community held together by shared space and language rather than by allegiance to a centralized, dynastic monarchy. In this latter sense, such a community was unimaginable—­or at least inexpressible—­for poets whose livelihoods 34

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depended on just such a central dynasty. But a community bound by a shared language and conceived of as distributed across England’s many counties, rather than only in relation to the central point of Westminster, was exactly what the gentry were imagining for themselves. These poets were thus not imagining a nation; they were imagining a language and through that imagining a class.

If My Brother Knyvett Is a Knight

Like Sidney and Gascoigne, though less successful (or, at least, less well remembered), Thomas Churchyard and Bernard Garter were both poets, both servants to the Crown, and both, in their own ways, engaged in imagining new capabilities for the English language. Both produced complementary accounts of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Norwich in 1578: Garter’s The Ioyfull Receyuing of the Queenes Most Excellent Maiestie into Hir Highnesse Citie of Norvvich, and Churchyard’s A Discourse of the Queenes Maiesties Entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk. “Rushed to the press,” the two texts are easily understood as bids for patronage, using the English language as a means of celebrating the English monarchy in hopes of advancement.3 But whether consciously as part of those strategies or unconsciously responding to larger cultural forces, the texts in fact ended up producing an alternative understanding of how the English language might work, an understanding that was not centered on the monarchy but on the local gentry and their own unique comprehensions of, needs for, and approaches to the language. These gentry then recognized each other through their use of language as belonging to the same group in a nation bound together by shared language and defined through a shared border. In this way their texts are not literary texts, but literacy texts. Religious leaders and educators in early modern England made repeated claims about the importance of literacy for individuals, and the perils of not being literate.4 Protestant clergy, serving in a religion in which by law the monarch was head of the Church, preached that being able to read the Bible in English was essential to salvation and a good religious life.5 Prior to this vulgarization of scripture and liturgy, early modern humanist scholars had developed multiple comprehensive methods for understanding the

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Greek and especially the Latin languages in their original social and material contexts. Now, as writers and poets developed programs to elevate English to the same level of literate esteem as Latin and Greek, they did so in part through this same method of focusing on context, and they followed the classical models and theories or their conceptions of them, in imagining that context. Practically, popularizers in both religion and education worked to formalize systems of training in English reading and writing for everyday use in trade and agriculture, while courtesy handbooks and rhetorical manuals in English served a similar function for those of loftier ambition. Vernacular rhetorical manuals emanated from a humanist curriculum that was developed under the auspices of the court first through the universities and then the grammar schools, even if such a curriculum was originally conceived of in Latin. But their audience, and thus the force that shaped their market, was the gentry. For the gentry as a group, literacy served as one of a number of material markers that indicated gentle status, which was as much a matter of interpretation and community consensus as it was any formal or legal certification. As far as the term “literacy” itself was used in the period, however, it referred to a level of scholarship, the ability to read and write in Latin and Greek. As a marker of gentle status, such a determination would endure well into the next several centuries.6 But, like a seat in parliament, or the honor of being made a knight, or any number of furnishings or material possessions, not everyone who would consider themselves or would be considered gentle would necessarily possess this particular literacy. This is obviously the case not only for gentry women, who were excluded from institutional sites of education, but also for many men whose education was, it seems, incomplete. Garter’s dedicatory letter strongly suggests that he intended his text for a gentle audience, but practically it could teach anyone about what it meant to be in the gentry and what it meant to practice courtesy; Churchyard’s introductory matter to his own work suggests the same. These texts are themselves very much about processes of writing and of reading, so they are not so much manuals about general conduct, but rather about the requirements for reading and writing in English in a way that marked one out—­or could mark one out—­as being gentle. 36

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The final page of Churchyard’s text lists the various gentlemen who were knighted during Elizabeth’s progress. These included Sir Thomas Knyvett and Sir Bassingbone Gawdy, father and uncle to Mary Holland, who wrote twenty years later about the knighting of her brother Knyvett and cousin Gawdy, children of the same gentlemen knighted on Elizabeth’s progress. In an undated letter from the late sixteenth century, Mary Holland wrote to her mother, Muriel Knyvett, to ask “if my Brother Knyvett is a knight,” adding that “if it be so the Lord give him much joy of it.” Congratulatory in wishing the best for her brother on this notable occasion of advancement, the letter goes on to suggest that such advancement might be a mixed blessing: “But good Madam, how doe my sister take it? She hath been heretofore very loath that it should be so, and I asked her reasons why, and she said that she knew it would be a means to cleave him to greater expenses than he should need bear as he was.”7 In other words, while there is some honor in the elevation, the added expenses, at least as far as his wife was concerned, did not seem to make the change in degree worth it. Holland here has to negotiate her brother’s presumed excitement over the honor alongside what she knows to be her sister’s at-­best-­mixed feelings about the honor, which would impact their household negatively, and she has to do this in such a way to her audience—­her and her brother’s mother—­as to demonstrate her understanding of both positions (see fig. 2). The complications multiply as Holland discusses her cousin Clippesby Gawdy’s knighting: “We heard that Mr. Clippesby Gawdy was knighted also and then we heard he was not, so it was conjectured that he stayed till his brother of Norwich should go up and so to have it together in order, but if it be so every man sayeth that he is worthy to go without it.”8 In this point Holland suggests multiple tensions at work in the process of being elevated. While for Knyvett the concern has to do with the added expense, in Gawdy’s case there is the additional consideration or possibility that he wanted his knighting to occur in a particular way. Whatever the honor he wanted a certain say in how it occurred. The opinion of and standing within the community at large factor in as well, and in being seen as “worthy to go without it” Gawdy is seen as having a status that, in some sense, operates

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independently of the formal honor itself, perhaps because of his consideration for his brother, or perhaps on his own virtue, or both. In reporting on these two different approaches to the question of knighthood, Holland contributes to the construction and maintenance of the attitudes and social status of both her brother and her cousin, adding on to and forwarding the reputations formed by both “every man” in regard to Gawdy, and her sister-­in-­law in regard to Knyvett. The circulation of news, which is a recurring feature of correspondence among families, does more than simply pass along information: it reinforces the attitudes and bonds that help build social reality. These bonds are verbal, and they operate through a literacy that understands how to negotiate various interests in a seemingly simple enough transmission of news, which, as Holland does not seem to know with any certainty that the news she reports is true, is more accurately a transmission of attitudes. The way these attitudes are transmitted is rhetorically interesting. In the case of Knyvett, the happiness that “the Lord” might give Knyvett is set in contrast to the concerns of his wife; in Gawdy’s case the honor of the knighting is set in contrast to the honor Gawdy already enjoys in his community. Such contrasts keep the exchange focused on the local community rather than on a transcendent or courtly honor. The language exchange, then, not the content of the news, helped to build communal bonds, and in knowing how to make these exchanges Holland practiced one kind of literacy among the gentry of late sixteenth-­century England. Unlike the authors Churchyard and Garter, Holland and her family had little anxiety over their place in the gentry. Her family’s place was so well assured that even the honorific of “knight” is of only very mixed value, the costs, she suggested in her letter, not being worth the benefit. In it Holland relies on her family’s long-­standing reputation in the county; she is less concerned with her family’s status on a national scale or at court. Churchyard and Garter’s texts, however, work to place these locally developed styles into a national context. The starting point for each is that the quality of gentility in Norfolk ought to serve as an example for the rest of the country. This gentility would have interested readers across the country, not just readers at court. Written in English, with Latin orations translated into and 38

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framed by English, Garter’s and Churchyard’s volumes offer a way outside the confines, control, or concerns of the court for the gentry across the nation, and those interested in the gentry, to be bound together through their English reading and, by extension, their English writing.

Literacies Old and New

In the most literal sense, the sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century Norfolk gentry were among the most literate members of English society. Taking as his measure the ability to sign one’s name (as opposed to making a mark) David Cressy has found that around 98 percent of the male members of the gentry in the Diocese of Norwich were literate, which puts that county on a par with counties in the prosperous south of England.9 For the yeomanry, the social group just beneath the gentry, this figure falls to around 65 percent, while for tradesmen and craftsmen it was 55 percent. Anywhere from 10 to 20 percent of the members of the lowest classes were literate, and about 10 percent of women in all classes were. These statistics make clear that the gentry as a class was highly literate and also illustrate the discrepancy between the gentry and the classes below it; at the same time, they indicate that literacy was not essential for social and economic advancement, nor did it create such advancement. While 440 members of the gentry were literate, there were still 9 people in Cressy’s study who identified as gentle but who were unable to sign their names, while 614 yeomen were literate, meaning that there were over 150 more literate members of the yeomanry than of the gentry. There were also over 1,000 literate tradesmen and craftsmen in the county, meaning that there were nearly four times as many literate people outside the gentry as within. A lack of even basic literacy did not exclude one from the gentry, while possessing it did not mean that a person would identify or be identified as gentle. Literacy had many uses and advantages, of course, and as such was certainly valued. However, possessing it was not essential to social standing, as the presence of nine illiterate members of the Norfolk gentry suggests, nor did lacking literacy carry any particular stigma. As Cressy explains, “It is difficult to discover anyone who actually felt shamed by his inability to write or who feared damage to his reputation or frustration of his designs.”10

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Nevertheless, religious leaders and educators in early modern England made repeated claims about the importance of literacy for individuals, and the perils of not being literate.11 Against a background of widespread ambivalence toward vernacular literacy, a variety of texts began to be published to teach writing in English at a variety of levels, from basic penmanship to advanced rhetorical practice, promoting the practical value of literacy for business, religious, and social life. The absence of the term “literacy” itself in the period suggests that the skill set we would today call “literacy” was understood in a much different way than in the current concept. In one view literacy functions to liberate meaning from context, a phenomenon David Olson has called the “autonomous text.”12 In speech or utterance, meaning is extrinsic, or dependent on the specific context, so that both situation and the behavior of the speaker contribute to meaning. In texts, meaning is intrinsic to language, so that the language itself carries all the meaning of its message. Such a distinction is posited as being evolutionary, so that language develops in society from an utterance-­to a text-­based model, leading to the idea promoted by Olson, as well as Walter Ong and Jack Goody, that literacy “restructures thought.”13 Other scholars have challenged this conception, arguing that the distinction between text and context is problematic, if not impossible, because it assumes that there can be such a thing as a context that is separate from language (while larger claims are problematic due to additional research by scholars from anthropology, literacy, literature, and rhetoric). Whether face-­to-­face in oral exchange or across time and space through literate exchange, language users create the contexts that give language its meaning. Literacy is dependent on context because context is determined by language, as Deborah Brandt explains: “All language use proceeds from a broad sense of ‘what is going on here’ . . . to use and understand language requires knowing how to accomplish language and its setting simultaneously, knowing how to use language not merely to share meaning with others, but also to constitute the conditions necessary for meaning to be shared.”14 Literacy and meaning-­making thus draw on a sense of process, on an active creation of meaning between individuals working together (even across time and space) as well as a sense that in working together 40

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they are also creating a “here,” an actual space, material and social, in which that meaning gets made. The creation of this shared social world necessarily entails a shared material world, and so the technologies of literacy skills involve not only the ways that the text interacts with its social world but also the way it manages its material context. As Laura R. Micciche argues, summing up a decade’s work in composition and rhetoric, writing is a “codependent interaction with a whole host of others—­materials, power grids, people, animals, rituals, feelings, stuff, and much else.”15 From the perspective of a literacy of involvement, writers and readers necessarily must create the space of meaning in light of both the social and material worlds. The decisions a writer makes about shared experiences are decisions about what the reader understands and experiences within the physical as much as the social world. Description of the physical world in a narrative, for instance, creates the space of that narrative, and it does so with some understanding of what a reader does or does not understand about the space in question. Instructional or analytic texts describe material in ways that directly change how the reader understands those materials. These functions overlap as well, so that in analyzing a material substance a writer may need to draw a picture of it for their reader, and, in imagining a physical space or material world, the writer may also change how the reader understands their own material world.16 This writer-­reader presence depends on a shared understanding of the material world, and the values to be understood as being expressed through the confluence of the material, social, and textual worlds. Churchyard’s and Garter’s texts suggest that this material, contextual literacy is necessary to the building of a shared identity in the same way that Anderson’s vernacular literacy is necessary for nation-­building. The gentry in this period were actively shaping an identity for themselves, somewhere between the classes below them and the nobility—­who were a legally defined and established group—­that would go on to provide the elements of style and taste that would shape what being gentle would mean for them and for the future, and that would have real force in the social, economic, and political worlds. The ability to create such an identity, to create a group boundary, was significant because there was not much else

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to separate the gentry from those classes below them. As Gordon Batho has argued, membership in the gentry was not inherently guaranteed in any way: It was not gentility of birth nor degree of wealth which distinguished the classes. Many of the younger sons of the lesser gentry became yeomen; many gentry were newly risen from the yeomanry or, with the aid of business or professional profits, from humbler origins still. . . . The principal characteristic of the yeoman was his contentment with a simple way of life, even when he could afford more comfort; he was, in Fuller’s phrase, “a gentleman in ore,” and could live without the expenses of a gentleman. Even in the prosperous south-­east, yeoman houses remained until late in the sixteenth century distinguished from lesser men’s primarily by the number of rooms rather than by the quality of their furnishings.17 Literacy was one essential element of this group identity, not only because it served as a marker of resources but also because texts interact with the other material goods and ways of using those goods that marked out the difference between the gentry and the yeomanry. Texts would have served as one way that the gentry would know what quality of material goods such as furnishings would connect them to other members of their own group. As Alison Truelove has argued about an earlier period, “The late medieval gentry put their increasingly sophisticated literacy to use for the purpose of strengthening their group identity.”18 Literacy functioned in this way primarily by virtue of the gentry possessing the resources to become literate, if they chose, rather than in any particular conception or function of literacy. Truelove explains that “what distinguished members of this group from those below them on the social scale, and aligned them with the nobility, is that the means of acquiring literacy skills were more readily available to them; whether or not they chose to acquire them was a matter of personal circumstance, need or desire.”19 Literacy in this understanding functioned as a means test, proof that one belonged in a class because they could, at least potentially, afford to be literate. But they also used literacy to actually shape the world they inhabited, so that they created a “here and now” in which the gentry possessed a certain position, status, and privileges. 42

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The material world can be organized to send out signals and signs, but language processes most frequently help us understand how to read those signs. People read and write differently in different spaces, and they read the signs of those spaces, which tells them different things about their value as individuals and as group members in relation to other individuals and groups. The space that writers and readers build together is both material and social, and the ways the material and social are shaped determine identities that then reflect back on the interaction of text, context, individuals, and groups. What we see in the gentry literacy presented in the accounts of Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Norwich is an attempt on the part of two aspiring members of the gentry to create a reading and writing process that could shape the identity of themselves, of the Norfolk gentry, of the gentry more broadly, and of those who aspired to the gentry. “Gentry literacy” is a figure used to describe the gentry’s attempts to employ language to control the mediation of social and material space that would give them their own identity; this would provide the lexicon and syntax out of which a gentry rhetoric—­and, indeed, the gentry itself—­would be built.

Churchyard: Writing like the Gentry

At the heart of Churchyard’s A Discourse of the Queenes Maiesties Entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk are four entertainments written by Churchyard and presented to the Queen in Norwich. Also referred to as devices or masques or pageants in the text, these are essentially short dramatic verses in which characters engage in dialogue before the Queen, present set speeches to the Queen, or both.20 These entertainments, however, take up less than half of the text, with the remainder made up largely of what, were it not for their sheer abundance, might be called “paratexts.” This includes the prefatory material that introduces the volume itself, as well as secondhand accounts of the Queen’s journey before and after her visit to Norwich. But each entertainment written by Churchyard also has its own heavy paratextual apparatus, preceded by a detailed prose description of the difficulties the author had producing the entertainment; the materials involved in providing costumes, properties, and staging; a description of what happens in the entertainment, including characters and plot; an explanation of how

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the entertainment was received by the Queen; and even an interpretation for the reader. Churchyard’s emphasis on how things were composed, presented, and produced creates a “literacy of involvement,” a term coined by Deborah Brandt to describe the constant array of operations in any text that signals a relationship between reader and writer, a sense that both are involved in a joint project that depends very much on a variety of shared understandings, meanings, and contexts.21 Keeping reader and writer on the same contextual page requires significant labor. Churchyard never lets his reader lose sight of the processes by which this text came into existence, or of the context necessary to properly interpret it. Churchyard dedicates his text to Gilbert Gerrard, the Queen’s attorney general, who was also a justice of the peace in Norfolk and Suffolk and who emerged from a well-­established gentry family in a different part of the country.22 The text is offered as a “recreation” amid Gerrard’s “grave studies, and weighty affaires,” because Churchyard knows that “no one thing is more welcome to a worthy wit, than the understanding of matter wherein the duty of good subjects is expressed and the greatness of good minds is made manifest” (a2).23 But while Gerard is seated in London and close to the court as attorney general, the expressions of duty and good minds is pointed and produced elsewhere. The gentry of Norfolk have, Churchyard explains on the next page, “surmounted in greatness and goodness any five shires in England for hospitality, bravery, and frank dealing” (a2v). Churchyard says he is obliged to “use my pen to their great glory,” so that “every other shire where the Queen hath not been, will rather strive to follow this lantern” (a3). Churchyard’s narrative functions as a textbook by which the gentle classes across England can achieve the same quality of expression as their compeers in Norfolk. This textbook will remake the normal boundaries of expression, which have been heretofore centered on the court and, by extension, the Queen. Following the dedicatory letter to Gerrard is an epistle “To the Reader.”24 Here it becomes clear that the people of Norfolk are not only better at gentle, courteous expression than those in other shires and counties, but they are better than the people at court. In the letter Churchyard promises a text that will delight and instruct.25 Delight will come from the readers’ shared 44

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national connection with the individuals who people the text: “Greater delight can not be presented, than heere to shew thee the good disposition of some people, bred up and nourished out of the bowels of thine own nation” (b1). The bond of expression here is horizontal, national, rather than like the vertical hierarchy of magnates and monarchs. Instruction is promised through the example these people provide: “And albeit it seemeth strange, that people nurtured farre from Courte, shoulde use muche courtesie, yet will I proove by the humblenesse of the common people, where lately the Prince hath passed, that if in a manner all civilitie were utterly decayed, it might have bin found freshly florishing in many of those parties and places specifyed before” (b1). Courtesy is exemplified, and through that example the reader will learn. The example comes from an unexpected source, however, so that the best instruction in how to express courtesy is in fact to be had not at the court, but in Norfolk. The behavior and practices of Norfolk and Suffolk produce a “new kind of reverence,” which “makes the old haughtiness and stiff-­necked behavior of some places to blush, and become odious” (b1v). This odiousness increases the closer one gets to court proper, where in “soils that the Prince generally keepeth her residence . . . proud people will pass by many of the nobility without moving either cap or knee” (b1v). The reason for such behavior has to do with literal distance, “fostered on the long familiarity with the noble men’s servants and daily view of their masters, with which sight they are so cloyed and wearied that their duty is forgotten” (b2). In Norfolk and Suffolk, the directing classes—­the gentry—­are able to produce an ideal expression of social order. The nobility, who believe themselves at the center of power, are unable to produce or evoke such expression; indeed, their constant presence makes such an order impossible. While reverence toward the prince and the nobility still serves as a marker of good and productive order, it is not something that the nobility itself is capable of producing, and the closer one gets to the centers of power, the less likely one is to find this kind of good order. Having set out his plan to describe a new kind of expression emerging out of a new location, the text goes on to describe the elements of this expression. As an introduction to his narration of the presentations he

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himself composed, Churchyard first explains how the locals welcomed the Queen. This brief description emphasizes the gentry’s ability to marshal material resources and direct them in such a way as to represent their attitudes, emotions, and other inward states, as well as their own social status. Churchyard explains, “Albeit they had but small warning certainly to build upon of the Queen’s coming into both those shires, the Gentlemen had made such ready provision that all the velvets and silks were taken up that might be laid hand on and bought for any money, and soon converted to such garments and suits of robes that the show thereof might have beautified the greatest triumph that was in England these many years” (b3). The elements of time (and its shortness) and material (and its lavishness) are foregrounded. The “small warning” that the gentlemen of the two shires received serves as an apology, an explanation, if the entertainment itself should found too modest. As the sentence progresses, it becomes clear, however, that this apology also serves as a praise of the ingenuity and resources of the gentlemen. Careful planning ensured that the resources necessary for a magnificent display were available—­at a whim. As a result, once the time arrived, the leading citizens were then able to manage the material so that it could welcome the Queen, not just appropriately, but exceptionally so. In the process these citizens signal their abilities, capacities, and, most important, status as gentlemen.26 The book is divided into days, Monday through Friday, each day’s entertainment given a heading accordingly (e.g., “Mondayes device”). Circumstances dictated, however, that Churchyard was not able to successfully present an entertainment on each day, so that Wednesday and Thursday simply describe the circumstances that led to the failure to put on a show, with the entertainment that was supposed to have been presented the following Thursday. The reader, however, sees little effort to make the masques or plays or devices stand alone as autonomous texts. To reiterate, each day’s device is preceded by a description of the difficulties the author had producing the device; the materials involved in providing costumes, properties, and staging for each device; a description of what happens in the device, including characters and plot; an explanation of how the device

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was received by the Queen; and even an interpretation of the device for the reader. Rather than emerging autonomously into the world and transmitting its meaning free of context, Churchyard’s text confronts its reader with geographical, material, and even explicitly interpretive context presented as essential to understanding the text itself.27 In “Mondayes Device,” Mercury rides a coach up to the Queen’s lodging to welcome her and to promise a week’s worth of exciting entertainments in a speech that describes Jehova summoning various mythological and mystical figures and creatures to pay reverence to the Queen and her court. In form, message, and style, the verse is conventional, but it also represents the kind of verse the educated were supposed to be able to produce and appreciate: rhymed iambic pentameter quatrains filled with mythological references to generic “spirits,” pastoral figures such as nymphs and satyrs, and spirits emerging from hell and the souls of men emerging from heaven, all under the control of a clearly Christian God, all come out to wait on the Queen. A poetic and fanciful construction, the speech serves as a preamble to the other entertainments in the Discourse. Jehova informs Mercury to in turn inform the Queen “that I appoynte by mans device and arte / That every day she shall see sundrie shoes [shows]” (c3v). The speech establishes itself as a justification for the week’s entertainments and the text as a whole. Meanwhile, Mercurie watches as the people of Norwich put together pageants, so that the material assemblages become part of the very presentations they are meant to produce. Looking down from heaven, awaiting the arrival of the Queen, Mercurie watches as a swarme of people every way, Like little ants, about the fields gan run, some to provide for pomp and triumph great, Some for good fare, yea household cates and meate, And some they ran to seeke where Poets dwell, To penne foorth shewes, and paint out trifles well, Some halde and puld to bring the carredge in, Some ranne to gaze on triumph neere at hand, And some stoode mute, as they amazde had bin. (c3)



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Thematically, in the context of the poem, the lines emphasize the idea that the earthly order corresponds to a divine order, both of which are working to celebrate the arrival of the Queen. Like other tropes in the devices to come, this one works off the idea that Elizabeth has been brought to the throne by Providence in order to deliver a godly, Protestant nation. But the lines also emphasize the labor and coordination that go into creating such a pageant that will welcome and deliver such a message. The verses underscore their own creation and the creation of the rest of the work. The verses also emphasize the material and labor required in the production of such a work, as “cates and meate” are gathered, poets do their work with “pennes” and “shewes” and “paint” and “trifles,” and even a “carredge” is dragged out. The reference to the carriage is one of the obvious ways that Mercury’s speech—­itself a context for another text—­depends in turn on its own contextualization: the three pages of the verse preamble are themselves presented within two pages of prose that describe in precise detail the setting and staging of Mercury’s speech. This contextualization begins with the device’s title (the only title given to a device in the text), which draws attention first not to Mercury’s speech but to the coach in which he arrived: The manner of Mercuries Coatche and message to the Queen, requesting hir Highnesse to come abroade, and see what pastyme the Gods had provided for a noble Prince (c2) The very first sentence of the description continues this theme: “The Coatch that Mercurie came in to the Queene, was closely kept in secret a long season” (c2). It is intended to be a wonder, replete with trumpeters and with the horses and coach fitted with wings and driven so fast that they and it “seemed to fly.” This attracts such a crowd as it passes through the streets toward the Queen’s lodging that by the time the coach arrives where Mercurie is to jump out and deliver his speech, there has formed “such flockes and multitudes . . . that scarce in a great greene (where the 48

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Preaching place is) might be founde roome for any more people” (c2). For the crowds the coach is a source of wonder, due in part to the modifications and execution of its function, all designed by Churchyard. It is presented here to the reader not only as an important detail but also one that they should understand, and that both draws the people and is fit novelty for a queen; the material element serves as a meeting point of sensibilities, the royal and the common. Churchyard’s reader should be able to understand both the appeal of the contraption and its function. Like velvets, silks, and gold cloths, the coach serves as an element of conspicuous consumption for a class attempting to define itself through material signs.28 In his Discourse, however, Churchyard’s drive to establish himself as a writer means he is not content to explain how the gentry use goods and objects to express new kinds of sentiment or group identity. These goods and objects affect the way that writing itself works, and the remainder of Churchyard’s text shows how his writing processes adapt and respond to this new kind of material. In the very first sentence of his introductory prose to “Tuesdayes Device,” Churchyard draws attention to the material conditions under which he produced the show itself. “Although I was not,” he explains, “well provided of things necessary for a Shewe (by means of some crossing causes in the Citie) yet hearing the Queene roade abroade, determined as I might (and yet by helpe of friendes and happe) to venter the hazzard of a Shewe” (c4v). Everything here is contingency: Churchyard lacks the materials he needs to compose a show properly; he is dependent on others’ abilities to marshal “thinges”; and any show that might be put on is articulated not in terms of artistic or aesthetic achievement but in terms of material risk undertaken. Even if by such description Churchyard intends to present his ability as a writer to overcome such obstacles, the effect is that Churchyard’s writing itself is dependent not on his own ideas or abilities but on a host of external, contextual factors. His dependence on such external circumstances does not mean that Churchyard intends to allow the understanding of his intention or the interpretation of his text to be completely in the reader’s hands. But he does understand that his text depends on an audience. Gathering together his “Boyes and Men, with al their furnitures,” and “two Coatches, hansomely

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trimmed,” Churchyard sets out to where he hopes to put on his show. He is followed by an increasingly large crowd, so that “there was as great a trayne and preace about the shewe, as came with the Courte at that instant, which graced much the matter, and gave it some expected hope of good successe” (c4v). The train and press of the commons serve to give the show its life, to “grace the matter” and offer the hope for success. These commons in turn represent or mirror the reading audience for whom Churchyard now in this text recreates the scene in their own imagination—­they, too, give life through that imagination to the scene and to its attendant good fortune. So Churchyard explains that he has described the show in its appearance (“set downe the whole manner of the shewe”) as well as in its dialogue (“every parte as they were played”), addressing the audience directly in describing his goal: “For that you shall (and please you) imagine you see the thing” (c4v). In this way Churchyard guides the reading in terms of its symbolic content and its material appearance, so that his readers can imagine, visualize, and interpret the setting and the context of his text. Churchyard then goes on to give a lengthy prose description of the play, which takes up nearly three of the ten-­and-­a-­half pages given over to Tuesday’s device and describes Cupid’s flight from Heaven, his exposure as a false god in a Christian cosmology, and his descent into dissolution alongside the allegorical figures of Wantonness and Ryot.29 Cupid and Venus run into the Philosopher, with whom they fall into dispute. Cupid runs away to court, where he addresses the Queen, who does nothing for him. He then wanders in the world, where he next meets Chastity “and hir maydes,” Modesty, Temperance, Good Exercise, and Shamefastness, who pull Cupid from his coach and abuse him: they “threwe him out of his golden seate, trode on hys pompe, spoyled him of his counterfeyte Godhead and cloke, and tooke away his bowe and his quiver of arrowes” (d1). The coach, already established in Monday’s device as a site of significance, here again anchors the way that status is symbolized through goods. Cupid is reduced from deity to shadow by the way his possessions, trappings, and goods are treated; coachjacked by Chastity’s gang, even his godhead is reduced to a mere thing, and one on par with arrows, a bow, and a cloak. 50

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These things and objects do not stand on their own accord as significant, however, and Churchyard explicitly guides the interpretation of his presentations. “Before you read the partes,” he tells his reader in closing his introduction to the device, “you must thoroughly note what my discourse thereof hath bin, and carrying that care and goodwill with you, the matter shall seem to have the better life, and I shall thinke my labour and studie well bestowed” (d1v). The discourse is fully immersed in the processes of reading and writing, and Churchyard draws attention to the fact that both of these activities (his own in particular!) require labor and study and effort, that there is possibility for misunderstanding, that the matter could potentially not be successfully brought to life. In short, there is no chance that his text can stand autonomously but requires active involvement between reader and writer. While the prose introduction to Tuesday’s device is an obvious place for Churchyard to discuss processes of interpretation, even the verses of the device itself are concerned with process and with making sure that readers can follow the ways that material objects illuminate social structures through language. Leaving nothing to chance, Churchyard writes so that the verses pick up on already established significant elements, texts, clothing, and coaches. Having been beaten down by Chastity and degraded by Ryot and Wantonness, the Philosopher again upbraids him, asking him to show a sign that he is indeed a god. Cupid argues that books and writers have established him as such, but the Philosopher counters that plenty of other books decry him; interpretation of texts is never straightforward. What Cupid is instead is a site of misinterpretation, not a man or god or even a monster, but a kind of shade as can no substance shoe begot by braynlesse blind delight, and nurst with natures foe Fed up with faithlesse foode, and trayned in trifling toyes Awakt with vice, and lulled asleepe agayne with irksome joys. (D4) Imagination and fancy without the grounding of material form produces meaninglessness and misinterpretation, leading even to blasphemy, and certainly into error and sin.

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Material forms provide the means by which understanding can be transmitted. Having been further beaten down now by the aged Philosopher, Cupid returns to his pals Ryot and Wantonnesse, who are likewise pitched into despair, which Wantonnesse indicates by reference to the coach, now transformed from a vehicle to express the vice of Cupid to one that translates the virtue Chastity. Chastity’s triumph, according to Wantonnesse, is signified when she “did mount to Starrie Skye / With such a Coatch, and such a noble spoyle / As seldome hath in Heaven oft bin seene” (d4v). While the coach provides the material proof of Chastity’s ascendancy, the dissolute trio’s defeat has been assured through their own lack of understanding of the importance of texts. Had they only “bin beaten” earlier, and thus learned to apply themselves to texts “And lovd our Bookes, and truely plyd our Scholes / We had bin learnd, yea livd, and felt no lacke / Where now our welth is all upon our back” (d4v). The ability to read well holds the key to prosperity and success and even life, but the signs of those elements are not in texts but in material objects like clothing, a point that Ryot then brings home by pointing out that their “goodly weedes” are now fit only “to duance with belles a Morrice through the Streets” (d4v). Indeed, the reading of their attire is a real source of concern, lest “some do heare alledge / We are but Roages, and clappe us in the Cage” (e1). Chastity having ascended to Heaven, Modestie, riding the now heavily significant coach up to the Queen, echoes this message in her final speech. Chastity has instructed Modestie and her companions to serve as handmaids to the Queen, and Jehova has further urged them to search out the Queen’s invisible heart and speak to its value. Modestie’s speech functions through the ability to transmit meaning to the clothes and attire in which they appear, as she explains that “in fairest weedes are cleanest thoughts, & purest mindes I knowe” (e2v). Such a reliance on appearance is inspirational, and Modestie’s discourse then explains how “the comely cleane attire, doth carrie mind aloft / Makes Man thinke scorne to stoupe to Vice, and looke to Vertue oft” (e2v). As the Discourse begins with the goal of instructing its readers how intangibles like virtues and minds can be expressed, Modestie’s speech, in the rhetorical project of praising the Queen, begins with her comprehension of the language of Chastity and then 52

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explains how material objects can signify social status but also ground that social status in internal virtues. Churchyard’s dramatic production facilitates this message. The allegorical figures, themselves physical manifestations of ideas, enable language to shuttle back and forth between physical objects and immaterial ideas and qualities. The magic of a text to be read, however, is that the description of a physical object can shape that object’s significance, even if the object itself is not present. This is important because the performances Churchyard wants to describe often don’t happen. His challenge is to turn those material failures into texts that are meaningful, which he does by emphasizing the material and social outlay despite the failures. While Monday and Tuesday see successful devices, even if they are produced under less-­than-­ideal conditions, Wednesday and Thursday are thoroughly unsuccessful, as both weather and scheduling interfere with Churchyard’s plans. On Wednesday Churchyard took his company of players to wait at the Earl of Surrey’s “backdore,” whence he expected the Queen to exit to her barge. However, once there he found that there was not enough room for his show, “Manhode and Dezarte.” He and his company then assembled on barges to wait near a landing where they assumed the Queen would disembark, but she never arrived. Based on information that the Queen would be expecting to see some entertainment the next day, Thursday, Churchyard postponed the show, which he explains he “minde[s] fully and truely to treate of,” until Thursday (e3). But a sudden storm made Thursday’s show impossible, too, with Churchyard and his performers seeking shelter as best they could so that “it was a greater pastime to see us looke like drowned Rattes, than to have beheld the uttermost of the Shewes rehearsed” (e4v). The destruction of the pageant, however, provides several lessons to the reader. It serves as a reminder of the tentative conditions of planning, and the reader’s own relationship to both nature and God, two of the primary concerns of the country gentry, and it also serves as an indicator to that gentry what sort of resources they ought to be arranging to express their status: “Thus you see, a Shew in the open field is alwayes subject to the suddayne change of weather, and a number of more inconveniences than I expresse” (e4v). The loss is difficult to calculate, but it can be briefly cataloged, so that Churchyard asks “what should I say

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of that which the Citie lost by this cause, Velvets, Silkes, Tinsels, and some cloth of golde, being cut out for these purposes, and could not serve to any great effect after” (e4v). The materials had been specially expended for the use of the show, thus with an understanding that they might not serve any function after despite their value; given the condition the rain left them in, however, they could not even serve this purpose. Such materials were meant to be expended, and it was a demonstration of social standing to be able to apply them to a one-­use task. It was even further a sign of status to be able to account them a loss for even these purposes, part of the nature of being the sort of person who funds such shows to begin with. The comfort for this in Garter’s text is an expression of God’s will through vernacular expression: “Well,” Churchyard explains, “there was no more to say but an old Adage, Man doth purpose and God dothe dispose, to whose disposition and pleasure I committe the guide of greater matters” (e4v–­f). The adage is a translation of “Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit” from Thomas á Kempis’s fifteenth-­century Imitation of Christ; “adage,” however, indicates that the translation itself was common enough. Churchyard suggests that simple wisdom in simple English is enough to help even the gentry who lay out the resources take comfort in their material loss; in his response to the adage, Churchyard demonstrates the means by which one might in English dress up an English adage in more technical rhetorical devices. The repetition and change of grammatical form of “dispose” is an obvious marker, but Churchyard’s response also functions as chiasmus, so that while man proposes and God disposes, Churchyard leaves the “disposition” to God, who is also the “guide”—­that is, the one who ultimately does the proposing as well. Social status is marked not only by the material, but by attitudes toward the material, and these attitudes are expressed not in the classical languages of philosophy but in the common vernacular of everyday experience.

Garter: Reading like the Gentry

Bernard Garter’s The Joyfull Receyving of the Queenes Most Excellent Majestie into Hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich is a fifty-­three-­page book devoted entirely to the Queen’s reception in Norwich.30 Its full title indicates that it describes “the things done in the time of her abode,” the city’s “dolor” 54

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when she left, and the “divers orations” delivered to her during her visit. The text itself follows this outline, with a dedicatory epistle followed by a series of speeches given and entertainments performed. Introductory material before each speech and masque provides a context, describing both who the speakers are and the actual setting in which they gave their speeches, while notes afterward describe how the speeches and masques were received by the Queen, including describing the gifts that were given to accompany the performances; setting and movement are described as well for the masques, which are simply series of historical and mythological figures presenting set speeches to the Queen. Garter’s text is distinct from Churchyard’s in that it focuses exclusively on the Queen’s time in Norwich; it also presents work by several authors in addition to Garter. The text centers on speeches—­in his own introduction Churchyard distinguishes Garter’s text from his own on this basis. Even the more formal devices presented in Garter’s texts as playtexts are really just collections of speeches. Indeed, the focus is so strong that, even within the pageants, speakers are introduced not simply by their names, but by the fact that they are delivering orations. In one of the two pageants, Debra, Judith, Ester, and Martia (ancient Queen of England) each welcome Elizabeth in turn, in speeches introduced by phrases like “Then Spake Deborah.” Such a framing emphasizes that these are speeches, rhetorical performances, while simultaneously highlighting their status as written texts; when Deborah spoke, no one necessarily announced that Deborah was speaking, she just spoke—­it is the narrator who writes this direction in. Those speeches or devices that the Queen did not hear are given in full, and, in some cases, Garter even describes how they were delivered in writing to the Queen. The readers recognize that as much as they were orations delivered they are texts to be read, a reading process that binds the gentle readers together. The reader of Garter’s book follows the Queen as she in turn encounters and reads (or hears) these texts; the book itself thus enacts how the Queen and those around her behave in relation to a set of texts. Sometimes these are quite literally written words; other times they are spoken words in the form of orations or set speeches in devices; occasionally they are material symbols like coats of arms or images on walls or on stages. Garter shows

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the Queen encountering, interpreting, and responding to these signs in their various forms, but constantly reminds his reader that written texts dictate the shape of orations, plays, and stages. In this way Garter presents an example of what Shirley Brice Heath has termed a “literacy event,” the different approaches to literacy taken by different social groups in the immediate scene of an act of reading or writing.31 Such occasions are not universally experienced in the same ways, however; the habits, rituals, and understandings that govern such interactions are specific to specific groups, as “participants follow socially established rules for verbalizing what they know from and about the written material. Each community has rules for socially interacting and sharing knowledge in literacy events.”32 What Garter offers is an idea that the gentry is a cohesive group, bound together in the way they read; each opportunity to celebrate the Queen is also an opportunity to assert the cohesive identity of the gentry, through the way the Queen, and thus the reader, is meant to read the text. The reader follows the Queen reading the texts, and in this way the reader understands their own place as a reader participating in a specifically gentry literacy event. While the focus on speeches and on reading is a difference between the two texts, Garter’s is similar to Churchyard’s in its implication that literacy is connected to the material world. Part of how the gentle reader was meant to understand the literacy event is in how it connects to and shapes the understanding of the significance of the material objects that accompany it. The first oration in the text, the mayor’s welcoming oration to the Queen, anchors the literacy event to the relationship of material signs, meaning, and language. The oration opens with the question of interpretation, through a wish that the Queen could read the truth of her subject’s heart without external signs, so that “the bright beam of your most chaste eye . . . might penetrate the secret strait corners of our hartes,” because “then surely should you see howe great joys are dispersed there” (b1v). This assertion of how glad the inhabitants are to see her also implies the obvious, which is that she cannot in fact see into their hearts, and so she will have to understand their gladness in other ways. The signs that she will read, as directed or suggested by the mayor’s speech and performance itself, are to be “signs of honor and office, which wee received of the most 56

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mighty Prince Henry the fourth . . . then to us granted in the name of Mayor, Aldermen, and Shirifs,” whereas previously the city had been governed by Bailiffs, or agents of the Monarch (b2). In other words, the signs the mayor offers to the Queen to indicate his own great joys (and, by proxy, those of the other citizens and residents of the city) are the signs that indicate his own status and the city’s own legal status as a self-­governing body, with rights continually increased in succeeding reigns, including by Elizabeth. The signs that could show the people’s hidden joys to the Queen turn out to be the very signs that publicly assert and reaffirm their own rights and obligations within a larger legal structure. Immaterial qualities like joy have to be translated into material things like words and speeches and public displays. Because the language of formal welcome was Latin, these material translations then need to be translated again, into English. These two translations are linked. The mayor’s oration was delivered in Latin, and Garter presents the Latin text to his reader. In the sense that to be literate indicated fluency in Latin, the Queen’s hearing of the mayor’s oration indicates one kind of literacy event—­she and the other hearers who could understand establish themselves as a literate community. The Latin oration marks the occasion as a formal one, wherein the level of ceremony dictates the use of this classical language; consequently, it indicates the mayor as having the level of skill and education to deliver such an oration. At the same time, it indicates the speech as a form of entertainment on the Queen’s behalf, as she considered herself an able judge of the language, took pride in (and was celebrated for) her fluency and artistry in it, and was given to taking in Latin orations as the kind of pastime that was custom in the universities as well. The Latin text, however, is immediately followed by an English translation: “The Mayors Oration Englished.” In the simplest sense this translation renders the oration in a form accessible to those who would have trouble following or fully appreciating the Latin version, so it makes the oration (and the rest of the Latin orations, all of which are “Englished”) more widely available. Latin was the language of formal education and was certainly useful in specific legal and political applications, but it was not the everyday language of the people, not even of the gentry or aristocracy. Latin

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was formal; English was instinctive. This is made apparent in a passing moment as Garter describes an exchange of gifts after the mayor’s Latin oration. The mayor presented the Queen with a cup filled with one hundred pounds, saying “sic hunt centum libra puri auri” (b2v). Passing the cup to one of her gentlemen, the Queen said, “Looke to it, there is a hundreth pounds,” signaling that she was not confident her gentlemen would have caught the rudimentary Latin, or that her reflexive instinct was to express the thought in English, or both (b2v).33 In any case both her own formal response to the oration and this more impromptu response to the gift were made in English. The center of the ceremony was in Latin, but the process of experiencing it, commenting on it, and responding to it all took place in English. Latin fluency was not even a requirement for participation in these regards, and for Garter’s reader even less so, as this description follows the English version, so a reader could experience it as a response to that version as easily as to the Latin version. The text has been presented as something that is meant to be at the heart of a communal experience, so the change in language also changes the nature of that experience, turning it into a literacy event built not around the Queen as audience but around the gentry readers of Garter’s text as audience, who could feel themselves participants bound together in a moment. In the Queen’s thanks to the mayor for his oration and the city’s gift, Garter returns to the point from which he began the scene: the problem of how the Queen can know her subjects, and the fact that such knowledge must come from signs that can be read. Such signs rely in part on the interaction of language and material objects and arrangements. To the gift of the cup, the Queen offers an ambiguous reply, explaining that princes have no need of material gifts from their subjects, as they are well provided for. She accepts the cup and the money, therefore, as “tokens of goodwill.” Rather than money, she has come, she says, “for that which in right is our owne, the heartes and true allegeaunce of our subjects, whiche are the greatest riches of a kingdome” (b2v). Like joy, hearts and allegiance are, of course, unseeable, and so in some ways unknowable, at least through direct observation. Unlike language they cannot be heard, and unlike a cup full of money they cannot be touched or counted. So, though the Queen has come for these 58

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intangibles, they must be experienced and understood ultimately through practices of reading various texts. Once presented before an audience and wrapped up in the right exchanges of language and texts, the cup moves from being simple money, which the Queen does not need, to being a complex sign of allegiance, which she does. Hence she keeps the money.

The Dutch Minister’s Speech

The scene of the mayor’s oration sets a pattern for the rest of The Joyfull Receyving, in which a speech is given, then a gift is given, and the Queen then offers words of thanks or reply. In one lengthy masque, for instance, a series of mythological characters give orations to the Queen, submitting themselves to her with an offer of a gift; Neptune throws at her feet a particularly impressive fish. The two speeches that form the center of Garter’s text, however, diverge from the pattern of speech, gift, and thanks in ways that illuminate how material considerations functioned practically and symbolically to bind people together. More important, they suggest that language itself, rather than simply material markers, could help illuminate the boundaries of a class and of a nation. One is a speech by the schoolmaster, Stephen Limbert, the other an oration by the minister of the Dutch Church. Both present individuals who are richly learned and used to putting that learning on display. The local schoolmaster is an integral and long-­standing member of the community, so much so that he came serve as a stock character (of both mockery and praise) in the burgeoning English drama.34 The Dutch minister, however, is a foreigner, and preacher of a church that is connected to the community by its Protestantism but is otherwise alien. The Dutch minister’s speech takes place before the church and gives thanks for providing haven to the Dutch, fleeing from persecution, in such a welcoming place as Norwich. The wool pageant celebrated wool production without making any mention of the Dutch role in it; the minister’s speech presents his community as religious refugees and celebrates the Queen as a religious deliverer, but makes no mention of the economic contributions of the Dutch. But while it ignores economics, and thus the material signs associated with economics, it is quite explicit about the relationship of

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religion and oratory. The speech opens by contrasting two kinds of ancient oratorical approaches, one that would “transforme” their hearer’s minds “by eloquence,” and the other that would “set downe before their eyes the calamitie of the thing and the person they spake of.” Each is impressive in its own way, though the Dutch minister chooses to focus on the audience rather than the orators. The first kind of oratory affected audiences showing “no common facilitie” in their attentiveness and understanding, while the second “obteined great favour amongest all nations whose common weale was governed in good order, and far greater amongest the Christians.” Neither, however, compares to the greatness evidenced by Elizabeth in her own hearing and understanding. Unlike these other auditors and orators, Elizabeth’s “minde[,] obedient to Gods word, the Spirite of Christ, and zeale of Godlinesse, and not this profane kind of speech hath instructed.” Whatever her sensitivity to the orator’s eloquence, God’s word led Elizabeth through her instruction by the spirit of Christ, and it was not words that drew before her eyes things and persons, but “the calamitie of Godly men, and teares of the afflicted” that “moved [her] to defend” the persecuted Christians (d1). Elizabeth’s godliness places her in a unique position to read signs, which are not ultimately necessary for her, since she hears God’s word and sees the state of the godly as it truly is. Nevertheless, the church still presents the Queen with a silver cup as a memento, the minister explaining that “it is our humble and yet only petition to shewe unto your majestie the thankfulness of our minde: behold therefore dedicated to your most excellent majesty not any gifte but our minde” (d1v). There is a bit of a puzzle in this, of course, as the Queen can presumably already see their mind without profane speech, and the cup only complicates this. The way to work through this puzzle is to present the mind through God’s word, through an extended discussion of the biblical Joseph, to whom Elizabeth is compared in overcoming her enemies to rule in wisdom and godliness. The comparison is fitting in that Joseph was a foreigner in Egypt, though it is the Dutch, rather than the Queen, who are the foreigners in this case. But the comparison is brought home by the material object given, on which was engraved a brief history of Joseph that clarifies the comparison: 60

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To Royall scepters, godlinesse, Josephus innocent, Doth take, from brothers bloudie hands, And murtherers intent. So Thee, O Queen, the Lord hath ledd From Prison and deceit, Of thine, unto the highest toppes, Of your princely estate. (d2) The Queen is figured as one who escapes from her sibling and other perils to find herself a righteous judge and ruler. Joseph’s immigration is unstated, left for those who are familiar enough to know it, while the story of treachery and Joseph’s escape stands out. The interpretation, however, is left to the cup itself. No gift was promised but the mind, but the imaginative comparison is provided in a text written on the gift itself. Here again the cup functions as the material sign of that which is otherwise invisible. Unlike the mayor’s oration or any of the other speeches Garter presents, however, in presenting this one he makes no mention of how the Queen received either the speech of the gift, and no sense of her response—­she is simply left out of the narrative here at this juncture that is intended to show, at least through the oration, that the Queen’s godliness does not in fact depend on her reading signs, that she does in fact have infallible (or close to it) access to her subjects’ minds through her understanding of God’s (rather than her subjects’) word. Instead of showing the Queen, Garter’s entire focus, in both Latin and English versions, is on the cup itself, its value and the text engraved on it. The focus on the cup undercuts both the minister’s claim that he would show only his congregation’s mind and the possibility that Elizabeth could read that mind through God’s word as the cup moves from a simple memento to the central key to deciphering the text. It also contributes to a partial erasure of the Dutch minister as an individual; like the mayor he is given just a role, rather than a name, but without the benefit of seeing any interaction with the Queen, his words stand alone, and they and his identity itself are ultimately subsumed into the cup itself as a material key to the text delivered

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by this outsider. In translation even his role disappears. In the Latin it is noted that the cup has inscribed on it the name and role of the church in addition to the Joseph text, but this inscription is left out of the English translation—­the presentation that reaches the widest possible audience.35

Englishing Speech

Unlike in the Dutch minister’s oration, in “The Oration of Stephan Limbert, / Publike Scholemaster” Garter is quite explicit not only about the role of the speaker but even his name. As with every other oration, Limbert’s speech bemoans the impenetrability of the interior, and longs to be able to make that interior perceptible to the Queen. “And I would to God,” Limbert prays toward the end of his oration, “you coulde pearce these our breasts with your eyes, and throughly viewe the hidden and covered creekes of our mindes; then undoubtedly shoulde you beholde an infinite heape of good will closely shut up within, which cannot breake out of so narrowe straights” (d4v). The other orations have used material gifts to serve as signs suggesting the hearts and minds of their speakers and those for whom they speak. But Limbert’s address is not accompanied by any material gift whatsoever, beyond, as it becomes clear, the speech itself—­and, in Garter’s presentation, this proves to be the gift that pleases the Queen more than any other. As befits an oration by the local schoolmaster, Limbert places England in a classical lineage, and, as befits an oration before the Queen, that lineage culminates in Elizabeth. “The yearly overflowing of Nilus,” and “the golden streame of Pactolus,” Limbert begins, are accountable for the “greate fertilitie of these countries” (d3v). England, however, is blessed to have much different kinds of channels, as “over all Englande . . . rivers of godlinesse, justice, humilitie, and other innumerable good things . . . do most plentifully gush out” (d3v). Even the most precious of material things are made paltry by this flood of virtues, “in comparison of the which, golde is vile and nought worth” (d3v). And these virtuous streams pour out not from hills like “Timolus,” of course, but from Elizabeth herself. Most important of all these virtues, though, is the Queen’s “uncredible readinesse to releeve the neede of poore men,” a virtue “which of many virtues, none can be more acceptable unto God, as Homer writeth” (d4).36 62

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The occasion for noting the Queen’s charitability is tied to the actual location where Limbert delivered his speech: the local hospital for the poor. Just like Limbert’s name, this location is also specifically detailed. Before the Latin version of the speech, Garter locates the setting of the oration and the station of the orator “within Bishops Gate at the Hospitall dore, Master Stephen Limbart, master of the Grammer schoole in Norwich stoode readie to render her an Oration” (d2). A monastic entity in the medieval period, the hospital was known as the Great Hospital or St. Giles’ Hospital of Norwich. While it maintained its charter under Henry VIII even after the Reformation, under Edward VI the hospital was rechartered in light of Edward’s strong Protestantism and became formally known as “God’s House.” Where others offer mementos they themselves have provided, Limbert draws attention to how the Queen (along with her predecessors) has provided her own memento: “This hospitall of poore men is moste famous, which will be a monument of princely virtue and beneficence amongest all posteritie” (d4). While Henry and Edward deserve great praise for the hospital, this monument has become the Queen’s because the hospital had been “of late notably encreased and amplified by the landes and possessions of Cringleforde, that you may not nowe worthily rejoyce so much in others ornamentes, as your own virtues” (d4). The history behind this gift is somewhat vexed. The hospital itself was able to be augmented by Elizabeth at least in part because of a planned attack on the Dutch emigrants. George Redmond, one of the ringleaders and a local gentry, was convicted of treason and his land—­Cringleford—­was forfeit to the Crown. Once the village burned down, it was then to the Queen to dispose of it, which she did by, as Limbert notes, donating it to the hospital.37 But the Queen’s charitability has turned this vexed history into something supremely virtuous. The treasonous acts of those who rose in arms against the Strangers have been transmuted into a virtuous act that distinguishes Elizabeth. Through chartering and rechartering the already existing hospital, previous monarchs have provided signs by which they might be remembered. The Queen, however, is not to be remembered by signs, but by her own virtue, which is intrinsic; the charitable giving is a manifestation, but it is

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the virtue itself that is to be rejoiced in. It is the Queen’s gift in this case, rather than the speaker’s, through which the invisible is made visible, and in this case as well something wicked is made into something good. This level of detail is complemented by the details of the Queen’s interactions as she hears the speech. At its beginning Limbert is nervous, but he is calmed by kind words from the Queen: “Thinking him fearefull, [she] saide graciously unto him: Bee not afeard. He answered her againe in English: I thank your majestie, for your good encouragement” (d2). After the English version of the oration, Garter explains that in the midst of the oration she called to her ambassadors and lords and “willed them to harken, and she herself was very attentive, even untill the end” (e1). After the speech was ended, she told Limbert, “It is the best that ever I heard,” removed her glove for him to kiss her hand, and then, after she returned to her lodgings, sent for his name (e1). Despite the Latin, humanist qualities of the speech itself, this is a distinctly English vernacular transaction. The exchanges are given only in English, and the fact that Limbert answers the Queen in English is especially noted. Both her response after the speech and her comforting of Limbert before he gives the speech follow the English version, so that even though in the event itself the oration was experienced in Latin, for the reader the entire exchange happened in English. Limbert was a proficient classical scholar, as was Elizabeth, but most of Garter’s readers, even his ideal gentry readers, were not. For that matter neither was Garter. In his Englishing of the speech, the pagan Homer is invoked as authority for a Christian God’s understanding of Charity, a notably odd choice that makes the reading of the text at least momentarily disjointed. Classical authors are brought in twice more in the speech, and while each fits thematically with the point at hand, each invocation disrupts the prose. After describing her gift of the estates of Cringleford, Garter explains that the Queen has “studied that divine lawe of the moste wise Plato, which he left written in the eleventh booke of lawes” (d4). The text then asks “in what books shall wee comprehende” the Queen’s “great bountie,” so that the reference to Plato makes sense going forward, but has seemingly little else to do with Cringleford. Hesiod, too, makes an appearance, a quick reference to the fact that he “made mention” of 64

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England. Beyond this, however, Hesiod himself hardly seems to warrant mention in the text. The awkwardness of these allusions is explained in that, in Limbert’s speech, each author is not only referred to but quoted from in the original Greek. The awkwardness of the prose in Garter’s Englishing is thus due to a fairly prosaic cause: Garter simply didn’t know Greek and so just left the quotations from each author out of his translation from the Latin. For poets like Sidney and Spenser, the difficulties of making English fit for the rich classical tradition in which they were educated is supposed to have been the source of deep anxiety. Garter seems not to have much shared this anxiety; at any rate he was comfortable simply passing over the Greek and dropping the names of the authors in as markers of a kind of education, but not one that was essential to what he was trying to do in English for his readers. At Limbert’s oration deep classical learning was exhibited, though there is no indication that it was necessarily experienced in its depth by many at the event. For Garter’s English readers, especially those who are proficient only in English, depth of learning is not essential in any way—­only enough learning is required to recognize the names of three famous Greeks and to attach some value to those names. Like the cups and gifts given to the Queen, and like the land the Queen gives to the hospital, the meaning of such tokens rests not in the tokens themselves, but in the confluence of the English language and the English gentry who come together in literacy events where the gift—­or the allusion—­serves simply as a reminder of these larger contexts.



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Chapter 3 •

Letters and Presence

I

n their recounting of the pageants and presentations put on for the Queen’s progress through Norfolk, Thomas Churchyard and Bernard Garter described the material world as a way of communicating ideas, emotions, moods, and arguments. Both of their texts also present individual human beings imbued with consciousness and engaged in the social and material worlds. These two techniques of writing, creating a vivid description and a distinct persona, may seem to readers today to be inevitable, perhaps even natural. But, in fact, these familiar techniques are the products of a complex development in the history of writing in English, one shaped in large part by the Elizabethan gentry. Presence in the modern sense—­what has been widely referred to as “literary presence”—­is, at least in English, very much an invention of the early modern gentry as they adapted processes and technologies of writing to the daily exchange of letters that governed so much of their lives. This chapter tracks that development through the concept of “presence,” a strategy described by modern scholars of rhetoric, literature, and literacy. In practice the tactic is connected or even synonymous with a number of rhetorical techniques: for example, demonstratio, descriptio, enargeia, evidentia, illustration, and ekphrasis. Essentially, any technique that is meant to present something to the imagination in detail falls under the concept. It is also sometimes connected to strategies of personation, such as prosopopoeia, taught throughout the rhetorical curriculum, especially in the progymnasmata exercises that formed an important element of instruction. In such exercises the writer would write in the voice of an historical or literary figure (such as Dido or Caesar Augustus), and doing so would necessitate making the figure and their material surroundings imaginable for the reader. In theory, for modern rhetoric and literature in particular, presence 

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has generally been seen as a response to growth and change in the ways human beings go about communicating across time and space. There is no specific timeline for these hypothetical shifts, but, roughly speaking and taking England as an example, low levels of literacy coupled with the fact that writing was largely taught for Latin, not English, meant that messages were delivered from place to place orally. Obviously such a culture would depend on rhetorical training, with its refinements of remembering and delivering effective speech, to preserve its letters and culture. As vernacular handwriting became more widespread, and then as vernacular print emerged, the techniques of description and personation became more and more important to communication. As such, a shift to the study of writing, rather than speaking, must inevitably follow. Presence, manifested through the routine correspondence of the gentry, came to play a central role in the ways that gentry writers turned the rhetorical principles of formal education to the management of their families and households.

Gentry Letters

The techniques involved in creating presence had long been a part of the rhetorical curriculum. Heinrich Plett sees presence as a “characteristic” of both classical and humanist rhetoric, which “enables the orator not only to produce effective images, but also, as a consequence, to evoke affects, either of pleasantly moderate ethos or of intensely passionate pathos.”1 Plett cites Quintilian, that “to the extent that the orator succeeds in creating this illusion of presence, he can claim for himself the appellation . . . euphantasiotos, that is: ‘one who is exceptionally good at realistically imagining to himself things, words, and actions.’”2 The speaker wants to make something vividly present for the hearer, so that that thing takes up the recipient’s cognitive and affective space, generating ideas and emotions. In their New Rhetoric (as its name suggests, a foundational twentieth-­ century text for the modern study of rhetoric), Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-­Tyteca suggest that presence is central to the processes of argument, as it serves to bring an idea or a point to the foreground of a reader or hearer’s understanding, while ideas that the rhetor is less concerned with are allowed to fade into the background.3 While they acknowledge 68

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the ancient lineage of presence, Perelman and Olbrechts-­Tyteca trace its modern origins to Francis Bacon’s claim for rhetoric that “the present filling the imagination more, reason is commonly vanquished; but after that force of eloquence and persuasion hath made things future and remote appear as present, then upon the revolt of the imagination reason prevaileth.”4 In the New Rhetoric, this function of eloquence as a mediator between “imagination” and “reason” is precisely what distinguishes Bacon’s early modern presence from its ancient counterpart: Quintilian recognized that description produces certain effects, but Bacon provided a psychological mechanism for these. Presence, a mere feature or technique in Quintilian’s old rhetoric, is essential to the “New Rhetoric,” and this essential presence began with Francis Bacon. But the kind of presence Bacon described had already been a feature of gentry writing for some time, emerging particularly out of the gentry’s household letter-­writing practices. The letter was probably the most important and most frequently produced text in gentry writing. As Gary Schneider explains, “Letters were the material medium, tout court, of early modern sociocultural exchange and, along with face-­to-­face conversation, a critical means of pragmatic communication. Unlike today, the material letter was involved in almost every sphere of early modern life.”5 In an idealized form in the grammar schools and universities, letters were taught as a genre very close to an oration, wherein a writer sought to compose and send a message unified around a single idea or goal toward the end of instructing, delighting, or persuading a reader. As a more practical medium, letters provided a vehicle by which a letter writer could, in a single document, perform a variety of functions: catch up with family and friends, pass along messages for the recipient to deliver, give instructions for the recipient to follow, arrange financial matters, make requests for actions to be taken, tell jokes, provide news, offer recommendations, and generally arrange the affairs involved in the complex socioeconomic world of the Elizabethan gentry. Letters carried entertainment and news, provided social connections, and functioned as bills, bonds, debt notices, contracts, legal actions, and records. These manifold purposes made the letter difficult to discuss as a genre,

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and in that way a difficult practice to teach. In his letter-­writing manual, De Conscribendis Epistolis, humanist educator and exemplar Desiderius Erasmus explains that the letter is marked by its indefinability, but this indefinability presents the central problem of how to write a letter. Letters are “by nature diverse and capable of almost infinite variation . . . the varieties of subject matter are as innumerable as the worlds of Democritus, and no topic is excluded from the letter form, and if, in addition, the mode of expression must never be at variance with the nature of the subject, how, I ask you, can a single style be devised for such an infinitely varied content.”6 Erasmus’s answer to this stylistic problem is presence: “If there is something that can be said to be characteristic of this genre, I think that I cannot define it more concisely than by saying that the wording of a letter should resemble a conversation between friends. For a letter, as the comic poet Turpilius skillfully put it, is a mutual conversation between absent friends.”7 In this way Erasmus makes the physical absence of the conversationalist the defining feature of what a letter—­otherwise indefinable and unclassifiable—­is. Letters served as conversations carried on between absent friends, but outside of the spaces of scholarly and erudite expression, as suggested above, they actually made things happen in the world, and the gentry adapted techniques of presence in order to coordinate their social and material worlds. Artistic and learned communication was certainly appreciated, but it was incidental to these more practical concerns. Techniques of presence combine with techniques of form to create the possibility of imagined presence, which also creates the possibility for real presence. Exchanges of letters could lead to visits from family members, the sorts of exchanges that served as part of the fabric of life in the county and that involved material and social resources and coordination. In Mary Holland’s letter about her brother’s impending knighthood (discussed in the previous chapter), Holland combines letter-­writing conventions with description and personation to strike a balance between intimacy and logistics. The letter opens with a standard greeting—­“My humble duty remembered unto your Ladyship”—­but then moves into a more specific if not less conventional expression of sentiment: “Methinks the time is very long since I saw my Father and your good Lady although it is not yet a fortnight 70

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since our being with you.”8 In her opening Holland establishes goodwill through a reminder of presence. She was with her parents recently, but, because she misses them so, it feels longer ago than it has been. Holland is not evoking a present self for the reader out of mere convention. The evocation speaks to having been physically in her parents’ presence in the recent past and implies a certain expectation of being so again. Presence is not an illusion, but a reference to reality; it also happens to serve a perfectly conventional rhetorical function—­that of referring to the bond between writer and audience (see fig. 3). In this case the familiar convention leads into a request for company, as Holland attempts to arrange a visit. As with the formulaic opening, presence here is a very real state, even if it emerges through rhetorical conventions. I have a very earnest suit unto you, good madam, and I beseech you let me obtain it; we have now sent for my sister Paston, and my humble request is unto your Ladyship to let my Brother mun [Edmund] accompany her hither; I would also have been exceeding glad if I might have had my good sister mus [Thomas] here also but then your Ladyship should be half done for one to have been near your hand, but I hope good madam that you will let me have her again; Mr. Holland I am assured would be glad to have the journey to fetch her himself; good madam tell me if he should, or save his labor.9

Holland’s letter follows a conventional organization. She begins by introducing and laying out her reason for writing (“I have a very earnest suit unto you, good madam, and I beseech you let me obtain it”). She articulates her request, which is to have her brother visit. She also suggests that she would like her sister to visit and then anticipates an objection to her request (that her mother would then be left short-­handed at home). Finally, she presents a means to obtain her request. In each case the presence of herself, or her family, is raised, and this presence forms both the occasion and content of the letter, the writing of which functions as an emotional vehicle, logistical platform, and social tool. Holland’s letter is not revolutionary or exceptional, but that is exactly the point. An entire structure

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of such letters helped to bind together the community of the gentry (and many other communities), operating through conventions that would be recognized within and, if need be, across such independent communities. Such letters very much depended on conventions, especially of the formal request, in order to do this work of building the possibility of presence out of the discursive condition of absence.

Literary Presence

In each other’s material presences, face to face, each individual can rely on his or her senses to verify claims about at least the immediate environment, including the appearance and behavior of the other individuals present. For the Elizabethan gentry, presence was a routine feature of communication, negotiation, appeal, and argument between people who knew each other intimately and whose very real presence might manifest at any time. When one gentry member wrote to another, they did so in light of shared experiences, and with the very real likelihood that contexts would be quite literally shared in the not-­too-­distant future. A daughter or son writing to a parent might be very likely going to see that parent in the flesh in a very real space and would depend on that parent to provide very real material resources. The invention of presence served to alleviate an anxiety felt by the sixteenth-­century English letter writer that face-­to-­face communication was intrinsically more reliable than written communication. Letter writers, according to Gary Schneider, sought the illusion of physical presence because “bodily presence and immediate, oral discourse guaranteed greater epistemological certainty . . . with the body missing from epistolary communication, not only was its authorizing principle missing, but its crucial validating, substantiating, and communicative cues were lost.”10 The missing authorizing principle of the body was supplied by writing itself. In his influential “deconstructive reading” of early modern English handwriting manuals, Writing Matter, Jonathan Goldberg suggests that writing, writing instruction, and writing technologies like pen and ink create the possibility for writing itself to take the place of some older principle of epistemology and even ontology. “Logocentrism,” in which individual consciousnesses express their true selves through language, is displaced, 72

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and, “in its reversal, inside and outside change places, and the material practice of writing determines thought and language.”11 Goldberg’s ultimate aim is to make a claim about literature (his work “suggest[s] the path from letters and literacy to literature”).12 For the gentry, however, one learned one’s letters (i.e., learned to write) primarily in order to learn how to write letters (i.e., correspondence) rather than literature; instruction’s end was rhetorical. But that instructional end, and thus the curriculum itself, was also undergoing change, and modern rhetorical scholars describe that change in terms of a contrast between rhetoric and literature. From the late medieval through the early modern periods, as Lois Agnew points out, print and literacy move England from “an oratorical culture [that] is primarily oriented toward consensus” to “a literary culture tend[ing] to the view that the locus of public morality is the expert and autonomous individual.”13 This autonomous individual, as Goldberg suggests, has come into being through the reading and writing of texts, and the text that the gentry wrote and read most frequently would have been the letter. Unsurprisingly, the development of the letter also follows this literary trajectory. James Daybell has argued that as the early modern period developed, letters in general moved from “a functional or pragmatic mode of correspondence concerned almost exclusively with business” to a “greater informality of purpose” with at least the appearance of being “more open and intimate, attaining an almost literary quality”; this corresponds with the letter developing from “a means of transacting and conveying instructions” to become “a vehicle for lengthy description, narrative, and travel writing.”14 This literary quality was presence, which the gentry employed to shape their individual and communal identities and prosperities. The presence of a text suggests, somewhere, the presence of a hand that produced it. If the reader acknowledges that the hand produced the text, the reader can also acknowledge that the hand was driven by an unseeable logocentric self (spirit, mind, will) and also the technologies that produced the text. Regardless of the value one ascribes to either the self or technology, rhetorically the opposition of the two functions in the same way that the hand does for the self, suggesting and describing something other than

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itself—­in this case, an entire network of relationships of individuals and a background of material and social processes. Presence describes the way the gentry used letters to control these relationships and thus the social and material worlds. They described the material world not to achieve epistemological or empirical certainty of that world but to achieve certainty of the unseen and immaterial worlds of selves and the invisible network of social connections between them. By observing and describing the material world, the self doing the describing presents its invisible but real presence as the thing doing the describing. Actual physical presence is not necessary for this certainty (someone must have written these words down). This means that, regardless of whether they were creating or describing the experience of their subjectivity, the gentry employed a well-­developed system for managing these processes. This system drew together the resources classical education had instilled in their culture and the material and social experiences to express that subjectivity. But certain forms and certain habits of description could be used to identify a writer as both belonging to a group and demonstrating knowledge about how to write (or talk) according to the habits of that group. These forms left room, however, for one to present an individual self as well.

Letter Writing, Letter Reading

Presence was first employed to address relatively mundane material circumstances.15 There was no regular post; correspondence was sent and delivered by messenger, and few households had anyone specifically designated with such a task. Thus, a letter writer would have to keep their correspondence until such time as they found someone going where they wanted their letter to go. Multiple letters from multiple senders would often be packed up together, and one correspondent might pass along letters from another correspondent, the contents of which might or might not be known to the intermediary. Such conditions raised multiple considerations. Secure letters would require secure messengers; there was, by and large, little chance of delivery guaranteed by any specific time; the possibility of lost or missed correspondence was ever-­present; and, thus, time sensitivity became much more complicated. At the same time, when 74

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the opportunity to send a letter arose, such a letter needed often to contain multiple messages. This condition explains the mingling of greetings and subjects customary in the gentry’s letters—­the technology dictated the organization, and the idea of a single letter for a single purpose would have been a bit of a luxury, or at least would certainly have been reserved for the most important correspondence. This mingling of matter also affected the way correspondence was valued and maintained. We have many letters from the various members of the Bacon family because they kept records of them as records of the multiple business transactions required for the maintenance and development of an estate. The technology also determined concepts of what we would call “public” and “private.” In a modern post system, the intermediary or letter carrier would not necessarily be known to the sender and might not come into contact with the recipient at all. The need to know one’s messenger, however, meant that the act of sending a letter was somewhat less private, of necessity. But a similar consideration often involved even the composing of letters, as well as the physical writing of them. Writing was a complicated, somewhat cumbersome affair, requiring a quill, a knife (if not several knives) to shape the quill and prepare the paper, and a variety of other tools. To write a letter or anything else was somewhat laborious and certainly a little messy. No one was above such labor—­many daily aspects of life at the time were messy and laborious, and these reached across class and station. But many people were happy to have others write their letters for them. Some households would have a secretary expressly for this purpose, and certainly men of business and politics at the level of Sir Nicholas Bacon would have had one or more secretaries attached to his various offices. In a smaller household a tutor or governess might fill such a role, or an inclined member of the household, whether a family member or someone in service. Many of the letters we have from Sir Nicholas to his sons are copies of letters that were kept for records’ sake. Some of these might have been actually copied by Sir Nicholas or his sons, but most were probably copied out by a secretary of some sort. The duties of the secretary went well beyond simply copying already composed letters; certainly scholars believe that in many cases a sender would offer up a rough outline of a letter to a secretary (or,

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again, to be clear, someone fulfilling that role), who would then take care of the actual composition, provide the copy to the sender to read, or read the end product aloud to the sender, and then revise as necessary. The sender in such a case would limit herself or himself to signing the letter. Letters were neither entirely private nor entirely public, and the processes of composing and delivering were complex and collaborative. This was certainly not always the case—­there are many letters extant written in the same hand that signed them. But it was the case often enough to mean that such composition practices were an understood and accepted part of the processes of letter writing. This leaves aside the fact that many letters would then very likely be read aloud to or by recipients. All this sharing tends to blur the distinction between oral and literate practices altogether. Such an observation is not revolutionary for either literacy studies or early modern studies; however, it bears emphasizing here because the indistinction of public and private and literate and oral was not a theoretical but a practical reality, and one that underlay the very possibilities of communication in the period. A letter demonstrates a kind of literacy and serves as a medium for various other kinds of literacy, whether of family, business, or scholarship, formally or informally trained. The letter is a technological platform rather than a form in and of itself, and what are thought of as genres of letters, I am suggesting, can be more precisely thought of as discrete literacies that might easily be delivered within a single letter. The letter is thus roughly analogous to a computer connected to the internet—­communication through it is rarely completely private, for one thing. It also stretches understandings of literacy; we would not say that someone was internet literate, except as a sort of baseline measurement (i.e., one knows how to log into an account, how to press send). Instead, at least in contemporary education, one teaches how to use the internet for multiple purposes, and even though the platform of the direct message is similar to that of the email, each can be used for overlapping purposes, and literacy is most accurately measured in terms of effectiveness within certain purposes and discourses rather than as a measurement of a single capacity.

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Learning to Write Letters

Rhetorical instruction was traditionally focused on oral delivery and reception. Nevertheless, since Quintilian the ability to write or compose had been considered an important part of this training, a means of forming an ideal orator. In the medieval period there had been lectures in what was called the ars dictaminis: sets of formal principles for the composing of correspondence, particularly in the service of church or court. The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries saw an explosion in correspondence among political and religious leaders and centers of power and administration in Europe. The ars dictaminis evolved to meet these demands, and it was directed specifically to the uses of clerks responsible for generating and responding to correspondence for rulers of church and state. In many ways this instruction was an adaptation of rhetorical principles to written, as opposed to oral, delivery. For example, the parts of a letter that treatises present, though they vary from treatise to treatise, generally mirror the classical parts of an oration. In other ways the instruction was specific to letter writing. Most of the treatises devoted significant space to questions of the proper salutation and other moments of address for recipients of various social ranks, and many also instructed in the proper stylistic construction for the signing off of a letter, through a rhythmical construction called the “cursus.” Alongside this ars dictaminis an ars notaria developed, aimed specifically at writing letters in professional capacities. Both the ars dictaminis and ars notaria were significant for their collected examples, which would present different models for different purposes. These instructional courses and texts ranged from intricate and sophisticated treatises adapting principles of classical or medieval rhetoric to the written form to simple formularies that presented patterns to be easily adapted to a user’s needs. The old formulas of medieval letter writing, however, no longer sufficed in the early modern age, and the fading of the ars dictaminis left Renaissance humanist scholars with the responsibility and problem of adapting their pedagogy and theory to new circumstances. And, while the groundbreaking theoretical work in that project was done in Latin for Latin writers, the ubiquity of the English-­language letter created a need that



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the first English-­language writing manuals to emerge in the Elizabethan period attempted to meet. Formal education set the general pattern for what constituted good writing, but this pattern then had to be adapted to the particular needs of the gentry household. The most obvious difference between what formal education offered and what the gentry letter required was that education in grammar schools and university was focused on Latin learning, while the gentry of course did most—­and, in most cases, all—­of their writing in English. Latin was a language of elegance, while in practice English was always going to be first and foremost a language of daily transaction. Erasmus himself had little time or respect for such vernacular interests. Dismissing arguments that letters should avoid using unusual words, Erasmus suggests that a large and robust vocabulary is essential to the project of adequate expression, a point he emphasizes by reference to expression in vernacular languages. To limit oneself only to “familiar” words is “all right if one has to write in French or German; but if in Greek or Latin what could be less appropriate than to seek elegance from those authors in whom there is nothing but sheer dross?”16 Sheer dross, obviously repugnant when writing in the classical languages, is really about all one can expect of French, German, or, presumably, English. Many of those who had good training and had learned from that training would be able to adapt the forms and expectations of Latin to the English letter on their own, but the rest of the gentry or gentry-­aspirant would get their understanding either by adapting the English of others or by informal training, such as that offered by English-­language rhetoric and writing manuals. The English-­language writing manuals printed in the Elizabethan period emerged as part of the first sustained efforts to teach rhetoric and writing and English, at least through the vehicle of printed texts. The authors of these texts were almost invariably members of the gentry and professional class: lawyers, country clergy, schoolteachers, courtiers, clerks, scholars—­these gentlemen authored volumes to help English speakers adapt principles of rhetoric to their own tongue. But while the texts are significant for these efforts, few attained success in any material way: while a dozen or so such made their way to print, only three saw sustained reprintings or developed enough of an audience to warrant many further printings or editions beyond 78

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the first. Two of these were focused specifically on letter writing: William Fulwood’s The Enimie of Idlenesse, which was first printed in 1568 and went through six reprintings and one new edition during Elizabeth’s reign, and Angel Day’s English Secretary, which was first printed in 1586 and reprinted three times during Elizabeth’s reign, including a substantially revised 1599 edition. Both texts would remain in print well into the next century, and in both, as it was in the school curriculum, the writing of letters was closely intertwined with rhetorical practice more generally. William Fulwood’s The Enimie of Idlenesse set out to teach its readers the skills necessary to successfully write letters, but did so in an English-­language manual and was thus obviously aimed at those who would be writing their letters in English. Despite its narrow focus, however, Fulwood is clear that a letter is rhetorical instrument: “To describe the true definition of an Epistle or letter, it is nothing else but an Oration written.”17 Fulwood presents a number of precepts specific to letter writing, but “if a man should make and compose an Epistle well either in English or in any other language, it were good to have the perfect understanding of all the rules both of Grammar and Rethorike.”18 While Fulwood looks to the humanist tradition as it was laid down in English in Thomas Wilson’s even more successful Art of Rhetoric, Angel Day’s English Secretary functions largely as a presentation in English of Erasmus’s own successful letter-­writing manual, De Conscribendis Epistolis. Both authors place their manuals within the project of Englishing the humanist-­reclaimed rhetorical tradition, a tradition they insist is at the heart of good letter writing. In presenting ancient and contemporary paragons of elegance such as Cicero and Erasmus, Fulwood and Day implicitly make the claim that English, or at least English letter writing, can have moral and aesthetic value. The result of this approach is that the manuals themselves tend to be out of step with the bulk of letter-­writing practice in Elizabethan England, if not later periods as well. Rather than presenting models of daily practice, these manuals present ideals of what letter writing could be in English under certain conditions, rising to the level of oratorical, or—­even more hopefully, perhaps—­poetic brilliance. But, despite their popularity, such a goal had little in common with daily life, even for the gentry.

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This is by no means to claim that these texts were not useful—­their popularity suggests that they must have been on some level. But, as much as their popularity was owed to their usefulness, it is also likely, as W. Webster Newbold has argued, that their popularity was down to presenting model letters that performed as, in essence, literary texts.19 As much as readers might have found useful theories they could apply themselves in writing letters, they enjoyed equally reading the prosopopoeia offered in the model letters. These literary qualities might be useful as the gentry negotiated with each other across multiple moments and through multiple means, but it would have to be adapted. Distilling broader, formal rhetorical training, Fulwood’s manual consisted primarily of letters addressing a single purpose, often with a concern for station and rank and modeled as a single “particular address.” The first book (of four books) provides guidelines for types of letters one might write, each type followed by an often classical example: “How to disswade our friend from rejoycing unadvisedly” and “Howe to write letters exhorting to lamentation,” for instance, each being followed by a letter attributed to Cicero.20 Several of the offered types would have been immediately useful to a gentry reader: two different kinds of “letters domesticall” are offered, as well as one example of a “mixed” letter. But even though Fulwood acknowledges that domestic and mixed letters are the most prevalent types of letters, they make up only three instances in the forty-­odd types he offers. The Enimie of Idlenesse is divided into four books, with the first book presenting the types to follow, and the remaining three books offering various model letters. The types in book 1 and the example letters of the three following books present the idea that a persona could and should be created through the letter, and that this could be done through regular forms as much as by painting images of the body. Such an idea is also prevalent in the formal process of the progymnasmata, the series of exercises learned in grammar school through Aphthonius and in English offered by Richard Rainolde. These exercises included impersonating a famous person’s speech, describing famous anecdotes, and praising or dispraising people, places, and things. Any of these provided an opportunity to describe an individual. In this way the tools of taking on a voice or evoking a persona was built into the system and culture of writing. 80

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The full range of the progymnasmata offered an additional resource to the letter writer: an attention to description of the physical and material world. This was most obviously addressed through the exercise of description, but would be essential as well to the exercises of narrative and of comparison, and praise and dispraise. Rainolde offers a number of such examples: “An oration poeticall upon a red rose,” “The praise of Epaminundas, Duke of Thebes, wherein the ground of nobility is placed,” “The dispraise of Domicious Nero, Emperor of Rome,” and “A description upon Xerxes, king of Persia.”21 In all these cases, the orator would need to spend time describing material objects (including people) and their surroundings in order to elucidate a situation or idea. This attention to both voice and to the way that the material and the social interacted to create identity was perhaps the strongest legacy of formal education that the gentry would bring to their letter-­writing practices and that would thus contribute to the creation of a gentry rhetoric.

Local Presence

Presence in a local community functioned differently than presence in the pan-­European republic of letters. At some point in late 1587 or early 1588 one Mr. Greenway, preacher at All Saints in Ashwellthorp, Norfolk, was removed from—­or possibly removed himself from—­his living. His departure arose from a dispute with Sir Thomas and Lady Muriel Knyvett, in whose estates the said living was found, and was documented in a set of three letters from William Middelton, a pastor from a neighboring benefice (also controlled by the Knyvetts) who was asked to seek out a replacement preacher for the now absent Greenway and possibly asked as well for doctrinal advice or at least reassurance on the issue that seems to have occasioned Greenway’s egress.22 The latter two of the letters deal with Middelton’s search for a new preacher. In the first of the letters, which I will discuss here, Middelton treats the conflict that led to Greenway’s departure in the first place. In this relationship, Middelton is very much the client, and his purpose in this letter is to keep his patron Lady Knyvett satisfied while also respecting his (as well as Greenway’s) position in the Church and community. As such, though its explicit function is to participate in an ongoing conflict, its real purpose is to sustain and maintain community bonds.

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These exchanges were parochial in every sense. Though they touch on matters of real religious controversy, in neither their subject matter, stakes, invention, arrangement, nor style do they rise to the level of the exchanges between Erasmus and Luther, or Erasmus and More, which are the kinds of letters one suspects Erasmus had in mind in his De Conscribendis. As Erasmus pointed out, however, letters are subject to infinite variety—­such emotional force and intellectual focus may make one exceptionally gifted, but it need not always be the best course for what letters need to do. And where toleration is concerned, it may well have been the case that the best course was to minimize rather than maximize emotional and psychological presence. As the patrons of the church, the Knyvetts would have had the right to present Greenway to the bishop of Norwich to be installed as rector or vicar and could by the same right ask that he be removed, though it seems in this case he may have simply removed himself. Middelton, like Greenway, owed his living to the Knyvetts, a fact to which he refers in his correspondence; in the most technical sense, he also owed his position to the bishop, Church leaders, and, ultimately, to the Crown, as the monarch was at this point the head of the Church. Practically, as his letters discussing Greenway imply, he also owed his living to the satisfaction of the local community. In a diocese like Norfolk, to keep all these parties satisfied required a rhetorical balancing act. Middelton had the task of confronting the ideas and emotions raised and still very present in the dispute between the Knyvetts and Greenway while mitigating their effects—­he wanted to cool rather than fuel the fires of the imagination. In part the problem of presence here is not just about Middelton trying to capture the conversational quality of absent friends; absence is real here as well in that Greenway had himself absented from his role as preacher. Greenway is absent. And yet his absence was a regular presence. There was no preacher for the church, and thus there was no getting away from the circumstances under which Greenway had departed—­every Sunday, at least, brought to the forefront of the imaginations of the Knyvetts and the churchgoers Greenway’s vivid presence. Also vividly present, then, would have been the attendant doubts and emotions of the doctrinal and communal questions that led to his absence. 82

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Lady Knyvett had a clear image already of Greenway, and of the threat he had posed to her community; Middelton’s challenge was to reduce the force of this image, and to do so in such a way as to assuage the feelings of Knyvett without himself wading into a potentially perilous debate over doctrine itself. The letter itself touches on two points: Middelton’s interpretation of the disagreement between Knyvett and Greenway, and Middelton’s efforts to find a suitable replacement for Greenway. In both points resources of presence allowed Middelton to offer comfort to Knyvett while avoiding strong impressions that would either enhance the conflict or commit himself to making any sort of doctrinal judgment that might be ill received or, in the hands of some other reader, misinterpreted. According to Middelton’s account, Greenway’s departure was occasioned by his determination that “communicants receiving without any Sermon, were all to be condemned as unworthy receivers.” Unworthiness was a formal state defined most clearly in the Book of Common Prayer as pertaining to the way that a communicant stood in their community—­if they were in open conflict with a neighbor, then they were not worthy. However, along with this went a long-­standing practice, reflected in the “Thirty-­Nine Articles of Religion,” the foundational document of the English Church, that a certain level of Christian education was required to make a communicant “worthy.” The communicant should know the catechism, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Apostle’s Creed, for instance. For the English Christian, the risk of taking Communion while “unworthy” was quite high; according to article twenty-­nine of the thirty-­nine articles, the unworthy or “wicked” who take Communion do so “to their condemnation.”23 Preachers had the right and, indeed, the obligation to withhold Communion from any parishioner thought “unworthy” of receiving. Because the Church in its particulars was relatively new, much was left up to the interpretation of the divines who would administer what was one of only two sacraments (the other being baptism). The rite itself as defined by the Church was one of the hallmarks of the via media, the religious settlement that attempted to balance Catholic tradition with Protestant reform. As such, however, Communion in the new religion was a particular point of conflict between those who thought the reforms of the Church had not

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gone far enough (those Calvinists whose doctrines and practices set the example for those we would later call Puritans) and the parishioners and congregants who looked to their churches and their churchmen for pastoral care, fellowship, and Christian community. However, such a division was not the only consideration for what was ultimately a ritual meant to signify and enact community. Parishioners did not like to see those who were openly or flagrantly in violation of conditions of worthiness being given Communion, but too stringent an interpretation, or an interpretation that was not consistently applied, was a source of conflict as well. Such conflicts then reflected the tension between clergy who saw their role as doctrinally minded preachers and parishioners who saw the clergy’s role as more communally minded pastors. Different congregations would have different expectations, of course, but this sums up the situation here in Ashwellthorp as it stood between Sir Thomas and Lady Knyvett and the preacher Greenway, who, in his insistence that the sermon would have been part of the education required to take Communion, held a stringently precise position, one heavily reformist and evidently not held by the lord and lady of the manor.24 In the letter, Middelton addresses the first point, his judgment of the disagreement, by presenting an image of himself but one that is thoroughly undynamic—­an image of his literal reading of the exchange of letters between Knyvett to Greenway: “Good Madam, I have perused your Ladyship’s letters to Mr. Greenway, and his answers back again to you.” Such an opening, in which an exchange of letters is described, is a staple of the early modern letter, functioning to bring the recipient of one letter up to speed on where things stand in a series of correspondences. In this case the formula, enhanced by the interesting but unelaborated verb “perused,” suggests three images: Middelton reading, Knyvett reading and responding, and Greenway reading and responding. A more striking image might promise a more dramatic judgment; what Middelton seeks to offer instead is an interpretation of the disagreement that will be satisfying to Knyvett and yet also respectful of his colleague Greenway. Rather than an image, Middelton seeks to portray a set of attitudes. In perusing the letters, Middelton explains, he “understand[s] how lovingly and Christianly you 84

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have dealt with him, and how fearfully and doubly he hath gone about to satisfy your question.” Middelton now describes himself not in a visualizable action (perusing) but the more abstract “understanding”; the things he understands—­that is, the judgment he has to offer—­is a balanced one, and this balance of judgment is made clear by the balance of grammatical structure. In each clause two adverbs modify a single action. Knyvett deals Christianly and lovingly, which would seem to be desirable qualities in a disagreement over Christian practice. Greenway responds fearfully and doubly; he shows the respect due to not only a social superior but to one who wields real power over him, but his going about satisfying Knyvett also suggests that Greenway has made real efforts to address her concerns. The balancing of the adverbs highlights the contrasting verbs and objects: the single action of Knyvett “has dealt with Greenway” with the more complicated construction of Greenway’s “hath gone about to satisfy her question.” Such structuring suggests a finality to Knyvett’s action and an incompleteness or lack of success in Greenway’s responses. But suggestion is all the structure allows: Middelton has avoided having to make a determined judgment even as he has accepted the role of judge. The style of the comparison presents an image of Knyvett’s and Greenway’s dealings with each other but does so in such a way as to maintain respect between two sets of people who obviously had a high-­stakes disagreement, one that had inflamed passions to a serious extent. So it seems that in this perused exchange Greenway must have made some points that stuck with and stung Lady Knyvett; Middelton goes on to reduce the force of whatever ideas or arguments Greenway made that are obviously still very present for Knyvett. “Truly,” Middelton explains, “I see nothing in his long windings but a desire rather to smooth up that which he hath once spoken, and to keep some credit of constancy, than to declare his meaning.” As Middelton sees it, or as he wants Knyvett to see it, the actions of smoothing up and keeping credit should be more apparent than any declaration or meanings. Even Greenway’s absence, the source of Knyvett’s consternation and regularly present reminder of their conflict, can be seen in a different light. Greenway’s “practice doth show what his judgment is,” Middelton explains, “for if he thought that

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communicants receiving without any sermon were all to be condemned as unworthy receivers, then surely he would never have betrayed so many souls by withdrawing himself, and spoiling them of the word preached, being so necessary a part of the sacrament, as he maketh it. Wherefore though Mr. Greenway his preaching be better than his practice in other matters, yet in this his practice teacheth better doctrine than his preaching.” The joke here is that in leaving his parish Greenway has done a more godly service than if he had stayed. The humor emerges first from the irony Middelton points out: no one can hear a sermon if there is no preacher to give it. This irony then in turn serves to call Greenway’s sincerity into question—­or, at least, such is the intent. In this case Greenway’s absence serves less as a confirmation of Lady Knyvett’s being in the wrong and more of Greenway’s error and betrayal; it affirms the good feeling of the reader by moving around the significance of Greenway’s absence. The stylistic twist—­the crossing of practice and preaching—­turns attention away from the actual doctrinal question to a question of Greenway’s more general conduct. It also covers up the possibility that Greenway may be right, or may have been in the right—­depending on one’s interpretation of the doctrine in question, it may have been less imperiling not to receive the Communion than to receive it in an unworthy state. Either way, Middelton suggests, the correct course for a preacher genuinely interested in the souls of the congregants would have been to have stayed and educated them to help them become worthy, a course Greenway chose not to take—­unless, of course, he was forced out by the Knyvetts, a possibility whose presence is minimized here. From here the letter turns from trying to minimize the presence of Greenway in Lady Knyvett’s imagination to Middelton’s trying to explain why he is unable to find a real person to fill the real absence in the preacher’s position. It makes this turn using one of the few really sharp images in the letter, a metaphor of Greenway as a weed in God’s garden, or the little plot of that garden tended by Lady Knyvett: “I heartily rejoice that it hath pleased God to cut him of that [which] troubled you, desiring the same God to plant another in his room that will edify more and offend less.” The vegetable metaphor is presented in terms vivid enough, cutting and 86

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planting, but here the presence is meant to emphasize absence; a priest who will at some point in the future be present, but who is as yet unknown and absent, is imagined stylistically through the antithesis of “edify more and offend less.” Description then moves from image to character qualities, as Middelton attempts to make present to Knyvett the challenges of finding this preacher: “It is hard to find a discreet, learned, and well-­studied divine, seene in the tongues and such a one as is of good fellowly and civil behavior, neither over precise nor yet dissolute.” Here the ideal preacher, at least for this parish, is described vividly, or at least thoroughly—­but is described as such because it is so hard to find. The effect here of this copious description is manifold: it lets Knyvett understand that Middelton knows what she is looking for; it lays out just what a tall order that is; it urges her to patience; and it suggests, subtly, that she may have to compromise on some points. The description is a fine model; it could come right from Erasmus’s first method for embellishing thought: “To relate at length and treat in detail something that could be expressed summarily and generally.”25 It also draws, and, more important for the possibility of presence, from what Erasmus numbers his fifth method, evidentia, in which characteristics of people and things are dwelt on. Like many of the other descriptions in this letter, however, it balances these multiple possibilities without firmly lodging any one in the foreground of its reader’s imagination. Middelton’s letter is not exceptional; many letters from sixteenth-­century England use presence by balancing vivid images with other stylistic structures. The significance of such a phenomenon is that everyday practice offers a different understanding of how style is employed than we might get by attending solely to a history of rhetoric either as a pedagogical tradition or as an intellectual one. The foundations that account for the changed expectations of what rhetoric is would in turn account for this intellectual development. The papers and letters of influential Norfolk families (e.g., Bacon, Knyvett, Gawdy, Woodhouse) adapted the rhetorical theories with which they were all well acquainted to the particular circumstances of daily life: buying and selling land, arranging marriages, paying debts and borrowing money, organizing family concerns, caring for the sick, and on and on.

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Personal Presence

When Middleton wrote to Muriel Knyvett, he had to adapt his approach to rhetorical presence to account for local circumstances in this case by being attuned to which descriptions were necessary and which were counterproductive for the emotional responses of his reader. In his case the absence and presence in question were not his own, but related to those local circumstances. In other cases the author themself might wish to conjure up their own presence, such as when attempting to manage an estate from afar. Lord keeper Sir Nicholas Bacon was extremely wealthy and built large and significant estates in Norfolk and Suffolk, usually held by one of his five sons. He was also considered one of the most effective and learned orators of his day. Of his speeches in Parliament, one of his eulogists claimed that “as he said, so the matter went,” while George Puttenham noted his penchant for studying Quintilian.26 A rhetorician’s rhetorician, his letters managing his estates offer a good example of how the rhetorical strategies of the classroom were adapted to the realities of estate management through vernacular letter writing. These two dominant elements of his personality—­his concern for the financial health of his estates and for education and scholarship—­thus become his identity as expressed in the following letter both by rhetorical style and description. Written to his son (also named Nicholas) his presence is not bodily, but he is no less present for that absence.27 You shall do well to cause some care to be taken of your sister that she spend the day well and vertuously less elz whylst she seekes here healthe she myght marre her manners. For the ammendment of health good dyet and covenyent exercyse is that that must help. Methinke if she did bestowe every day some time to lerne to wryghte amongst other thinges it were well doone. The pump maker shall have hys charges allowed when so ever he comes but the sooner he comes the better. If he shall be bound to perform the work it wolde be understoode whether he be of sooche substance as a man may trust to his bond and what you can learn hereby signify by your next letter when he comes up for because the

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depthe ys xxviijty fetdone [28 feet down] I fere he shall hardly be able to do yt well. There remaynes in my study a booke in the saxone language wreton in parchment conteyning the v bookes of moysez which booke I should have safely sent up by the next messenger with grete charge that it be well looked unto. Yt lyeth lowe amongst my wreton bookez comend me to your mothere & to your wyff. Wryton the xi of Marche 1565 by Your Fathere N Bacon C. S.

The letter fits into a larger pattern of estate and family management that would fall under the general heading of the household. It must be understood, then, as part of an ongoing process of communication between Nicholas son and Nicholas father regarding the management of Redgrave and its constituent properties and economies along with the family members attached to that household. Under this larger purpose, however, the letter serves four more explicit purposes. It provides direction for the care of another family member; it provides direction and requests information regarding the work of a contractor; it requests that a book be delivered; and, in its valediction, it passes along greetings. Two of these purposes are aimed at family affairs, one at estate management, and one to the personal interests of Nicholas, lord keeper. All of these are distinctly rhetorical in the sense that they seek to directly enact the lord keeper’s will through language. For each of these purposes, then, the lord keeper takes a different rhetorical approach. For the first purpose, convincing the younger Nicholas to take care of his sister’s moral wellbeing, the lord keeper takes a stylistic approach, allowing his own prose cadences to carry the force of his moral arguments. The second paragraph serves two functions: to approve the hiring of the pumpmaker and to request Nicholas to investigate the pumpmaker’s financial solidity. The final paragraph also instructs or directs; its purpose is to have Nicholas locate and send a specific book. The letter itself balances something like the personal and intimate with something like the pragmatic and businesslike while also demonstrating the

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difficulty of disentangling these two things, as well as the extent to which the impression of each opposition is a construction. As a first impression it would seem the discussion of caring for a family member would be the most personal. That paragraph exhibits, however, the most distinctly formal and formulaic style, certainly in terms of putting into practice stylistic expectations of formal rhetorical training. The premise Bacon is trying to get his son to accept, and that should motivate him, is that learning to write will be of moral benefit for the younger Bacon’s sister, who, it seems, is staying with young Nicholas to look after her physical health. Thus she should “spend the day well and vertuously less elz whylst she seekes here healthe she myght marre her manners.” The parallel structure of seeking her health versus marring her manners emphasizes the peril that is to motivate young Nicholas; the sentence structure also sets up the ordering that makes the next comparison of physical and moral associated with writing, which takes place over the two following clauses. The first clause deals with her physical health and suggests that its care is relatively straightforward: “For the ammendment of health good dyet and covenyent exercyse is that that must help.” The ease with which the “ammendment of health” can be addressed then implicitly raises the question of how her manners are to be addressed. The answer, it is suggested, is through writing: “Methinke if she did bestowe every day some time to lerne to wryghte amongst other thinges it were well doone.” The stylistic pattern that the first sentence establishes through antithesis (its “lest while x, y” construction) thus creates a pattern that allows Bacon to tie learning to write to the moral health of the sister. This antithetical structure is both a central element of rhetorical education and a prominent feature of the lord keeper’s rhetorical style. Patrick Collinson sees antithesis as fundamentally characteristic of Bacon’s style, which Collinson attributes to the influence of Seneca: “Nevertheless there is no doubt that Bacon cultivated the ‘pointed,’ silver, Senecan amble, with its terse and strikingly antithetical figures of speech.”28 This figure itself being distinctive, then, it functions as one means by which Bacon the elder asserts his presence and uses that presence to address a moral need in managing one of his households. This presence, however, is not generated from unique personal intimacy, but routine formal training. In 90

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this sense the paragraph, despite its family concerns and intimate feel, is impersonal. The paragraph about the pump maker then seems the most businesslike, with less of the rhetorical style and intimate feel of the paragraph about his daughter’s education. The first sentence is three clauses, each concerning the timing of the pump maker’s arrival to do the scheduled work; the first clause also indicates the lord keeper’s acceptance of the (unstated but presumably discussed) pump maker’s charges. Stylistically these clauses build a nice momentum, reminiscent of the sort of antithetical structure of the first paragraph: “When so ever he comes but the sooner he comes the better.” Following the declaration that work should proceed (implied by the point that the charges will be allowed), this style urges young Nicholas to in turn urge on the pump maker. The second sentence, though clear and effective enough, lacks Bacon’s Senecan artistry. Nine (more or less) clauses all discuss the possibility of a performance bond to ensure that the work is done to an adequate quality. The entire second sentence operates in a conditional mode, and three conditions are at stake: whether or not the work is to be covered by a performance bond; whether or not the pump maker “be of such substance” that he will actually be able to cover the bond; and whether or not the challenges of the work will make it impossible to perform adequately, in any case. The message tracks out a number of shared understandings and ongoing conversations. Obviously the discussions about the pump maker have been ongoing. Bacon Senior’s conditional clauses also provide to Bacon Junior material that the younger should employ as he negotiates and inquires with and about the pump maker and his bond. Without explicitly saying so, Father Nicholas wants his son to get assurance about both the feasibility of the pump itself and the security of the maker’s finances. These three-­party conversations also bespeak several different kinds of understandings: not only about the fluid and financial dynamics involved but also about the legal and mechanical stakes. Both Bacons must recognize the legal difficulties of pursuing a claim against the pump maker should his bond, or his pump, prove inadequate to requirements. Perhaps the lord keeper genuinely feared the pump maker would be unable to build a sufficient pump, or perhaps he

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was merely offering his son a negotiating point in establishing the bond. In any case the conversations and the understandings were ongoing. Absence and presence are distinct elements not only of this conversation, but of all the conversations to which this conversation refers and applies. What comes across to scholars today as anxiety about the letter being an unsuitable substitute for face-­to-­face interaction works just as well to reinforce the idea of presence—­not by directly conjuring the physical body of the sender or recipient, but by obliquely reiterating the letter’s place in what is undoubtedly a physical relationship, and a relationship that is ultimately mediated through the physical world. Feeling and knowing certainly intertwine in this example of epistolarity; likewise, absence hovers over the conversation. Mistrust certainly does relate to absence here, but not as something particularly new to the epistolary condition. Mistrust—­signified, for instance, by the bond—­is built into the entirety of the social context, while this letter functions as both intervention in and indicator of that context. Anxiety is likewise built into the request for the Saxon-­language book; the concern over its value and its care would exist regardless of any additional writing about the book itself. Nevertheless, the letter itself is certainly conversational, in two senses: topically it depends on an already established and ongoing shared set of understandings, and stylistically clauses are ordered as if they were written as they occurred to the writer. Such ordering is most evident in the way the clause “what you can learn hereby signify by your next letter” interrupts the logically connected clauses about whether the pump maker may be trusted and the reason why Bacon is insisting on the bond: “It wolde be understoode whether he be of sooche substance as a man may trust to his bond . . . because the depthe ys xxviijty fetdone I fere he shall hardly be able to do yt well.” It is conversational in the sense that it relies on understandings long since established. It does not create its own sense of involvement or presence per se, but it relies on them nevertheless, and it evokes them with whatever touches are necessary to achieve ends or realize purposes. These touches are not random, however. They are marked by two forces: a deep, almost instinctive rhetorical training, and a rapidly evolving sense of the complexities of early modern estate holding. 92

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Making Obligations Present

Techniques of description and persona functioned to manage the emotions of the reader (as in Middleton’s letter to Knyvett) or to emphasize one’s own directions (in the case of Sir Nicholas to his son). These techniques could also be effective, however, in making present for the reader things that might otherwise be not just absent but immaterial, such as obligations and relationships. In 1569 (or so), Nathaniel Bacon, son of Nicholas Bacon, was married to Anne Gresham, daughter of Sir Thomas Gresham, founder of the Royal Exchange and revolutionizer of English financial controls and markets. As Nathaniel and Anne attempted to set out on their married life, they faced two immediate obstacles: first, finding a way to live together, and second, finding a house of their own. The reasons for which Anne was not allowed to join her husband at first are unclear, but the arrangement was not unusual. Nevertheless, they were finally allowed to live together, but, being young and unestablished, this meant living together in the house of Nathaniel’s brother-­in-­law, Francis Wyndham. Household dynamics were even more complicated, as Anne’s mother, Mistress Dutton, was not Gresham’s wife (also named Anne), even though he and Anne were married when he was involved with Mistress Dutton; still, the younger Anne was clearly recognized as the Greshams’ daughter and able to appeal to the quality of their relationship in her writing. She and Nathaniel rely on this relationship, and the obligations it entailed, as they set about to establish their own house in a series of three letters by Anne addressed to her natural mother, “Mistress Dutton”; her stepmother, Lady Anne Gresham; and her father, Sir Thomas Gresham.29 Several features of their strategy draw on a conception that may be termed “modern.” For one thing they follow Kenneth Burke’s idea that “we must think of rhetoric not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reënforcement [sic] than to exceptional rhetorical skill.”30 They also depend on presence. By carefully presenting images of herself without a home of her own, Anne attempts to make present for her readers a sense of the complexities of the social bonds in which she is engaged, and especially the obligations her reader owes to her.

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To make these concepts present, however, she relies on a working of what would be in the sixteenth century fairly routine rhetorical conventions: first, a classical structure of exordium (introduction), narratio (laying out of the case), confirmatio and refutatio (dealing with the arguments of the case), and peroratio (conclusion); second, a reliance on the loci or topics, “places” or standard conceptual frameworks out of which arguments may be generated on any subject (e.g., lesser and greater); and, finally, a use of stylistic structures that emphasize contrast through repetition. Thus her letters demonstrate fluency with invention, arrangement, and style of arguments, which are the three most important of the canons (or subject divisions) of rhetoric in the sixteenth century. The fact that her arguments are distributed across three letters to three different addressees suggests that she is aware of the need for Burke’s dull daily reinforcement. Though the daily reinforcement may not occur, what is clear is that she adopts a long-­term strategy rather than a solitary appeal. There are also telling repetitions in the letters regarding the way in which the tactics of this strategy were measured. Two of the letters run quite parallel in terms of structure and style, but all three operate out of the same set of principles. All of the letters open with a flat address: “Mother Dutton,” “My very good father,” or, in the case of Lady Anne Gresham, “Madame,” which is then struck through in the draft. Each then provides an exordium: in every case this is framed as an apology for not having written sooner, along with an explanation that not having written is due to the fact that nothing has been going on (“I have not mutch whereof to write”). In two cases this leads to a thanks—­to her Mother Dutton, thanks for a gift; and to Lady Anne Gresham, a more general thanks for constant good treatment. In this way younger Anne establishes the presence of a bond between she and the addressee despite distances of time and space. But the real weight of the opening apology and its reason, uneventfulness, form part of a larger pattern. The letters go on to explain that Anne is lodged at her brother-­in-­law’s house, and this residence, it becomes clear, affords her little chance for anything other than uneventfulness. At this point the letters have moved from exordium into narration, and into the mode of making the case. This is not a direct appeal—­not yet—­but rather 94

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an effort to draw Anne’s state into the imagination of her readers, in order to prepare that reader for the more immediate appeal, which is that, while she is perfectly happy at her brother Windham’s, she could be happier in a place of her own. So she explains to Mother Dutton that “a sojorner yow heare I am, & I will saie trewly I colde not sojorne in a better place.” You can hear how the repetition of “sojorne” helps to set up the sentiment, making the process of sojorning into a tolerable state. It also makes the next clause stand out even more in its contrast: “Yet that notwithstandinge, your dawghter wissheth her self in a house of her owne,” so that the expression of desire becomes a period her addressee reaches, a turn contrasted with the purported happiness of sojorning, as not being able to sojorne in a better place shifts from being a statement of satisfaction to one of dissatisfaction. This direct expression of desire is then explained by a statement also stylistically structured around repetition: “Though my troble so wolde be the greater, yet it beinge about business of myne owne wolde seame the lesse.” The expression of desire to be busy then brings home the idea of idleness expressed in the exordium, at the same time drawing on an arithmetic of trouble (greater or less) that operates out of the classical locus of quantity. These rhetorical features (arrangement, invention, and style of the argument) serve to make present to her audience her boredom and its causes, her connection to her addressees, and her desires. That this is intentional seems clear from the fact that, with few alterations, she adopts the same language, structure, and argument in the letter to Lady Anne Gresham: “I cannot sojorne in a better place as I thinke; yet I colde very well be content to be in a house of myne owne,” she says, and “though my care should be greater than it nowe is, yet it beinge bestowed about business of myne owne wolde very litle troble me.” The style is altered slightly to downplay the repetition (which perhaps bespeaks an attention to what will impress on different audiences in regards to style), but the arrangement and invention are the same. In these two letters the function of presence—­rhetorically constructed—­ is to push the addressee to action. Anne wants Mother Dutton to appeal directly to Sir Thomas Gresham, and she wants Lady Anne to appeal to Sir

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Nicholas Bacon, as Nathaniel “will do nothing but by his appointment.” (A curious aside is that in both letters she speaks seemingly disparagingly of Nathaniel’s initiative—­not the least interesting because the drafts are in his hand.) To her father she takes a slightly different approach, but one nevertheless dependent on using rhetorical structures to activate, as it were, the imagination. To Thomas Gresham himself, here a little more indirection is used: “I continue here in my brother Windham’s house, wher I am still well used both by him & by my sister, & have no cause any waie to complaine,” she writes, but there is the hint of a dissatisfaction, which is housed in a discussion of her husbande, who “causeth me to use my singinge, & besides to learne some songes upon the virinolles. I write this the rather because yow willed me not to forget my songes. I am driven to borowe virginolles to learne upon.”31 Here Anne presents a vivid image of herself both practicing and borrowing virginolles in an effort to, as she claims, uphold an obligation placed upon her by her father. This establishes a bond between her and her father, while pointing out that through someone’s fault she is put in difficult straits in order to keep up her end of the bond, and that it lies in her reader’s power to alleviate those difficulties. In any case, to Sir Thomas as to her other addressees, Anne relies on formal structures to make both her physical condition, and thus her reader’s obligation to that physical condition, present to the imagination.

Rhetoric and Literary Presence

As the sixteenth century progressed, the English letter developed “an almost literary quality” and so fits into a longer narrative of an evolution in discourse from “oratorical” to “literary,” at least for rhetoric as an academic subject. As a final example of household rhetoric, I would like to consider two letters much more in the literary style, in which the identity (including the morality) of the individual writer is itself the question and subject of the correspondence. In a series of letters between Edmund Knyvett and his mother, Muriel, Edmund plays out what is essentially a narrative arc of repentance.32 These letters suggest that even where the presentation of a unified subject is concerned, that presentation cannot escape the material concerns of the gentry household, coalesced through the text of the 96

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letters. What seems today a literary quality—­the presentation of a “unified” subject—­emerges in this case out of a need to make present an internal and unverifiable state of repentance while diminishing the presence of certain other much more tangible or verifiable things like debts. In the first of these letters, Edmund has to present a current condition of repentance alongside a projection that this repentance, which seems to be accompanied by a newfound or rediscovered relationship with God, will lead in turn to an amendment of behavior. The likelihood of this amendment is, Edmund admits, problematic, as he has seen the suffering and displeasure of both his father and his mother, to whom he writes, and has lost his credit and hope of preferment, and so, he writes to his mother, “you might think there was small hope of amendment, if all this could not move me to sorrow for my former sins, and to call to God for his mercy and forgiveness of them all.” The sentence leaves open a variety of possible interpretations: a sincere statement of faith; a statement that is intended to be sincere but is wrought from doubt; or a statement that is intentionally obfuscatory or mendacious. This is not to say that Edmund does not recognize this tension; he explains that “tis nothing to say all this but time shall try it by deeds.” But to manage the tension means he needs to make his future actions (which, of course, do not yet exist) and his repentance (which is, of course, insensible) more present than his past behaviors or his current material state. As the letter progresses, Edmund makes clear, intentionally or otherwise, that the presence he wants to create is in competition with other efforts to make him present to his mother. Good Madam the tales that are brought hourly to you of me conceive the best, considering it is the common course of this vile world always to aggravate and make things worse rather than to mend them. Anyone is glad if he can hear anything to bring it to you to augment your grief and to exempt your love quite from me if it were so possible. And if I think not amiss there are some that devise tales for one another to tell. They neither love your Ladyship nor us all but for show and for their own good.



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The specific nature of the rumors is left unsaid, though it is not clear whether this is out of modesty or is simply a strategy; not knowing what tales may or may not have reached his mother, Edmund remains vague on the details. The lack of description, detail, or even adjectives in this case function to diminish the presence of the tales themselves—­or so, presumably, Edmund hopes. The world, however, is “vile,” and in this vile world people are actively working to worsen “things” and leave them broken. Grammatical forms are carefully used here; neither the tales nor the tellers aggravate or make worse. Those verbs are made infinitives and arranged so as to describe the “common course” of the “vile world.” The tales themselves are present. In the first instance tales are not told, but brought, though Edmund is careful to place himself (“me”) as far grammatically as possible from them; in the second instance, they are devised to be told. In neither case is a person telling a tale or offering a report actually directly presented to his mother. His presence, he hopes, and his motivations will exceed the presence of other interlocutors. The second letter manages presence in a different form. It provides what is essentially an account sheet listing Edmund’s various debts with those to whom he owes and how much. According to the account, Edmund owed around £25 to nine people or more (one line is simply money owed “in Norwich”—­i.e., to various people or establishments in that city). £10 might be an approximate average annual salary, so this is a substantial debt, though Edmund might well expect to draw more than that per year; nevertheless, the debts would require some payment. The loans would have been made, essentially, on his family name, and thus it will be up to his mother ultimately to make the repayments. The account serves, then, as much as a bill, unmissable and placed in center of the page. Edmund takes two approaches to diminishing this bill’s presence. First he accounts not so much for how it came to be, but how the realization of his debt became present to him. Edmund came to understand the requirement through his sister, who had been informed of it by his mother. Edmund explains that he was reluctant to draw up the accounts because in effect he was worried about what he would find, but the way he presents this expresses both his understanding that they would be more than he thought 98

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or wanted, and also the effect that this drawing up would have: “I was very loath” to write up the debts “because they be more than I thought they had been when I came to reckon them together.” This means that, upon hearing from his sister that his debts needed to be recorded and sent to his mother, Edmund first assented, then calculated the debts—­this done, he is “loath” to actually draw up the bill. His memory had in some ways misserved him (though, in that the slips of memory allowed him to continue to accrue debts, they served him just fine); the memorial tool of reckoning the debts then draws on a rather unpleasant realization of exactly how deeply in debt he is. Whether or not this is a good strategy for ameliorating his mother’s anger and convincing her to repay (or help to repay) his debts, it does serve to make the reckoning, rather than the accruing, more present for the reader. As the goal is reestablishing a different, moral type of credit with his mother, one based on his behavior, the effort looks pointed toward leaving the how and why of the debt out of her imagination. But the letter also concerns itself with making present Edmund’s own material body and doing so in a very material way. In a note written along the margin, with the text running perpendicular to the account details so that the reader must physically turn the page to read it, the letter offers a health complaint. Edmund explains that he is having some pain in his eye that “comes about noon and I lose it in my sleep.” As a marginal note, this health concern is positioned as if it were an afterthought, though in its verticality it draws significant attention to itself. It competes for visual attention with the bill in the center, drawn out in two columns with lines running from the person owed to the amount owed so that Edmund’s financial and physical illnesses vie for acknowledgment from his mother (see fig. 4). Edmund’s state and his strategies for addressing that state in his writing use the rhetorical tools at his disposal in order to create effects of presence toward a specific end. The same is true of the other letters examined in this chapter, as well as, for that matter, the model letters produced in letter-­ writing manuals of Fulwood, Day, and others. The education in writing that students would receive in formal settings and in their households would similarly focus on making things happen in the world. No doubt letters

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could serve as simple amusements or even as fictions. But if literary letters were to play a role in the development of the eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­ century pursuit of taste, the same elements that define that literary taste were those by which sixteenth-­century English gentry letter writers actively shaped their identities as individuals and group members and carried out negotiations to make their wills present in the world.

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1. Map of Norfolk by Christopher Saxton, one of England’s early cartographers.

2. Letter from Mary Holland to her mother, Muriel Knyvett. nro kny 632, Norfolk Record Office.

3. Opening paragraph from the letter from Holland to Knyvett.

4. Edmund Knyvett’s health complaints run along the margin of this accounting of his debts. nro kny 634, Norfolk Record Office.

5. Hand-­drawn survey on scrap paper, inserted into descriptive survey. lest q34, Norfolk Record Office.

6. This full view of the descriptive survey shows its relatively small size. The image also gives a sense of the use of columns and rows to organize data, with rows of lots (hundreds) listed in the left-­hand column, a description of their rental situation in the middle column, and monetary figures in the right-­hand column.

7. Letter from Muriel Knyvett to her brother, Thomas Fortescue. kny 466, Norfolk Record Office.

Chapter 4 •

Places of Argument

T

he previous two chapters have suggested that certain twentieth-­ and twenty-­first-­century conceptions of literacy (an “involved” literacy) and of rhetoric (in the term “presence”) find their roots in the practices of the Elizabethan country gentry. This chapter and the next will approach gentry rhetoric from the opposite direction, considering the ways that the rhetorical curriculum of the sixteenth century provided precisely the terms and techniques to allow the gentry to adapt their rhetoric to changing, modernizing circumstances. In a history of ideas, the classical and humanist approaches to rhetorical invention and style that were embraced by the Renaissance educational system would prove inadequate in allowing writers to adapt to the modernizing world. Examining the ways that the gentry practiced the techniques of invention and style, however, suggests that, even if they are now outmoded relics, these techniques were essential to the gentry’s shaping of their world and, moreover, their conceptions of modernity. The education of the gentry, through a curriculum based on the twin disciplines of rhetoric and dialectic, was built for writers and speakers who believed that language and ideas could produce effects in the material world just as the material world provided a set of signs that could be read in the world of language and thought. Thus, in the dedicatory epistle of his Arte of Rhetorike (1553), Thomas Wilson praised eloquence through an anecdote about King Pirrhus, who in his battles with Rome depended on an orator named Cineas: “And so it came to passe, that through the pithie eloquence of this noble Orator, diuers strong Castelles and Fortresses were peaceably giuen vp into the handes of Pirrhus, which he should haue found very hard and tedious to winne by the sworde.” The ability for words to capture places justifies rhetoric’s study: “What worthier 

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thing can there bee, then with a word to winne Cities and whole Countries?”1 Whether the education itself produced this belief, or the people who held these beliefs demanded such an education, the end result was a gentry discourse that connected people, property, and activity. Such is the case with the rhetorical or dialectical topics, which by their very name (“places” or “seats” of arguments), suggest the easy flow between the material worlds of property and the immaterial worlds of language. Rhetorical education provided a means for translating that social relationship into an educational program, regardless of whether we speak of the formal sites of grammar school and university or simply the expectations for writing and speaking trained into the gentry through daily practice. The usefulness of some literate practices in daily life, however, may well outstrip their usefulness from a strict educational perspective. Such was the case with the topics, which, by the end of the sixteenth century, had begun to fade from the educational curriculum altogether. In this case what faded from the curriculum was actually something of central importance to gentry life, and so what was at one time taught in school was then out of necessity taught through some other process. As literacy scholar James Paul Gee argues, “The choice, in any ‘literacy’ programme, will always be what sort of social group do I intend to apprentice the learner into?”2 Gee is writing here about formal literacy programs, but by extension this is true of informal practices as well. “One is socialized or enculturated into a certain social practice,” but such programs need only be programmatic; they need not necessarily be enacted through institutions set aside formally and exclusively for producing literacy. The correspondence of the maintenance and record keeping of the estate provided one such program. The development from Aristotle’s topics to Cicero’s topics is one of greater practical application; the gentry adapted these further to their own needs. In the rhetorical practice of the gentry, the topics provided a way of taking control of the processes of measurement that were increasingly central features of the gentry’s early modern world. The gentry used their own English understanding of the topics to inject uncertainty into any discussion and then take advantage of that uncertainty, making facility with the topics an essential social practice in 102

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which a member is enculturated, even as the practice itself becomes less and less important as part of the formal education of that group.

A History of the Topics

The basic understanding of the topics in sixteenth-­century England was derived from Aristotle, re-­created and refined with a particular English flair. Aristotle explains that the elements of a proposition or problem must fall within one of four orders: definition, property, genus, or accident. Making an argument in any one of these four orders would in turn entail making an argument (or predicate) about one of ten additional categories: “Essence, Quantity, Quality, Relation, Place, Time, Position, State, Activity, Passivity. For the accident and genus and property and definition of anything,” Aristotle explains, “will always be in one of these categories.” For a rhetor facing any argumentative or negotiating situation, these topical categories would provide the means “to reason from opinions that are generally accepted about every problem propounded to us, and . . . when standing up to an argument, avoid saying anything that will obstruct us.”3 As it turns out, however, the topics proved useful not only in discussing opinions generally accepted but also facts established with certainty: if presented with a negotiating situation in which the question begins as one of certain quantity (e.g., there is this much land priced at this rate), then once that question is answered, one simply asks a question about quality (e.g., what kind of land?) and the negotiation can keep going. The topics allow for such an array of approaches to the seemingly certain fact that even the answer to the original question can be cast into such doubt that its settlement—­and thus the negotiations—­can always be delayed indefinitely. In his comprehensive history of logic and rhetoric in the eighteenth century, W. S. Howell modestly describes the century that marks the beginning of rhetoric’s long nadir: “The changes that took place in logical and rhetorical doctrine between 1700 and 1800 are perhaps best interpreted as responses to the emergence of the new science.”4 This new science Howell sums up as based in “observation, experiment, and the discovery of causation.”5 It emerged from landmark texts of the 1600s, “from the publication in 1620 of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, from

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the publication in 1637 of Rene Descartes Discours de la Methode, from the announcement by Boyle in 1662 of the law of the inversely proportional relation between volume and pressure in a compressed gas, and from the fateful publications of Newton’s Principia in midsummer of 1687 and of Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding in 1690.”6 This listing provides a standard bibliography of the texts that would inevitably alter what rhetoric was. If not the texts themselves, at least three of these writers—­Bacon, Descartes, and Locke—­are, following Howell, repeatedly connected to the history of rhetoric generally and specifically to rhetoric’s diminishment as a field of serious intellectual endeavor. These authors may not have set about to dismantle rhetoric, but the cumulative effect of the new approaches to knowledge that each writer offered was to knock rhetoric’s sister art, dialectic, off its epistemological perch, and once dialectic was no longer a viable method of pursuing truth and knowledge, rhetoric, which depended on dialectic, could hardly be thought of as a meaningful science or art. If we consider Bacon’s first foray into curricular revision to be his 1605 Advancement of Learning, and Locke’s similar endeavor to be Some Thoughts concerning Education, we see that this new science was being conceived along curricular lines. But making a new curriculum meant dismantling an old one. Rhetoric and dialectic were interconnected both in the sense that, together, they made up the first three years of the university curriculum, and that the principle concern of each was how to use language (specifically Latin, of course, in formal education) to make arguments and thereby to discover the truth (in the case of dialectic), or at least the probability (in the case of rhetoric) of statements about the world, and especially about actions, decisions, and judgments that might be made in the world. To these ends the two arts were fully interdependent: dialectic was divided into two concerns, invention and judgment, which overlapped often indistinguishably from invention and arrangement, two of the five areas (or canons) that made up the subject of rhetoric. Furthermore, as two of the other five, memory and delivery, were really only applicable to speech, it was only in invention and arrangement (along with style, the remaining canon) that rhetoric applied to both written and spoken language. 104

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Practically, this meant that students learned methods of invention and arrangement in rhetoric, and then very similar or even the same methods again in their study of dialectic. Both writing in English and each at one end point of the narrative of early modern rhetoric, Bacon and Locke set out in their texts from the position that the current curriculum was in need of reform. In the curriculum supporting that old science, dialectic concerned itself first with the study of the topics, a set of places or seats of argument that, once learned, provided a means to find points by which to argue on any side of any question. Aristotle had divided these into common places that could be used to make arguments on any subject or question and special topics that could be used to make arguments in specific settings, like a trial. The second part of dialectic, judgment, then evaluated arguments by use of various kinds of syllogisms. In both cases the things judged or invented were statements or propositions about the world; arguing about such propositions (usually through some manifestation of the formal process of disputation) helped people then come to discover some truth about the world. Rhetoric was likewise concerned with arguing about statements about the world, but, where dialectic helped people understand truths about the world, rhetoric helped people make decisions about things that could not be known with certainty, the easiest example being political decisions about some course of action whose outcome could not be known. The new science, however, concerned itself not with propositions, but with observation of the world and the rigorous testing of hypotheses or formulas put forth to understand those things that were observed. Topical invention and syllogistic judgment become more or less irrelevant in such an approach, so that by the early nineteenth century at least one important philosopher was to suggest, as Howell puts it, “that induction as envisaged by Aristotle and his followers [i.e., Renaissance Humanism] was incapable of advancing [hu]mankind a single step in the acquisition of new knowledge.”7 Such a position was unthinkable in the sixteenth century, where the dominant text in the university curriculum was Aristotle’s Organon, followed closely by Rudolph Agricola’s revisionary text De Inventione Dialectica libri tres (1479).8

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While the topics and the syllogism retained vital importance, some applied uses of tools and concepts of technology and science began to lay the groundwork for the new science, in daily application in the lives of the gentry as they managed their households and estates. New concepts of surveying, husbandry, and accountancy thus emerged just at the moment that humanistic learning was beginning to apply some similar principles to theories of discourse and its relationship to argument and understanding. In both instances the trend toward the new science was signaled and described by a move away from communal sources of how to know and how to value the world, and toward a model in which individual agents applied abstract methods to discover objective and verifiable facts about the world. Such facts, however, might not always serve one’s interests. If the value of a piece of earth can be known with geometric certainty, and the only function of communication is to transmit that knowledge, there’s no point in trying to negotiate price or conditions of sale. The sixteenth-­century gentry landholder had to navigate an approach to discourse that valued the individual over the community, and a developing science that sought to remove questions of uncertainty from things like measurement and valuation, and had to do so in the midst of maintaining good relations with the community and allowing themselves negotiating room. To manage the growing technologies of both the sciences of land management and the new arts of discourse, gentry estate builders relied on established rhetorical techniques. The topics (e.g., quantity, quality, comparison, and definition) allowed individuals to adjust to an ever-­changing science and build and maintain community even while recognizing individual advantage. This topical adaptation in turn established one particular aspect of how the gentry adapted classical rhetoric to their own mundane early modern needs. While work like that of Agricola’s Dialectica had begun revolutionizing the understanding of the topics for sixteenth-­century scholars (like Ramus), for most of the English gentry their understanding of the topics would likely have been conventional, rooted in the work of Aristotle and, especially, Cicero. Cicero’s Topics served as a central text throughout the curriculum, but it was, or claimed to be, an adaptation of Aristotle’s topics. 106

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Though it is perhaps no less complex philosophically than Aristotle’s work, it is certainly less systematic (it is framed as a letter and is thus less clearly structured and more conversational), and at no point does it offer a succinct listing of topics or orders or categories; the different topics rather unfold as Cicero discusses them. However, unlike Aristotle’s more formally structured discussion, Cicero’s has the advantage of providing examples for each of the topics drawn from actual or representative situations, many based in questions of property, debt, and liability. So he explains, for instance, that “in the way of comparison there are many kinds of valid arguments; in this way: ‘That which is valid in a greater affair, ought to be valid in a less: so that, if the law does not regulate the limits [i.e., borders] in the city, still more will it not compel any one to turn off the water in the city.’”9 For Aristotle the term “property” is a technical one, one of four orders of predication, also including definition, genus, and accident. Any one of these may be treated under one of the ten classes of essence, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, activity, and passivity. The bounds between the elements in each of these four-­and ten-­member groupings as well as between the groupings themselves are not impermeable. As Aristotle explains about the largest classification, “All remarks made in criticism of a ‘property’ and ‘genus’ and ‘accident’ will be applicable to ‘definitions’ as well.”10 “Property” in the sense of something owned thus easily lends itself to topical negotiation, where “property” refers to “a predicate which does not indicate the essence of a thing, but yet belongs to that thing alone,” and a series of discursive moments described by Aristotle enables one to assert or challenge the belonging.11 Definition signifies a thing’s essence, according to Aristotle, and something accidental is not essential, so calling into question that something happens in every case (quantity) or always (time) or only in certain conditions (relation, place, state) might render something accidental that has been claimed as essential, or vice versa. Such a change in understanding a thing’s essence would necessarily affect its status as property in both Aristotle’s technical sense and in the more colloquial sense. If pasture turns out to be instead woodland, its value as property is changed. The efficacy of the topics lies precisely in the mobility between and among them.

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While it may be true that the visualization of knowledge would eventually lead to a new science in which the topics were useless, for the gentry the topics were necessary precisely because they enabled one to insert uncertainty into areas that claimed to be certain. For the gentry involved in the mundane negotiations for the land that would make up their estates, land arguments depended on topics. However fitfully, new ways of envisioning and understanding land, livestock, and produce were emerging, and these in turn led to and accompanied changes in the social organization around these material elements. These new discoveries and innovations had to be applied in the realm of daily discourse, and among groups who might have only the most tenuous grasp of their principles or implications. These scientific approaches then created a new set of terms and approaches that someone in the gentry would need to be able to effectively use, and the older topics of invention provided a ready-­made means of adapting these new developments to their own land negotiations. In this application the topics were invaluable.12

Trodden Out

The end of practical application therefore guided the rhetorical topics as presented by the vernacular handbooks. These have the charm of simplification, losing much of the nuance without resolving any of the theoretical implications, but nevertheless providing an easy-­to-­remember listing of topics. The vernacular handbooks illustrate what we might expect a landowner to have retained of the topics from their formal education, or what they would have picked up about their use through experience in the discourse of estate negotiations. For example, Leonard Cox’s The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke (1532), though it was not popular in the sense that it was published in only two printings, is nevertheless useful to consider because it is the first such a rhetoric printed in English, and because it is written by a grammar school master rather than a university scholar; it thus represents an early example of how the topics would have been understood.13 Further, because it is written with the grammar school student in mind, it represents the expectation for those who had or would aspire to have that level of education—­not perhaps the Latin language itself, but the principles that 108

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were to be derived from the instruction. In other words, if you were in the gentry, dealt with the gentry, or aspired to be in the gentry, you would be well served to have at least this much understanding of the topics. For Aristotle definition encompassed the other objects of argument, including property, genus, and accident, because defining a thing meant being able to distinguish and identify these elements of that thing. In application this required seeking out the terms that would allow for discussion of these elements. Cox explains, “[De]finicion (as Tully wryteth) is whan in any wrytynge is some worde put / ye significaciō wherof requireth exposicion.”14 This topic is illustrated through a legal example pertaining to how three claimants would define “forsake,” “goods,” and “ship” to press their individual claims on the goods in a ship that two of them forsook. As Cox explains, definition balances not only the signification of the words in question, but our own positions stand in relation to what is signified; the definition proposed must not only be acceptable to an audience or to people generally, but once such a definition is established, the claimant has to show that the circumstances thus defined support their claim. Therefore, while definition seems to point toward certainty, it is imminently social in two ways—­a reader or writer must not only think the definition acceptable herself, but thereby assume that others would accept it, too; and the term described has to be applicable to circumstances in such a way that the reader would not only accept the definition, but accept that the circumstances of whatever the writer is arguing fall within the definition. Debates over terms in the context of negotiation are not about terms in the abstract or in relation to truth, but in relation to the negotiation at hand. In the example Cox gives, a man who had leapt overboard during a storm but held onto a line and as such did whatever he could from the water to keep the boat from sinking (which would be, practically, not much) would define “forsake” in such a way to support the idea that he had not forsaken the boat, even though one could pretty easily imagine he had, given a slightly different definition of “forsake.” Definition became a fruitful site of negotiation because the terms themselves speak to a larger process, any step of which might introduce error or uncertainty into what claims to be certain as a result of the technology.

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Definition also indicated to the negotiator how to take advantage of these uncertainties by suggesting what other topical elements (property, genus, and accident) will be available. An instance of this occurs in an exchange between Sir Nicholas and his son Nathaniel as they try to work out some surveying terms and their significance for an ongoing set of negotiations. Their contact for this process was John Moumford, who operated as a surveyor or land agent for the Bacons. In their exchanges we see that not only are the processes of surveying unstable but also that the terms for doing so are equally wobbly. On 12 June 1572, Moumford sent a letter to Bacon laying out a number of steps that had been taken in regard to the assembling of an estate in Stiffkey. These all literally begin with the process of surveying, though admittedly not a particularly sophisticated process, as the first line indicates: “My duty remembered unto your honor, this shall be to let your honor understand that I have trodden out the field.”15 “Trodden out the field,” however, does not really capture the fullness of the work that Moumford did, all of which contributed to the topical description of the land and how it might be valued. He explained that he has found out the revenues and areas of two pieces of land (Calthorp’s and Corbett’s) and to whom the revenues belong, as he has apparently indicated in a bill sent separately, thus offering elements of definition, of parts, and of properties. He seems to have negotiated for the use of a foldcourse; negotiated the use of about 440 acres of land to which the town of Stiffkey has rights; identified some other potential town holdings that might be of interest, invoking state, position, relation; and sent along deeds and other paperwork pertaining to these same questions. Moumford has negotiated with individuals and with civic corporations, he has arranged the exchange of legal documents to enforce or clarify these, and he has physically done the work of verifying the arrangements both in their social and their material elements. To have “trodden out the fields” speaks as a synecdoche for all these activities, and the listing of those activities under the genus “trodden out” provides Bacon a whole host of points in which he might at any given time be able to negotiate or advise Nathaniel or Moumford to negotiate. There are certainly technical terms of measurement at play; the township has offered 440 acres to Bacon’s use for corn, with another 325 or 110

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so potentially available for livestock. In such figures the letter would seem to offer the kind of rationalization or the kind of systems that landowners want to rationalize, but here they function primarily as traces of a multitude of negotiations and surveying processes, any one of which might eventually be subject to questions of quantity, or quality, or comparison, or properties that define the land in question: Of what did these acres consist? How or through what instruments were they measured? More than simply places to find an argument, the topics provide a set of habits about what should be communicated within the larger processes of building and managing an estate. Terminology could become problematic, but when the terms were not clear, the possibilities of argument expanded. Nicholas wrote in September of 1572 that “Moumforde telleth me that he is not able to make your Lordship a true value of the lease of Corbett and Calthorp, but especially not of the profits of the parsonage, without having from your Lordship the drag (for so he termeth it to me) wherewith the ground of Stiffkey might be trodden out and measured, for otherwise he must give credit to that which other men tell him.” What is meant by “drag” itself became a question, as the Bacons look to these textual exchanges for places of argument. So, in his reply, Sir Nicholas explained that “the dragge that Moumford speaks of I know of no other but this which I send you, which is a survey of the desmesnes. The surveys of Caltrowpe’s and Corbette’s lands be hard to understand as they be written, but when Mounford cometh up bid him speak with me touching these surveys, and then let him bring with him a survey of the parsonage as best as he can make it.”16 The terminological consistency that landowners seemed to have looked for is not one that they particularly practiced: here the values of the lands, which are surveys (as we shall see), are drawn, but this does not mean they are drawn in the sense of a visual representation—­at least not necessarily—­nor is it clear that one necessarily draws a survey anyway. The same is true for the practice of surveying, which may also be valuing, or drawing (drag being etymologically akin to draw, as in to draw or drag a plow, to draw or drag a pencil across a page), and that may be drawn or written, regardless of its final form. There is, then, little chance that surveying is going to provide certainty, but it will provide places for argument.

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The instability around the terms for surveying, and the range of additional activities (and thus topics) that the terms speak to, meant that, ultimately, “survey” itself became a topic. In addition to a powerful and wealthy father, Nathaniel also had a powerful and wealthy father-­in-­law, Thomas Gresham. Like lord keeper Nicholas Bacon, Gresham was seldom in the neighborhood, but he nevertheless built up extensive estates throughout Norfolk and became one of the major power brokers in the county. Nathaniel played a similar role here as he did with his own father, acting as an agent on the ground in complicated land (and other business) negotiations. In their correspondence, too, the terms of surveying were a topic. As for the survey of Massingham, I will take [it] another time when I have more leisure. I do perceive the Bishop of Norwich hath been a visitation in Suffolk and will be at Saffome this next week whereas Cely shall present him with my lease for to sign for his land in Holkeham fearing he will put me off still till his surveyor come down for to make a survey, for that I spake with his surveyor on Sunday last at the court who sayeth his Lordship will keep promise with me so soon as he hath made a survey, which I do nothing like for that his Lordship hath put me off the 4 years with this word of “survey.”17

Gresham’s displeasure is clear here (“I do nothing like”), but the source of that displeasure comes not from surveying per se or any inaccuracy therein, but in surveying’s use by the bishop as a negotiating tactic, a means of putting off (it seems) a claim Gresham has to some land in which the bishop himself had interest. An agreement had been reached, apparently, and the decision to exchange the land had already been taken largely irrespective of measurement. The source of the bishop’s reluctance to move forward until a survey was taken (at least from Gresham’s perspective) lay not in an anxiety about uncertain measurements, but rather in a reluctance to fulfill his part of the bargain. Each claim about a survey and the processes of decoding what terms play what roles in the processes of valuing land are active moments in these literate exchanges. At a distance—­outside the conversation and outside the period, a reader may be drawn to that which is fixed or seems or suggests 112

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stability—­terms like “acre” or “survey” and the instability around them may therefore seem to be an obstacle. But for those involved, the instability would have been simply a part of the process of literate exchange, not invisible, not unproblematic, but intrinsic nevertheless. These writers were not specialists communicating with one another—­the correspondence is not, as it were, surveyor to surveyor or mathematician to mathematician. Instead these were members of the gentry, landowners and land dealers, working through a terminology that both was and was not their own, negotiating changes in approaches to land management in order to build their own interests and to do so within the bounds of long-­established but nevertheless dynamic communities.

Refuting Ramus

While the gentry were adapting rhetoric to new purposes, scholars were attempting to reform rhetoric’s role in the educational curriculum. Alongside the possibility that traditional dialectic and rhetoric might not serve as a solid foundation for knowledge about the world emerged the idea that Aristotle and his followers were not sacrosanct, and that there was a career to be made in attacking them under the guise of providing a “new” science, even if that science itself simply repackaged the work of earlier, more sincere revisers like Agricola. The most notorious of these reformers of the curriculum was Peter Ramus, not least because he was the most combative. His presentation and defense of his master’s thesis, which was a detailed refutation of Aristotle’s Organon, became legendary, although it may have never happened as that legend described; at any rate it marked a pattern of attacking—­vocally if not brilliantly or even intellectually consistently—­ conventional wisdom. For many histories of rhetoric, Ramus’s greatest innovation was the dividing off of the study of invention from the subject of rhetoric and leaving that study entirely in the dialectic curriculum. Ramus’s revisions are often thought of as “impoverishing rhetoric and depriving students of access to invention.”18 Though, according to Peter Mack, this image reflects a “widespread misunderstanding,” the view of Ramus as a charlatan who nevertheless exercised tremendous, though negative, influence on rhetoric

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finds its origin in the unquestionably meticulous work of Walter Ong.19 For Ong Ramus’s conception of invention as strictly dialectical, coupled with his belief that any question could be broken into a series of dichotomies that in turn could be mapped out as if in a flow chart (and that, through the print technology of the day, were indeed illustrated with just such schematic diagrams), signaled the removal of the voice and thus agency of individuals from discourse, debate, and reasoning—­the latter of these becoming, at best a private affair, and at worse an exclusively technological one. “Ramist rhetoric,” Ong writes, “is a rhetoric which has renounced any possibility of invention within the speaker-­auditor framework. . . . By its very structure, Ramist rhetoric asserts to all who are able to sense its implications that there is no way to discovery or to understanding through voice, and ultimately seems to deny that the processes of person-­to-­person communication play any necessary role in intellectual life.”20 In England Ramism would enjoy its heyday in the first half of the seventeenth century, but a small vanguard was already actively promoting—­or at least propagating—­R amus’s ideas by the 1580s. These nascent Ramists were familiar to the project of creating a vibrant literary English language: Gabriel Harvey’s 1570s lectures at Oxford explicitly invoked Ramism as their guiding idea, while Dudley Fenner’s Art of Logik and Rhetorik (1584) and Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) and Lawier’s Logik (1588) are all clearly Ramist, the latter two works dedicated to Henry, Earl of Pembroke (Philip Sidney’s brother-­in-­law) and to Mary, Countess of Pembroke, Henry’s wife and Sidney’s sister. None of these texts enjoyed more than one printing, but they suggest that Ramism had an appeal for gentry reformers of English. And, while none reproduced Ramus’s ideas in full, they indicated the broad outlines: commitment to a strict (though presumably complementary) division placing invention and judgment in logic, and style and delivery in rhetoric, and a streamlining of rhetorical features like tropes and figures, so that tropes are reduced to metaphor, synecdoche, irony, and metonymy. This streamlining occurred mainly through the use of dichotomy, dividing any question or category into two and then two again and again, and so on. This dichotomizing can be seen, for instance, in Fraunce’s rhetoric, 114

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wherein rhetoric has two parts, elocution and pronunciation; elocution has two parts, congruity and bravery; congruity has two parts, etymology and syntax; etcetera. Tropes are of two kinds, the first divided into metonymy and irony, the second into synecdoche and metaphor; metonym is either efficient or material. Such dichotomies, once presented in printed texts, added to the sense that thought itself was being reconceived, no longer operating through verbal but through spatial, visual processes. The attempt to relate thought to the spatial and visual is easiest to see in the graphic representations of the dichotomies, where chains of pairings stretch across the page, grouped together by lines branching off to indicate the dispersed pairings like the right-­hand side of a tournament bracket. The sixteenth-­ century English Ramist rhetorics and logics were not so elaborately graphic, but Fraunce’s texts employed multiple fonts to indicate logical relationships, while Fenner’s printer made as much use as possible of the brace or curly bracket as a set piece of type to indicate dichotomous relationships; other printers relied on more clearly custom-­made pieces of type and rules to vary the conjoining of the various pairs. The brace for such groupings was not necessarily a print innovation—­it was standard in note-­taking and in manuscripts.21 But their appearance on the page of a text that was ostensibly meant to represent the way that thought worked could leave the impression (at least for the modern reader, like Ong) that thought itself, even as a reflection of the world, could be viewed spatially and evaluated and expressed with mathematical, geometric certainty. While Ramus did not abandon the traditional topical logic by any means, what he did was set the stage for its diminishment by removing it from the sphere of discussion and rhetoric: “The topics, relegated by Ramus to dialectic (or logic) exclusively, were in principle denied any oral or aural connections at all.”22 Peter Mack has pointed out that Ramus never intended for dialectic and rhetoric not to be studied together, and that his innovation was pedagogical, rather than theoretical.23 Ong acknowledges this, but his argument implies a longer history than sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century pedagogy. While “Ramus’ over-­all program was to combine philosophy and eloquence,” this by no means was the outcome of his work: “The Ramist dialectic represented a drive toward thinking not only of the universe but

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of thought itself in terms of spatial models apprehended by sight,” which in turn made “the sequel of Ramus’ work . . . dry-­as-­dust ‘technology’ and systematization.”24 In this sense Ong’s objection is not so much to Ramus (for whom Ong’s disdain is nevertheless palpable, to say the least) but for Ramus’s clumsy efforts at replacing the messy give-­and-­take of rhetorical thought with a supposed certainty of scientific thought as the dominant model of rationality in intellectual history. Ramus thus becomes a representational figure, rather than a key player, in a narrative where space, number, and visualization replace dialogue and discourse as the foundations of social structure. But the same process by which Ramus felt that certainty could be achieved on any question could also be used to inject uncertainty into any question that had been previously considered settled.

The New Science of Measurement

Whatever the sequel, the Elizabethan gentry used the topics to rhetorically manage the visualization of abstractions such as an acre or something one owns but cannot see or touch. New land surveying processes allowed landowners to know what it was they owned and allowed potential landowners to know what they were purchasing. New technologies of measurement and calculation promised the kind of certainty the new science imagined, but whatever was made certain could always be made either uncertain or irrelevant through means that can best be described as topical. Up until this moment, the main way area was measured was simply by pacing out the ground in question using a pole or chain of a certain length. This end was served as well, along with research into legal and other written claims, by an actual moving through space and recording of those movements. In this way the surveyor would complete a visual inspection that would help give a fuller life to the information available through a review of legal and other written records. This process not only supported the community but was a communal operation. The surveyor would walk the manor with two members of the manor, an older member and a younger member. The older would point out to younger and the surveyor the various boundaries and their markers that indicated where various holdings within the manor had traditionally been placed. The surveyor would record these for comparison 116

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or evaluation in light of his other research; the younger member would learn these so as to be able to point them out in the future generations. In this way a continuity of the body of the manor was established, a continuity in which the entire community of that manor was invested. One feature of sixteenth-­century land owning was a miniboom in texts devoted to explaining the mathematical and geometrical techniques that were essential to transforming the surveyor’s art from one of verbal description of land according to ancient boundaries and borders to graphical representation of land in the form of maps, charts, and plats.25 These include Thomas Digges’s 1571 A Geometrical Practice, Named Pantometria, a volume originally begun by his father, Leonard, that promised its readers “rules manifolde for mensurations of all lines, superficies, and solides,” one of the chief uses of which consisted in aiding “to set forth the true description or exact plat of an whole Region.” Dedicated to Sir Nicholas Bacon, Pantometria was concerned with general principles of measurement, and served as a companion to the elder Digges’s Tectonicon, which had been republished in 1564 and 1570 and would continue to be published well into the next century. Where Tectonicon explained how to apply measurements to land surveying specifically, including providing tables for calculating area of land parcels, Pantometria explained the science of measurement itself, including ways of measuring using glasses and instruments—­that is, means of measuring without pacing out an area of land. Such innovations were part of an ongoing shift in the technologies of land measurement more generally, but they also promised a shift not only in measuring but in conceiving of land. These manuals thus presented to the landholder an image of the land transformed into a series of spaces that could be definitively measured out using the tools of the new science.26 This new science sought to overcome a twofold uncertainty. Measurement itself was fundamentally an unstable concept. According to Leonard Digges’s Tectonicon, an inch was equivalent to three ripe, round barleycorns.27 Spread across an acre, of course, the variation between one person’s inch and another’s sowed the seeds for a great deal of dispute. Richard Benese’s earlier surveying manual, The Manner of Measuring of All Manner of Land, from 1537, insisted that barleycorns are not a viable or practicable unit of

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measure and urged surveyors to base their measurements off a “London standard.”28 Presumably, however, the London standard would rarely have been handy, but barleycorns could always be gotten a hold of and also had the virtue of being, for those whose lives were spent in agriculture, easy to visualize. Even in Digges’s later manual, then, the older and much less scientific foundation for surveying length prevailed and, despite its connection to nature, rather than to technology, may have been preferable precisely because it could be easily visualized. An additional source of uncertainty came in the terms used to describe the land. According to Benese, for instance, a woodland acre is not the same measurement as a pasture acre, which makes talk of an acre immediately complicated. Furthermore, surveys of the period are happy to substitute “land” for “acre” and “butt” for “rood” and to exercise any other number of local or otherwise idiosyncratic usages.29 Even precisely what was meant by a “survey” was not clear, nor was what a survey produced. The map produced by a survey is technically called a “plat,” which is so close to the word “plot,” the area of ground being represented, as to prove indistinguishable, at least in the period. Furthermore, this term itself then spreads out into other discursive fields like drama and narrative. As literary scholars Martin Brückner and Kristen Poole have explained, playwrights took advantage of numerous opportunities to pun off “plot,” and “in playing with ‘plot,’—­a word which increasingly implied structures imposed upon both land and text—­late Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists self-­consciously call attention to this very process of solidifying lexical, geographic, and narrative boundaries.”30 The surveying manuals used print technology to visualize the practices of this measurement in ways that privileged visual and spatial knowing over verbal knowing much more dramatically than Ramus’s brackets. Digges’s manual is particularly illustrative in this regard: engravings show surveyors moving about the pages with their instruments, measuring the heights of towers and hills and the areas of fields and buildings. For each thing measured, lines trace out the geometries, showing larger triangles and smaller triangles embedded within them, offering patterns of angles and subsets of lines to the reader, who is also a viewer, tracing out the steps 118

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on the page that the users themselves would have to make, showing how the instruments should be shaped and how they should be placed. The process is thus visualized, and so, too, the map or plat that would be produced. The geometry and technology that would produce the new graphical representations would seem to promise more precision and accuracy; as Eva Taylor explains, “The superiority of the accurate estate plan over the simple survey by book was immediately obvious. As it hung on his chamber wall . . . it enabled the landowner to consider his lands as a whole, and to weigh the advantages of some fresh disposition of the fields, or of some intended sale or purchase.”31 But an enhanced understanding of one’s ownings or the legal value inherent in them was not really what these developments produced. While Digges’s Tectonicon and Pantometria are examples of a growing print genre dealing with the latest processes for measuring land, this precision of measurement, and the visual graphic representation it would allow, only very slowly took over as the standard understanding of what a survey should look like. David Fletcher has explained that surveys did not regularly appear with maps or plats until well into the seventeenth century, and not inevitably until the eighteenth. In practice, while representation such as Taylor describes may have had a kind of aesthetic appeal, it could have at best played only a small part in the actual management of estates. The visualization of the estate was no doubt pleasing, but the real currency of the estate was money, along with the network of material goods and social obligations through which money was created and circulated, and these things were not so easily visualized on a map. The descriptive survey, rather than the visual representation of the plat, allowed for far more precise description of potential and actual productivity of the land, so that even when a plat was included in a survey, it would be indexed to a verbal description.32

Maps and Grids

A ruled ledger or spreadsheet-­style grid serves, like a map, as a means of visually representing knowledge and delivering certainty. What stands out about their use by the Elizabethan gentry, however, is that their organization was topical; in their negotiations over land and other property, the gentry

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rely on uncertainty as much as certainty—­either can produce advantage, and the topics provide a means of uncovering uncertainty in what appeared to be certain. The uncertainty of the terms and units of surveying provide just one instance of opportunity, fitting neatly within an argumentative system that based itself in part on finding flaws or errors, or negotiating opportunities in matters of definition, quantity, and quality. The Lestrange family of Norfolk, for instance, kept a detailed survey of their estate, set up in ruled columns with what amount to parcel numbers down the left margin of each page, descriptions of the land in a central column, and land value in the rightmost column.33 The survey amounts to a book roughly folio size, entirely made up of columns, text, and figures. For parcels 23–­32, however, a graphic survey, drawn on a scrap of paper about one-­fifth the size of the standard sheets, has been inserted into the volume, unattached in any way, and drawn with enough care to indicate certain lot boundaries in dashed lines and others in solid lines, as well as indicating the presence of some buildings. But the feel of it, stuck in along the pages on a fragment of paper and with corrections made though crossing out, is not so much as a means of gaining visual mastery than of perhaps illustrating what is detailed on that page—­it conveys neither certainty nor grandiosity (see figs. 5–­6). Rather than a plat, it was a ruled ledger that enabled the Lestrange family to keep careful records of the obligations their estate holdings incurred. Ruled lines create a grid, and the grid then creates a sheet of cells in which information is entered. At the top of the page, column headings indicate the amount various holdings incurred in “conduct money” (a royal tax), the “hundreds” or land units to be taxed, the “mony” associated with each hundred, and the total monies. Each descending row then provides, in the leftmost column, a total amount of conduct money; a bracket then allows, within the same cell, for this total to broken into smaller units. Following £35, for instance, a bracket divides this into £3 10s, £7, and so on, to total £35. The next cell to the right then contains a listing of hundreds, and each hundred corresponds to the subdivided unit of conduct money from the column to the left: 3p10s corresponds to East Flegg, and 7p to West Flegg. The next column shows that East Flegg owes 100 men (i.e., to armed service) 120

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and the next column that that 100 men cost 5p. This last column of money is then totaled in the rightmost column. Writing about Roman and early medieval accounts, Hannah Higgins has argued that “they can also be seen, with their columns and rows, as a running tabulation that forms the appearance of a grid. This wealth was not, however, yet subjected to the homogenizing function of a money standard as the universal denominator of value.”34 Though the record-­ keeping instruments discussed here (e.g., surveys, abstracts) also rely on the grid space for creating visual ease of records, they likewise hover between an ancient system in which material goods have real value and a “modern” system in which all value is expressed in monetary units. So, while accounts that were cast in English estates may have reflected to some degree the advances of double-­entry bookkeeping that began to spread at the end of the fifteenth century, for the most part the record keeping of an estate visualized both material and financial assets in one space, frequently converting one to the other for different purposes in a manner that, if not haphazard, gave money, land, goods, obligations all an easy fungibility. Two related elements differentiate the sixteenth-­century record keeping from its ancient counterpart. Most important is its ubiquity; from the ancient through the medieval periods, a scribal class took care of the administration and record keeping of such estates and enterprises. The sixteenth-­century gentry, however, expected that a competent householder be able to both write and keep accounts. The expectation and ubiquity of a gentry literacy also resulted in a greater flexibility and variety of such record-­keeping systems for an individual estate. Nevertheless, however individualized, these methods were united in one important aspect, so vital it might easily be overlooked. Rather than a highly regulated system of accountancy or inventory or surveying, however, what was similar about these systems was their purpose: the records were not kept for curiosity or satisfaction, but for argument and negotiation. They provided evidence of what was owned and what was owed, and they also provided sites out of which any number of argumentative positions could be generated. The Lestrangeses’ various records indicated equivalencies along axes of different qualities and quantities, and any point of negotiation about the value or obligations

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inhering in a particular parcel of land could be approached from a number of different directions. To visualize the scope and boundaries of one’s estate through a map or plat was no doubt useful and satisfying, but just as useful—­probably much more useful—­would be the ability to rely on a spatial and visual organization of different topics of argument about any part or parcel of that estate. Ramus’s graphic organizations of topical argument may well have served as a herald of the new science and new math that would govern things like land measurement and agricultural science, but, at least throughout the sixteenth century, these sciences never lost their roots in topical argument. Like the Lestrange family, the Ferrer family of Tamworth Castle (located in Staffordshire rather than Norfolk) kept a number of surveys of the family estate in the 1570s. These come in three forms: rentals, surveys, and terriers. A rental works simply as a list of tenants and how much they owe, and the value, in rental, of what is owned. The survey describes at least in part the land in its parcels, which might be listed according to who rented it or by geographic or social features, and that land’s value in terms of rent and (at times) productivity. The terriers in the collection list land according to parcel describe the size of the parcel, but add into the description, at least in some cases, a description of the quality of the soil, which serves to organize the description of the property. One such survey, for instance, is titled with the name of the tract being measured, and “the best sort of land there.”35 The document lists parcels of land that are part of the manor by the name of their current holders, then gives a series of lines of text that describe the amount of land held (which is further broken into the Lande [acre], butte [perche], and rood), the quality of land, and the quality of the soil on that land. For example, the top line reads “Item of the greatest lande and best earthe ______ vi”; the next line, “Item of the middle sort of land and the best earthe ______ v”; then “Greatest sort of land of middle earthe” descending to finally “smallest sort of land of the worst earth.”36 The terrier than moves to describe the same for buttes and roodes of land. Along the left margin is a two-­letter code that indicates what each line describes, so that to the left of the top line are the letters “bg,” indicating that that line describes the greatest land and the best soil. The practical 122

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result is a matrix that describes the quality of the property in that parcel along two different axes: size and soil. In appearance, perhaps, these tables produced something of the spatial and visual features Ong attributed to Ramus’s dichotomies, and, like Ramus’s dichotomous topics, they provided the materials out of which arguments would be made through a spatial presentation.37 The difference was that the materials themselves seemed to have a certainty—­a fixed quality of soil, or a fixed quantity of land or rent. But, despite their apparent fixity, negotiators who were trained in topical rhetoric would see in the categories of the grid ample opportunity to adapt their understanding of definition, of quality, of quantity, to search opportunities where what appeared certain could be made to appear uncertain. The various homemade and impromptu matrixes and visual representations fit into this new science as harbingers of spreadsheets and global positioning systems, in modern terms, but they also illustrate a more ancient foundation for the way these sciences are actually going to be used. Through the topics the gentry would be able to turn the certain facts and data that the new science produced into discursive points to be questioned and negotiated. In the midst of ongoing discussions over the purchase of land from a Mr. Bozom, Sir Nicholas Bacon wrote to his son, Nathaniel, who acted as an agent on the ground.38 Three sites of argument are apparent in this negotiation—­geometric, geologic, and social—­and Bacon moves these into the ongoing negotiations through the topics of quantity and quality. One way Bacon approached his negotiations with Bozom was by pointing out a discrepancy in measurements: “It is also very strange to me that Boldero [Bacon’s surveyor] should measure the Close called Pastur Close but for 33 acres where by Hunte’s measure [Bozom’s surveyor] it is 57 acres.”39 Bozom counted out nearly double the acres that Bacon did. Andrew McRae has pointed to this specific passage as an expression of “frustration,” with the primitive land measuring techniques available.40 But, in the context of instructing his son on how to conduct negotiations with Bozom, Bacon’s expression of frustration functioned as an exercise of opportunity. In the context of negotiation, pointing out such a discrepancy served to do more than express frustration; it could also call into question the credibility

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of the person with whom one negotiates, or undermine the grounds on which they make a claim. As Sir Nicholas’s letter continues, an equally rich site for negotiation has to do directly with the nature of the land. Here quantity (acreage, money) intersects with quality, specifically the geological and agricultural quality that makes the land useful in various ways: “I fynde by Hunte’s certificate that . . . he [Bozom] will nedes delyver his moore and marshe and firrey and brakey growndes at 3s. 4d. the aker without giving any manner of allowaunce as he owght because in dede more [moor] is no pasture.”41 However big an acre is, Bozom was selling all the acres of his land at the same price. But what Bacon was interested in buying was a not only a certain quantity of land but also a certain quality of land, which got described in terms of what the land can produce. Does it produce firs and bracken, or, in other words, vegetation that cannot be sold but must be cleared before it can be put to agriculturally (and thus economically) productive uses? Or is the land marsh, which means it must be drained and prepared before being put to such uses? Bozom’s negotiating stance presents land as simply geometric space to be valued accordingly; Bacon insists that the product of the land may be more or less desirable, and that that affects the land’s value—­what he wants is pasture, enclosed pasture where he may engage in wool production. The discussion of acreage (geometry) is one of quantity, while the discussion of produce (geology) is one of quality. But the leverage to be gained from these general topics was based on a particular expression for a particular context among members of a group who recognize each other’s abilities to make claims and draw on standard topics in light of those particularities—­in this case, particularities of the measurement and produce of land. In addition to the geometric and geologic sources for argument, Sir Nicholas went on to point out a social concern as a site for negotiation: “Besydes all this I saye and besides suche other lyke thynges, he demaundeth nowe a newe allowaunce for 4 acres whiche lieth neyther he nor his tenaunt cannot tell wheare. And whearesoever it liethe, open to a common it liethe and hath bene used, and this must I nededs take for severall [i.e., enclosed] for so he seyethe. And I muste offende all the comoners for 124

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usynge of it so.”42 Here one question is where the land actually is, which obviously makes a difference when it comes to asserting rights over it. Wherever it is, and although it is pasture, it is not pasture that is usable without labor. Unlike with the issues of quantity or quality, however, the issue is communal—­the custom has been that the land in question has been common, but its value can only be realized once it is enclosed. The trouble here, rather than preparing the land through agricultural methods, comes in preparing the land through social processes, notably those of how the various residents of a place would react to a change in the uses of the land from which they have customarily benefited. Where the geometric and geologic arguments exploited discrepancies between a limited technology and the need to come to agreement in the terms of that technology, this argument exhibited gaps in the understanding of custom and use.

Demonstrative of a Thing: Honest, Profitable, Easy, or Hard

In adapting the topics from their classical and humanist sources for the use of the gentry reader, English writers did not offer any particular intellectual innovations.43 As a text Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorike was more sophisticated, more comprehensive, and more popular than Leonard Cox’s rhetoric, but it nevertheless served a similar function. These works did not govern the discourse of the gentry and their clients; instead they described the already existing expectations of that discourse. Wilson’s rhetoric, in treating invention, is primarily concerned with topics, which he refers to as “places.” Here they are much more practically oriented, with specific places given and described for each kind of oration one might give, and in these rhetorical places Wilson demonstrates the practical innovations to which the topics had been applied. Wilson offers places to consider for all manner of what he calls demonstrative orations, such as for a person, for a deed, and, as he explains, for things: “The kind demonstratiue of things, is a meane wherby we doe praise, or dispraise things, as Vertue, Vice, Townes, Cities, Castelles, Woodes, Waters, Hilles and Mountaines.”44 Negotiating over a piece of property is not exactly the same as praising or dispraising, of course, but neither does it align perfectly with Wilson’s three other types of orations: deliberative, exhortatory, or judicial. As Wilson

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and many other authorities suggest, however, the divisions themselves are somewhat arbitrary, and praising or dispraising the property in question functions as a means of establishing its value in exchange. So it is perhaps not coincidental that this is the point in his rhetoric at which the places seem most conducive to negotiation, and also the point at which the places of logic are invoked. The places or topics in the “demonstrative of things” are honest, profitable, easy to be done, hard to be done. If these do not comprehend all the topics one might employ negotiating property, they certainly are comprehensive enough. The comprehensiveness is driven home, however, when Wilson explains that these places are inextricably related to the topics of dialectic or “Places of Logic” (Definition, Causes, Parts, Effects, Things Adioyning, Contraries): I Doe not see otherwise, but that these places of Logicke are confounded with the other fower of confirmation, or rather I thinke these of Logicke must first bee minded, ere the other can well be had. For what is he, that can cal a thing honest, and by reason proue it, except he first know what the thing is: the which he cannot better doe, then by defining the nature of the thing. Againe, how shall I know, whether mine attempt be easie or hard if I know not the efficient cause, or be assured how it may be done. In affirming it to bee possible, I shall not better knowe it then by searching the ende, and learning by Logicke, what is the finall cause of euery thing.45 Where attention to quantity, quality, and definition allow for writers to insert uncertainty into negotiations, Wilson’s “demonstrative of things” places allow for the writer to adapt to those elements that may not admit of uncertainty; if one accepts that a certain amount of wool weighs a certain number of stones, then one in a sense waives the objection of uncertainty. But this waiver certainly does not mean that all has been said, particularly when the running of an estate is such a complex affair involving so many people, places, and things.46 To build a profitable estate of any sort was a serious undertaking, a complex of moving parts and possibilities for revenues. The category “demonstrative” is thus also useful in such a case, because any particular exchange may be simply a part of a larger process and 126

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may not be intended to persuade, or exhort in itself, but rather to provide the material out of which negotiations involving these other elements may be conducted; due to the nature of letters, where multiple subjects might be treated, any one letter might also contain multiple genres. A topical rhetoric that draws on the flexibility of the places of logic thus became essential to the corresponding landowner, who must carefully manage people, places, and things, as a letter from Gresham to Nathaniel of 18 July 1579 makes clear. Principal among the possibilities for profit was the wool trade, and this is Gresham’s first concern: “I have received yours of the xv of this present, whereby I perceive my wool nor my lambs is not so good unto me as they were last year, for that Cely [another of Gresham’s agents] writeth me my wool doth weigh but 763 stone and my increase of lambs was but 2,716, and my wool last year weighed 976 stone and my increase of lambs was 3,260. As the difference is great, so I must be content seeing it is every man’s case this last year.”47 The weights of wool and the number of lambs are not sources of dispute or negotiation, per se. Nevertheless, their inclusion indicates a shared understanding of some topical features and potentials. Gresham thinks through (or, rather, appears through his writing to think through) the problem of the lambs and wool by moving through topics. The potential for profit is derived from cause, effect, and accident: the numbers are accidental to the lambs and the wool, a quality of them that does not thereby determine their essence. In their potential to be converted to profit, however, and in the costs of realizing that profit, these accidents also speak to profit and to effects. Gresham’s satisfaction suggests the question of whether the “thing” is “honest,” in Wilson’s terms—­in this case Gresham understands the yield of lambs and wool to be a condition shared by everyone else, and therefore is not a result of dishonesty. Nor, for that matter, was there anything in the processes of realizing the lambs and wool that could have been done differently in terms of hardness or easiness. The yields are a common condition, and there is no argument or objection or problem to be found through these topical approaches, and so Gresham “must be content.” Contentment is by no means guaranteed, but something arrived at through a reasoning that is, despite the modern issues of finance and

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measurement at play, topical. Where Gresham has been able to content himself with the yields of lamb and wool, he is less contented with at least one other transaction. “Perceiving by Cely his letter you have sold too on in Upwell 10 acres of copyhold with a tenement for £40,” Gresham writes, but while this transaction was satisfactory, others have been less so, apparently, as Gresham complains that “I would you had sold the rest in Upwell after that rate.”48 We cannot be clear where Gresham’s sentiment lies here—­whether he expressed displeasure with Nathaniel’s skills as a broker, or lamented the general state of the land market, or was speaking to the qualities of a particular plot of land and holdings (the ten acres of copyhold with tenement) that made it particularly valuable in relation to other holdings in that area. But where he clearly expressed contentment regarding some transactions, in this case he was clearly not content, wishing the sale price had been different. Each of the possibilities for dissatisfaction would be available to Nathaniel to mull over, as he, too, was topically conversant. If the sale was easy, it was too easy; if it was hard, Nathaniel did not rise to challenge. Perhaps he was not alert enough to potential dishonesty, or perhaps was too honest himself. In any case, the thing was not profitable—­at least not profitable to the quantity Gresham had hoped. The topics, a shared understanding suggested merely by writing “I would you had sold the rest . . . after that rate,” provided Nathaniel a set of concerns to address as he went on to further sales on Gresham’s behalf. Outside of the county, Gresham was trying to clear some debt, a decision that meant he would put on hold certain land development schemes, explaining, “I will do no more cost in building or tilling at Westacre nor no other place till I am out of debt.”49 Getting out of debt required in turn that he sell some land, or the rights attached to some land, and he instructed Nathaniel to carry out these transactions: “Praying you to proceed in the sale of my copyholds and rent to the rest of my tenants of Walsingham, with my rent and copyholds of Tasborrow and Earlstonham also Hokham and Thurlsbee in Upwell.”50 All of these sales required the kind of calculation and measurement that surveying provided, at least as part of the negotiating process. Measurement did not guarantee revenue, of course, and thus it became only one of a number of uncertainties that had to be negotiated, not always satisfactorily. 128

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Though concerned with “facts” that could be known with “certainty” through new scientific methods, this exchange relied on a shared understanding of the topics through which writer and reader could approach problems, a process that could be triggered even by slight suggestion (“I must be content”; “I wish you had sold”). Gresham let Bacon know that he was keeping track of his lambs and his wool through multiple sources; not only was Gresham basing his estimate of revenue on Bacon’s report, but also on Cely’s. Beyond even that he lets Bacon know that he had been in conversation with other men about the yield of their wool and lambs as well. Gresham played out these conversations for Bacon, not only tracing out the exchanges themselves (between himself and Bacon, Cely, and other men) but also recording his reactions to them on both an intellectual level (“seeing it is every man’s case”) and an emotional level (“I must be content”). Moreover, Gresham indicated that precision was involved in weighing out the wool and counting out the lambs, even though he leaves unsaid how or when these weights and counts were established. The weights and counts themselves indicate a host of processes that took place on the ground and by which the acreage on which these sheep were pastured and stocked had been translated into numerical value. It is tempting to view these numbers as a sort of final summation, an ultimate product, an end point. They do to some extent serve as a sort of sum, but this sum was embedded in a larger process for which the numbers operate as a synecdoche. Each stone of wool would be sold for a certain price, to be determined by the market; each lamb will have a certain value also determined by the market. More than this, however, the wool required a whole host of other activities to produce, from shearing to carding to carting, while the lambs likewise required a set or processes to produce involving the working of an entire community and over which Bacon was seemingly expected to exercise some interest and activity himself. Beyond even this, this was not a one-­time event of profit (or loss): Gresham’s comparison to the previous year’s performance emphasized that Gresham’s interest was long-­term. He wanted to maintain these processes, and he indicated his involvement in the community that effects these processes by tracking them out over time. His reference to having a sense of other men’s losses

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and his contentment, therefore, with his own lower-­than-­expected gains not only indexed his own sense of the profitability of his affairs, but it also reassured Bacon of their own relationship. The correspondence in this case was not meant to express disappointment with Bacon (or at least not only to express that), but with a general situation in which Gresham, despite his absence, still felt himself deeply involved.

Negotiating Topics

The topics governed exchanges about how to measure and calculate and value the land; they also governed how individuals negotiated with one another over these values. Thomas Knyvett and William Paston, though neither famous nor powerful to the extent of the lord keeper and his sons, were nevertheless prominent landholding gentry in Norfolk, with concerns both there and in London. The Paston family was a gentry family who dated their prominence in the area back to the fifteenth century. They are indelibly connected with the rise of the vernacular in English through the documents that have come to be known by historians as “The Paston Letters,” which remain one of the earliest comprehensive sets of English correspondence. The Knyvetts, too, had been notable in the area for over a hundred years and would continue to be so: one of the earliest members of note was an important figure in Henry VII’s government, while a later member of the family would lead the party that would uncover the gunpowder plot in the beginning of James I’s reign. But, in both cases, the primary source of both the wealth and prestige of these families came from their holdings and estates in Norfolk. Consequently, when members of these families came to negotiate land exchanges, their exchanges involved a need to make sure not only that each could exercise their respective wills but also that the community that was the gentry be upheld through the forms and processes of negotiating. The topics provided these forms and processes, especially as they were well suited to address issues of property exchange. On 30 December 1597, Sir Thomas Knyvett wrote to Sir William Paston to negotiate some rights to a piece of land. In this letter topics determined how bodies, spaces, rights, and ways of speaking and writing all met: Whose land was where? What kind of land 130

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was it, in a legal sense (copyhold, freehold)? What were its boundaries? What were the limits on what could be done with what was on the land, like timber? How could those rights be expanded or contracted? “Sir,” wrote Sir Thomas, “I understand by my tenant Mr. Francis Kent that upon reasonable condition you are contented either to enfranchise the copyhold land which I hold of your manor of Sallkirk hall or to grant me the license to fell the wood growing upon the same for a reasonable composition, or to buy the wood of me and to give me a reasonable satisfaction for the same.”51 Knyvett was looking to either obtain the land in a more permanent manner or obtain rights to harvest the timber on the land. In his letter he established a connection between himself and Paston while also invoking both surveys and the rights and obligations associated with them in order to forward his claim. By invoking Mr. Kent, the tenant, Knyvett established his correspondence as part of a larger ongoing pattern of communication. From there Knyvett laid out three possibilities: to change the nature of the agreement by which Knyvett held this piece of land from Paston; to allow him timber rights to the land, for a compensation (i.e., “composition”) of some sort; or to allow Knyvett to harvest the timber and sell it direct to Paston himself. The options he understood from Kent provided the topics that helped situate Paston in his approach to the request to follow and also began to steer him in a desirable direction as to what might constitute “reasonable condition” and “reasonable composition.” The topics suggested the possibilities: the invocation of enfranchising the copyhold raised the questions of definition, property, and qualities: Who has rights over this land, and how are those rights articulated, exercised, and enforced? Agreements about reasonable conditions and compositions would likewise be guided by topics: the quality and quantity of timber available from the lands in question will determine a “reasonable” value for that timber and the land on which it sits. Everything written in the letter—­the invocation of a tenant, the easy use of technical terms (“enfranchise the copyhold land”), the possibilities for the timber—­speaks to a shared set of common understandings specific to this landed gentry class. No particular understanding is necessary here: it is not clear what Knyvett’s motivations were, whether to get the land clear so that it might be arable or converted into pasture, or else simply to raise

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revenue from the timber, or some combination thereof. But whether or not Knyvett and Paston already understood why Knyvett wanted to clear the land, both writer and reader were able to proceed with negotiations, because the topics allowed both writer and reader to quickly situate the various requests, claims, and information involved. If new scientific methods might add more precision to these processes, this did not change the need to translate the material findings of that science into social relationships. The shared topical understanding provided a means by which to negotiate specific moments where these material and social interact, such as the tenancy, the copyholding, and the timber. The practice of surveying was the formal means by which the estate holder kept track of their land, and its invocation suggests a mutual understanding of its importance as well as a problem to be resolved (or taken advantage of) from a negotiating standpoint: “And I am to request of your good favor a copy of the extent and survey of my copyhold land as it is in your record to the intent that I may the better distinguish the same from the freehold of Hoovese(?) and Moorehall.”52 Here the topic of the survey functioned as an addendum to the discussion of the timber rights or the change in holding status of the land, and so as additional weight in his negotiations with Paston. Not only is there a potential issue with the use of the land, but Paston also needs to provide a better demarcation of the land itself. While the uncertainty surrounding borders and boundaries can be seen as an inconvenience, it speaks with just a hint of negativity to Paston’s role as the holder of the manor, which he has not seemingly kept in order in terms of making sure that his tenants know what is theirs and what belongs to the other tenants. Alternately, Knyvett is seeking a survey he doesn’t want to undertake himself—­in either case, he adds a burden in the negotiations for Knyvett and what he must provide, but the justification for doing so is the idea of greater certainty in determining the outline and definition of the land in question. The topics created habits of organizing and writing about aspects of the world, particularly those aspects that came to be the subject of the new science. The gentry employed and relied on the topics as they communicated with one another about land and the profits that might be realized thereby. 132

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Estate holders thought about their estates through the topics, and they expected others to do the same. The topics allowed anything to be compared to anything else. Modern accounting and finance, which can translate anything into money, and modern science, which can reduce anything to geometric and numeric forms, are thus predicted and served by a topical system that always finds out similarity, difference, quality. That the new science displaced or deformed the old rhetoric is itself, at this point, a bit of a commonplace. In examining the fading of the topics from the curriculum, Carolyn Miller has claimed that “as conceptual connections between human reasoning and the particularities of practical situations, they [the topics] lead our attention outside the academy to rhetoric as it occurs naturally in human societies.” Certainly, this interaction of reasoning and practice is evident in the gentry negotiations above. However, “as rhetoric became academicized, the topics became ‘academic’ (that is, they lost their relation to social situations), then scorned for being academic, and finally abandoned. This trend points to an unfortunate conflict between rhetorical pedagogy and rhetorical practice.”53 The abandonment of the topics by the curriculum, however, does not diminish the influence they exercised and continue to exercise in that practice. Writing about the interrelationship of literary works, particularly dramatic works, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Valerie Traub has argued that “the texts we now deem ‘literary’ comprise a mode of discourse that, while structured through distinct rhetorical forms, nonetheless exists within, partakes of, and contributes to the same epistemological domain in which scientific values, procedures, and logics were being developed” in early modern England. Traub goes on to argue that literature and science both shared, in this moment, “modes of knowing,” and that an examination of the period’s literature thereby provides “a unique rhetorical vantage from which one can examine the formal, syntactical maneuvers by which scientific discourses functioned and gained efficacy.”54 Perhaps due precisely to the sort of loss pointed to by Miller, in which topics have largely fallen out of our contemporary understanding of what rhetoric is, Traub’s concept of rhetoric here is largely limited to style. What I have suggested above is that it is not Renaissance style but topical invention that structured both the discourses and domains of the new science.

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Chapter 5

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Gentry Style

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n the previous chapters I discussed three different means by which the gentry developed and employed a shared understanding of rhetoric to solidify their individual senses of group belonging and identity. They used ways of reading and writing as part of a larger complex of material signs of their status; they used the classical mode of description to create a sense of involvement in their correspondence with one another; and they used topical rhetoric to discover and take advantage of uncertainty in their negotiations with one another for material like land and livestock. The final rhetorical process I consider is the practice of style, or elocution. Throughout the early modern period, style was one of the two central elements of writing instruction. At the beginning of the century the canon of invention provided the means through which the educational curriculum (grammar schools, universities, and instructional manuals) taught rhetoric. By the end of the century, style was clearly set to overtake invention in this curricular importance. Letter writing and other record-­keeping practices and forms had become a large part of gentry writing activity, but they were so structured by material necessity that style came to dominate the gentry’s approach to conflict, concord, advice, giving, taking, lending and borrowing. Consequently, Erasmus’s work on style became a dominant influence on rhetorical education; as it was well established by the time Elizabeth reached the throne, nearly every English scholar and politician was educated under that influence for the following seventy years. For the gentry in their everyday writing, style provided a shared means of communicating. Concerned with the forms and order of words that would appear as sound in the air or in ink on a page, the study of style governed many of the principal material manifestations of immaterial things like thoughts, emotions, obligations, and virtues. These invisible 

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things, considered vital to the constitution of both individuals and the community, were in many ways only knowable through style. Thus, style gave the gentry a potent means of managing each other’s unseeable and unknowable hearts and minds.

Invention and Style

One could be forgiven for believing that, for both moderns and early moderns, rhetoric consists of not five canons but two: invention and style. For moderns this manifests in an idea that rhetoric is intrinsically concerned with civic action, which is accessed through the processes of invention. But eighteenth-­century rhetoric’s focus on style initiated this inventive, civic-­ minded rhetoric’s decline. Sharon Crowley sees this struggle articulated in the beginning of the twentieth century by rhetorician Charles Baldwin Sears, who in turn traced it straight back to antiquity. As Crowley reads Sears, the complaint is that invention addresses subject matter of moral and civic importance; a focus on style makes rhetoric not about civic and moral communion, but about individual self-­indulgence, so that rhetoric becomes, as Sears suggests, “an elaborate art of display, devoid, at its worst, of other motive.”1 This lament echoes Walter Ong’s concerns about Ramistic rhetoric. The divorce of invention from rhetoric, and the subsequent turn to style as rhetoric’s chief focus, led to a rhetoric devoid of matters of ethical and civic concern (Crowley) and unable to allow for genuine communication or dialogic pursuit of moral truth (Ong). At best style is a necessary servant to invention; at worst it is a parasite. Other scholars have offered more complicated accounts of style’s historical evolution. For Jeanne Fahnestock style has historically had a cognitive as much as an affective dimension, intellectual as much as emotional. More specifically focused on the eighteenth century, Mark Longaker argues that style was the means through which thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith imagined that virtue (as embodied by the bourgeois class) was formed. Lois Agnew understands style in eighteenth-­century English rhetoric as a means of reflecting inward states like “propriety.”2 Similarly arguing that early modern literary studies could take style more seriously than it did at the time of her writing, Patricia Parker traces out how metaphor, in the 136

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sense of transportation or translation, is essential to the very concept of property. All of these arguments take place, however, in the context of style’s relevance to the modern, invention-­driven world. Though they certainly did not see the two as antagonistic, even the most run-­of-­the-­mill rhetorical theory in Elizabethan England saw invention and style as the main interests of rhetoric, and most frequently English-­ language rhetorical treatises took style as their subjects. Even the most comprehensive work of English rhetoric (and the most successful), Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric, took invention and style as its main subject matters, almost to the exclusion of the other canons. Invention, the process of generating arguments, is the principal focus of Wilson’s text. Of rhetoric’s five parts (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery), Wilson’s text treats invention most thoroughly, spending about 150 of its 225 pages on that first part. After that, however, style is the only subject to be given thorough treatment, taking up almost 60 pages. Arrangement, memory, and delivery are each given about 4 pages, leaving invention and style, in this most popular of English-­language rhetorics, as rhetoric’s principal, almost exclusive, concerns. Other English rhetorics were even more singularly focused on style. Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577; revised edition, 1593), which went through several printings in the century (though not as many as Wilson’s did), was primarily concerned with figures, as was Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, printed in 1550, three years before Wilson’s text, and on which Wilson arguably drew for his own discussion of style.3 These represent the understandings of style that were likely most accessible to the gentry for whom and by whom they were written. Such concerns would have been instilled first for the men of the gentry in grammar schools and universities, where a foundational, universal text was Erasmus’s De Duplici Copia verborum ac Rerum commentarii duo (the earliest version of which appeared in 1512), translated in a popular edition as Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, but perhaps more literally translated as “the twofold copia of words and arguments in a double commentary.”4 This more literal translation provides insight into why the age was so concerned with style. Writers like Wilson understood language as the material manifestation of reason, wisdom, and knowledge; style thus functioned as

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the only means by which wisdom could be shared. As Wilson expresses the idea, “Many are wise, but fewe have the gift to set forthe their wisedome,” and so “enter into talke with such as are saied to be learned, and you shall finde in them suche lacke of uttrance, that if you judg them by their tong, and expressing of their minde, you must needes saie thei have no learning.”5 The most fitting analogy for Wilson, used as well by Erasmus in the opening of his Copia, is to describe style in terms of clothing: “Elocution getteth wordes to set forthe Invention, and with such beauty commendeth the matter, that reason seemeth to be clad in Purple, walking afore bothe bare and naked.”6 The analogy of style, or elocution, with raiment is not meant to suggest style’s superficiality. The point instead is to reflect the classical idea about rhetoric’s function more generally, which is to make truth or reason persuasive. It is true that the sentence promises beauty and purple garments, but the comparison’s impact relies on the fact that, when arriving to participate in a political debate or any other civic or community engagement, generally speaking, someone wearing clothes will be instantly more persuasive than someone who arrives naked, regardless of the inventive capacities of the naked participant. Such a comparison had even more force for a gentry who explicitly believed in the signifying power of material goods as essential to an entire social and even universal order.

Elocution

Following current usage I have referred to the concern of this chapter, the third canon of rhetoric, as “style.” Such usage, however, is an anachronism. Those of us who work on the scholarship of rhetoric in English departments take as our object of study rhetoric as manifested in written or printed texts, and the concerns we have translated over from a rhetoric concerned with oratory we have tended to group under the heading of “style.” The term familiar to Renaissance rhetoricians, however, would have been “elocution,” which covered a variety of concerns. One of them, “style,” indicated three manners of speaking or writing: high, middle, and low. Whichever style one pursued, elocution consisted of a set of studies that would enable one to best provide words to match the occasion, the matter, the audience, the ideas, the purpose, the argument. Thomas Wilson divided elocution 138

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into four parts: plainness, aptness, composition, and exornation. The first three were about audience (plainness and aptness) and speaker or writer (composition); the last, exornation, which he addressed most fully of the four parts, treated how words and sentences represented ideas, emotions, material objects, and social structures. These representations were created through figures. Wilson defined the figure as “a certaine kinde, either of sentence, Oration, or worde, used after some newe or straunge wise, much unlike to that whiche men commonly use to speake.”7 However, the purpose of such novelty is not simply for novelty’s sake. Figures could allow speakers and writers to confront and adapt to new circumstances, to employ language so as to address ever-­ evolving circumstances. Tropes themselves, in Wilson’s telling, were first invented by speakers to describe things for which their current language was not adequate: “When learned and wisemen gan first to inlarge their tongue, and sought with greate utterance of speech to commend causes. Thei found full ofte muche want of woordes to sette out their meanyng. And therefore rememberyng thynges of like nature unto those whereof thei speake. Thei used suche woordes to expresse their mynde, as were most like unto other.”8 While Wilson places this innovative response to linguistic need in the hands of “wisemen” seeking to argue “causes,” the examples he offers to demonstrate are rather more run-­of-­the-­mill, suggesting that, rather than rarified innovations, tropes are fundamental to the way language works. So, he explains, if he accuses someone of ignorance in figurative terms, he might call that person “crooked, cloudie, darke, blinde . . . all which words,” Wilson helpfully explains, “are not proper unto ignorance, but borrowed of other thynges that are of like nature unto ignorance.”9 But the examples are striking not because of their inventiveness or borrowed nature, but because they are so routine that their borrowed nature needs to be pointed out and even explained, as Wilson goes on to do. Figures provide new ways of expressing old ideas, functional ways of expressing new ideas, and conventional ways of expressing conventional ideas. Figures can be ornamental; examine their function in detail and they exist in a complex relationship with thought, emotion, value, community, and the material world.10

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These elements also intersect in the law, which governed, particularly in its attention to property, the relationship of individuals, the community, and the material world. As suggested in the previous chapter, the details and processes of property ownership grew increasingly complicated throughout the Tudor period, and, to address these growing complexities, an increasingly complicated set of courts and legal apparatuses evolved.11 The Elizabethan court system was an amalgamation of a series of church courts, local courts, and, increasingly, Crown courts such as Chancery and the Exchequer. The languages of these courts, their texts and judgments, also made a hodge-­podge. The legal education at the Inns of Court was conducted in large part in Law French, a patois developed out of the Anglo-­ Norman court systems that emerged in the wake of Norman government. Laws themselves, and judgments, would be recorded in Latin, as would many legal documents. Court cases would often be conducted in Law French, though they might also be conducted in English. This would even happen in the same case and same court, so the lawyers might plead in Law French, while the testimony of witnesses, defendants, and plaintiffs might be in English. The proceedings themselves, if recorded, might be written in Latin, Law French, or English, though the judgments were supposed to be recorded in Latin.12 Those who wished to avail themselves of the law would not need to be literate in any of these languages, so long as they had the resources to obtain representation. The specialization of the arguments and procedures of the law coupled with its specialized languages meant that it was unlikely that any one individual landowner or farmer was going to be able to participate fully in the processing of his or her own legal needs. One would need to turn to legal expertise to help qualify judgments and institute and execute proceedings. That said, a great deal of negotiating went on outside of the court systems. In order to accomplish their goals within the context of the developing legal system, landowners developed a set of moves that connected their negotiations to that system: an appeal to various aspects of the law could serve as a threat, or as a goal; discussions of the law could divide correspondents or connect them; land, money, or arrangements around them could be discussed in regard to their status under law; the 140

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law and the responsibilities and rights that it entailed could be put into contrast or comparison to other social structures, like religion or community ethics; and, of course, complaining about the law and appealing to the law could be casual and conversational and so connect people through mutual experiences of the law in everyday life. This variety of possibilities and more had become the requisite vocabulary, grammar, and rhetoric for negotiation among the gentry and needed to be negotiated by them and those who wished to be one with them. Facility with rhetorical figures may or may not have been of benefit to legal practitioners. Thomas Wilson called the middle style “the lawe kinde, when we use no Metaphores nor translated words, nor yet use any amplifications.”13 But most of the gentry, well schooled as they were, were not legal specialists, and, for them, figures were an essential means of communicating with each other about the law. Style as the gentry would have understood it through formal education consisted of closely related elements: tropes, schemes, and amplification or colors.14 Tropes were thought of as encompassing the use of individual words, as with metaphors; schemes with the arrangement and ordering of words or ideas, as with contraries or repetitions; amplification or colors with the practices of variation. “Figures” as a term was somewhat flexible. In Wilson’s use it referred to tropes, schemes, and colors. For Henry Peacham it was merely tropes and schemes. These instructional texts looked to simplify the classifications, but their classical antecedents were just as interested in the complications of classification. Quintilian considered figures and tropes as two separate things and divided the former into figures of thought and figures of speech, and so the English deviated at least from that classical authority.15 Even Quintilian points out, though, that many of his contemporaries and older authorities considered tropes either as a species of figure, or the two terms as interchangeable. Likewise Quintilian points out that authors differed particularly on the numbers and kinds of each, as well as how they would be classified. These differences in number and kind may have been confusing to students in both ancient Rome and early modern England, but they also trained students in the manifold flexibilities of linguistic forms, and created a shared experience and shared set of expectations in manipulating those forms.

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Whether or not the English-­language treatments of figures adequately captured all those complexities, they did reflect a baseline expectation of what one ought to know and be able to do when writing in English.

The Law in Writing

Gentry culture was landed culture, and it was also debt culture, and consequently the law was discussed, invoked, and disputed on a regular basis in gentry correspondence. Writing specifically about legal matters, especially property, everyday writers with an investment in the law (though without necessarily having legal expertise) could not help but write about it in ways heavily determined by their particular literacies. In a literate culture in which figures and style had become a dominant means of teaching and understanding writing, they had also become a dominant means of discussing and understanding legal matters as they underpinned everyday life. It is fair to say that such stylings in large part were a product of and constitutive of gentry education and gentry discourse. The educational system was built in large part, when it came to writing, around the idea of teaching style; this was true certainly of the grammar school and early years of the university curriculum. Such an education, as has been suggested, was instrumental to belonging to or even joining that class. The law, too, functioned very much in service of the gentry, even if the law itself was a specialized practice (albeit a specialization largely practiced by the gentry). But writing to each other about the law’s role in day-­to-­day matters was very much a part of gentry life, and so, unsurprisingly, the training in how to write influenced the way they wrote about the law. Being well trained in figures, schemes, and tropes was especially useful in writing about the law because the law frequently depended on the relationships between terms, ideas, and things. Generally this meant that a term represented some larger concept, or was used outside its strictest meaning but in a sensible and customary way, or both. Lawyers and professors of rhetoric, dialectic, and grammar all depended on these processes, even if in law the larger social significances of the processes are in some ways easier to see. “Property” as a legal term was in regular use in the law courts during the sixteenth century, but it only appears in printed law texts in a systematic way 142

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toward the very end of that century. The term was first formally discussed in text in English by professor of civil law John Cowell in 1607 who explained that property was technically “the highest right that a man hath or can have to any thing, which no way dependeth upon another mans courtesie.”16 This definition was not practical, though, because in this sense all land in the kingdom would be the king’s property, as all land was technically held “either mediately or immediately of the Crowne.” Instead, the term was more often used to refer to “that right in lands and tenements, that common persons have.”17 The jurist Sir Edward Coke would extend this concept to movable goods as well.18 By the nineteenth century, property had come to be defined as a “bundle of sticks,” a set of rights held by an individual described in an image that gives a sense, through a distinctly rustic metaphor, of the ongoing process of defining the concept of property.19 In its earliest use, “property” signified a relationship between a person and an object while beginning in the sixteenth century and increasingly by the nineteenth “property” the word was defined as a relationship among various people and various sets of rights. In both cases, however, the concept (property) is represented in other terms—­whether some undefined but obviously material “thing” or an actual bundle of sticks, one term (thing or sticks) stands in for another (the concept of property or the larger relationships the concept suggests). To say that I own a thing like a plow, or that I owe you an amount of money, is to have a sign (the plow; the money) indicate a set of relationships and obligations between myself, the plow or money, and other people. In this way property itself functions through figuration. The bundle of sticks metaphor suggests a relationship between persons and processes of law: statutes, precedents, judgments, rulings, actions, courts, wills, deeds, surveys, attorneys, and other processes and participants. As shown by the rentals, terriers, and surveys examined in the previous chapter, these processes and participants might include the parties involved (a tenant and landlord, or a buyer and seller); the piece of property involved (a piece of land, a building, a set of sheep, even simply money); and the valuation of that property, including the processes and people necessary to establish that value (a surveyor, or someone charged with collecting

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the rents). The law, particularly as it intersects with financial concerns, expands this collection quite a bit. A court case involves not only the lawyers and judges and complainants involved immediately but also the textual processes that make up the force of the laws in play, both in the past insofar as these determine the outcome of the particular question at hand, and in the future as additional precedents or points to be referred to later. To manage the complexities of legal relationships, gentry writers depended on figures—­both common figures that indicated shared understandings, and more inventive figures that served to emphasize various aspects of the relationships between themselves and others. In each case figures connect material things to immaterial ideas like property, relationships, and intentions. In a letter to Sir Thomas Knyvett, George Downing writes to secure some funds owed to him by Sir Thomas and uses figures to situate what is simply a bill collection note in a larger network of duties and obligations; figures also allow such a conversation to remain cordial and effective. My duty and commendations unto your worship remembered, giving your worship to understand that I and my other the partners executors are earnestly called upon to great sums of money in regard whereof I am constrained to call for the due from your worship, desiring your lordship that it may be paid at the time. Thus I cease to trouble your worship commending you to the almighty, who always serve you. Wherewith this fifteenth day of November, 1599 yours to command George Downing20

In one sense the message here is simple: I and my partners, says Downing, need money, and you owe me money, so I need that money. But several features suggest the presence of a legal financial network described in connection with an ongoing social status system. Where these features appear, they do so through figures, which provide both fixed processes for working out specific rhetorical tasks and sources for reinventing and revising those processes on the fly but still within recognizable patterns. 144

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The short opening is entirely conventional, but also figurative in several senses. “My duty and commendations remembered” is a scheme that abbreviates a longer phrase in a customary way (e.g., “I hereby signal that I remember the duty and commendations I owe unto you”). Both “duty” and “commendation” also serve as tropes, in the sense that they stand in for more lengthy expressions of duty, social position, and respect. In this way Downing establishes himself as someone who understands the rules of discourse in the community and in the particular exchange in which he situates himself. The next lines suggest a further set of relationships by the obligations and duties of financial exchange, credit, debt, and repayment. As Downing makes clear to Sir Thomas, the broader set of relationships involves more than simply the two of them—­Downing has partners, and they have executors, and all of these are in a state of reliance or dependence on, or expectation of, a circulation and exchange of money that binds them and others together. Both Downing and Knyvett understand themselves as part of this exchange, but the statement of it works to situate Downing’s request: he does not call in the money owed him by Knyvett sheerly out of greed but out of need, and the need in this case involves multiple other people. This tempers Downing’s request while reminding Knyvett of the vast web of dependencies of which he is a part. These dependencies are also articulated through figures, and, as with the duty and commendations remembered, they are so conventional that they might almost be passed over as such. Nevertheless, the use of the phrase “called upon to great sums of money” is a figurative way of saying “asked for” great sums or “demanded” great sums, while “great sums of money” itself indicates the debt of which repayment has been demanded. Both substitutions function figuratively as tropes in which one term (albeit a compound term in the case of “called upon” or “great sums of money”) is substituted for another with which it is associated. In this case being called upon reinforces the fact of the actual human beings who are demanding repayment, while “great sums of money” makes the debt more present. Real people need real money. Downing explains that he is “constrained to call for the due from your worship, desiring your lordship that it may be paid at the time.” Downing

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was not literally constrained, of course, so the phrasing is figurative in that sense, but the sentence is figurative as well in two instances of omission (“call for the [amount] due . . . that it may be paid at the [appropriate or appointed] time”), and in the synonyms “worship” and “lordship.”21 At a glance these seem like trifling choices of word or phrase, but they speak to shared understandings of discursive conventions, and, indeed, of circumstantial reality. Neither the amount nor the terms are expressed because they are known, so the figures place the correspondence within an already established chain of conversations, meetings, signings, and draftings. What has been established outside of the letter does not necessarily need referring to in the letter, but in omitting such details Downing remains sensitive to his reader; he is not sending a detailed invoice or collecting a bill—­it’s just a friendly reminder. The synonymy of worship and lordship has a similar function. Knyvett was a knight, perhaps not technically due the honorific of lordship, yet, under the guise of varying his speech, Downing granted him that honor, or at least suggested he was worthy of it. A thorough exposure to the tradition of figures meant that Downing simply approached discourse—­and thus the world of credits and debits built through discourse—­through figures. Therefore, the actual calling in of the loan only takes up twenty-­two words of this brief letter, because it is one moment in a longer exchange. All of these events go into the making of the particular reality that Downing, his partners, their executors, and Knyvett, his partners, and his executors were actively shaping and that was both determined and facilitated by these figural practices. Debt could lead to legal action, which could be costly financially as well as socially. As with the letter between Downing and Knyvett, one way to address these different costs would have been by drawing attention to the larger set of relationships in the community. But figures could serve to emphasize elements of friendship while also drawing attention to the intricate connection of friendship, or at least amicability, and money. In a letter to Clement Paston, Sir Henry Woodhouse explains that he had repaid the principal and most of the interest on 700 pounds lent him by Paston. But he also suggests that he had heard rumors that Paston was going to sue him or otherwise take action against him. Woodhouse has chosen to 146

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rely on the belief in Paston’s professed friendship toward him, a choice he indicates through figures. I do hear that it is reported in norwitch and other plases that there is hard meswer [measure] intended agenst me for the resaite [receipt] of this mony. I do make esteem your faithfull and honest promises in this matter more then I fere the supposed danger. I have geven credit to your professed frenshipp in suche sorte as I parswade my selfe rayther of a friendly benifett at your handes then the contrary, and untill I find by profe otherwise I will contenew in openion as I have protested unto you and rest as muche at your commandment in all honest frenshipp as any frend you have.22

Woodhouse relies on figures to emphasize his faith in Paston’s friendship. In the opening sentence, the use of synecdoche puts the threatened legal action into context. Hard measure stands in for “legal action” and, as such, calls to mind the entirety of the court systems. By the use of “norwitch” and “other plases” where Woodhouse has heard reported that that “hard measure” is intended, Woodhouse associates those locations with the communities to which Paston and Woodhouse both belonged. Woodhouse believes Paston has threatened an action. There has not so much been a formal threat of legal action, but rather a reputed possible intention of legal action. The phrasing “I do her that it is reported in norwitch and other plases” thus invokes both reputation and a larger network and community of people. The fact that Woodhouse has heard this in Norwich gives an extra impetus to the possibility of proceedings; the community involved includes that of the first city in the county. There is an ongoing conversation, and Woodhouse is centering his message in relation to that conversation. He may have done so, but his claim is that he did not do so out of concern for his reputation or for the legal action. He explains instead that it is his belief in the promises that Paston has made, and the bonds of friendship between them, with which he is more concerned. To answer the concerns raised in the first sentence, the second sentence relies on the rhetorical figure of antithesis (unlike metonomy or synechdoche, a scheme rather than a trope): “I do make esteem your faithfull and

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honest promises in this matter more then I fere the supposed danger,” and “I parswade my selfe rayther of a friendly benifett at your handes then the contrary.” These antitheses are framed through Woodhouse’s own perceptions and beliefs. These sensations themselves form the first contrast. He esteems the promises more than he fears the threat of a court action. This emphasizes Woodhouse’s own self and thus his belief in Paston’s “faithfull and honest promises.” In the second contrast, Woodhouse then implies that despite evidence (of the rumors he has heard of an impending legal action) he is maintaining his own faith in those promises, which were based in friendship. Here the subjectivity is not contrasted, but the outcomes. Woodhouse has persuaded himself of a “friendly benefit” rather than the “contrary,” which is left unspecified. Woodhouse suggests that he is having to bring his own powers of persuasion into play in order to uphold Paston’s honor. Woodhouse continues to use figures to establish the close relationship between finance and friendship. Rather than simply “believing” or “trusting” in Paston’s friendship, Woodhouse has “geven credit to your professed frenshipp.” Since the friendship has been “professed,” it has been, in a sense, pledged or promised, and “given credit” conjures this meaning. Once this idea has been suggested, “friendly benifett” also takes on a financial implication: the specific matter may be an economic one, but this cannot be divorced from all the other aspects of honor and friendship that support the relationship between the two gentlemen. The “hard meswer” that Woodhouse has heard rumor of is also a financial or trade-­based figure. The usage of “hard measure” as a promise of retribution or justice was only a very recent coinage in English at this time.23 The connection of finance and friendship is further emphasized through repetition: “I have given credit to your professed friendship in such sort as I persuade myself rather of a friendly benefit at your hands than the contrary, and until I find by proof otherwise I will continue in opinion as I have professed unto you and rest as much at your commandment in all honest friendship as any friend you have.” The repeated forms of “friend” move the question of friendship from one based in finance to one based in honesty,

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trust, and obligation. Despite the threat of law, which Woodhouse has heard by way of the community, he asserts his confidence in the friendship he has established with Paston—­a “professed friendship” that Woodhouse counts on (has “given credit to”) to produce a “friendly benefit.” The repetition of “friend” is figured here in the context of gain and loss: the giving of credit and receiving of benefit. But from there Woodhouse describes a friendship that relies instead on his commitment (absent “proof otherwise”) to “continue in that opinion” that reflects his consistency and the value of his own word (“as I have professed to you”). This second “professed” then places his own profession of friendship in contrast to the “professed friendship” of Paston to which Woodhouse has given credit. Despite this potentially ill-­favored comparison, Woodhouse remains at the “commandment” (figuratively, of course) of Paston, which leads to the conclusion that Woodhouse stands “in all honest friendship as any friend you have.” Using figuration Woodhouse is able to suggest his efforts to maintain the quality of friendship that ought to be manifested in this kind of relationship. Figures allow Woodhouse to invoke not only the ways that finance and friendship are joined, but the web of other elements of friendship, such as honor and duty.

Synecdoche: Rhetorical Figure and Self

One kind of figure, like synonymy, metonymy, and antonomasia, function through substitution—­one sign is substituted for another. In a different kind of figure, most clearly seen in synecdoche, one sign stands in for a larger set of ideas or a more complex set of circumstances. Thomas Wilson gives the example of a sign outside an establishment: “By the signe of a Beare, Bull, Lion, or any such, we take any house to an Inne.”24 Many authors, including Wilson, suggest that this signification often occurs through the whole for a part or a part for a whole (e.g., “England rejoices” indicates that some of its people rejoice; the king is in town indicates the king along with his retainers, court, household) so that by the seventeenth century this was the general presentation of synecdoche, and its difference from metonymy had largely been lost. For Thomas Hobbes, for instance, synecdoche was simply “when the name of the whole is given to the part; or the



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name of the part to the whole.”25 But, as the Latin name intellectio suggests, this signifying power was for Wilson the prominent aspect of this trope. Intellection then in turn suggests or reminds that, even in the seemingly simple and merely decorative substitution of one word for another, the word carries an entire complex of meanings along with it. Synecdoche is a prominent figure in discussion of the law because, as with Woodhouse’s letter to Paston, many disputes that turned to the law relied on making visible or perceptible what is inherently internal and immaterial—­things like promises, honor, and virtue. Educated in a system that saw layers of hierarchies and correspondences as fit background assumptions for writing, writers found in synecdoche a way to articulate arguments about invisible states like debt, honor, reputation, intention, and obligation that were subject to legal processes. In a letter to her brother in an ongoing argument over money, Muriel Knyvett suggests an entire line of argument based on the way that a sign indicates a larger complex of internal states. Beloved Brother I received your letter in answer of mine of my Brother Edmond Knyvett, in which answer you seem to have nothing to do with my mother’s will. Yet I have always heard of those of good credit you were her only executor and have authorized diverse legacies; and if that is the case, that I can demand my mother’s gift of you. . . . This I have been told long since, but seeing you affirm it otherwise, I pray good brother let me know where my mother’s will was proved and about what time, and I will take out a copy of it that thereby I may justly demand no more than is my due. . . . Where you say as for conscience you hope to have a better than they that show it outwardly I am loth to mistake you. If there be not a more careful conscience in us all inwardly to discharge all trust and truth both to God and man, then our outward show or burden is to hereby [show] how far soever we serveth up our selves. I had no purpose to impeach or [reprehend] your conscience, neither do I, but did not doubt of your good conscience in even dealing and seeming to uphold to preserve the will of the dead. It is a great duty you know in all people.26

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The letter makes use of several typical elements of style. In the phrase “I pray good brother let me know” is the figure obtenacio, a graceful requesting. Expeditio describes the structure of laying out reasons and dismissing them until the conclusion is obvious: if you are the executor, give me my due; if you are not, tell me where to find the will so I can get my due. Ironia is exercised in the phrasing “in which answer you seem to have nothing to do with my mother’s will,” the verb “seem” indicating disbelief, rather than verification. “Seems” also speaks to the larger theme of Knyvett’s letter, a discussion of what actions and words can and do signify about interpersonal relationships like duty and inward states like virtue. The question of signs and how to read them dictates the approach Muriel Knyvett takes in her letter. The first aspect of the argument has to do with a discrepancy between what is understood about the will and what the will itself actually determines. Knyvett notes that Fortescue claims “to have nothing to do with my mother’s will.” He has made this claim on paper—­it has been documented—­and in response to a specific request. Fortescue’s claims run counter to other claims that have led Knyvett to have a particular understanding in regard to the will; Fortescue claims to have nothing to do with it, and “yet,” Knyvett explains, “I have always heard of those of good credit you were her only executor and have authorized legacies.” Knyvett identifies competing claims and competing understandings of how goods or monies are to be distributed. These goods and monies are not referred to in their material senses, but in terms of the processes of willing: they are “legacies.” The will itself, whoever has the role of executor in relation to it, is a mediation between something intangible—­the will of the person who made it, and their desires for the disposition of their worldly estate once they have died. The material document is one kind of will; it is tangible and has a real material form, and yet its import lies not wholly or even primarily in its materiality but in its expression of a very immaterial force: the will of its maker. Like other epistolary exchanges we have seen, this one opens in the midst of ongoing conversations. The first such conversation was an exchange that has already occurred between Knyvett and Fortescue and has passed through the hands of Knyvett’s brother-­in-­law. This letter was in turn an

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answer to a request by Knyvett, and she emphasizes that this was an answer by repeating the word; she has received the answer, and in the answer Fortescue makes his claim about his remoteness from the will. Emphasizing “answer” in this way serves several purposes. The first is simply to show a level of rhetorical fluency; in the repetition the use of the word shifts slightly. In the first instance it functions in a modifying role, in that the noun “letter” is what Knyvett has received, while “in answer of mine” places that letter in relation to a letter from Knyvett herself. In the second instance “answer” becomes its own noun, the place in which Fortescue has made his claim about having nothing to do with their mother’s will. Two rhetorical techniques are in play here, then: the first is simple repetition of a word (conduplicatio) while the second repetition evokes the use of figures in which the meaning or form of the repeated word changes (polyptoton or antanaclasis). At a strictly formal level, in any case, the use of “answer” here suggests a kinship of uses and of training or at the very least of enculturation—­the emphasis is neither haphazard nor accidental, but meant to create a particular effect using a particular technique. A second rhetorical function of the repetition of “answer” is argumentative. By emphasizing answer over, say, letter (the noun-­object that “answer” represents), Knyvett does not merely highlight the fact that there is an ongoing conversation, but reiterates that Fortescue has made a judgment and decision. The repetition makes Fortescue an agent in a decision-­making process, and he must take responsibility for the decision and judgment he has reached (obviously, in Knyvett’s view, in error). The repetition sets up the terms and the tenor of the argument in which Knyvett will now proceed and thus reflects a proficiency in style applied to argument and arrangement, in that she has limited the question at hand to Fortescue’s own claims. In this sense the repetition here in the opening sentence also exemplifies an efficiency in rhetorical arrangement. In multiple ways, then, Knyvett’s repetition of “answer” shows that she was part of the same rhetorical community as Fortescue; she is not university educated, but she is rhetorically educated. Having established the object of the argument, the letter then is arranged to address two points: it goes on first to cast doubt on Fortescue’s claim 152

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as to his legal responsibilities, and then to answer another claim that has to do with Fortescue’s virtue and honesty. The first claim thus focuses on things that are established in law, while the second deals with Fortescue’s conscience. In both cases Knyvett discusses essential elements in a community like the law and conscience. There is a difference between the two, of course, as the law is fundamentally communal while conscience is fundamentally personal, an internal state upon which much of collective activity depends, at least in the worldview both Knyvett and Fortescue appear to share. In both cases the topic of argument has to do with a discrepancy between one thing (the actual state of the will, Fortescue’s conscience) and the signs by which that thing is known to others. In the first case, the law, the specific object of argument has to do with a discrepancy between Fortescue’s claims about the will of their mother (again, in which the document is an outward sign of an inward state, but a state that is necessarily directed outward) and the actual claims made in that document; ancillary to this topic is simply the possibility of access to the document itself. There are as well competing claims about an entirely social or collective matter, the state of the will’s execution and, specifically, its executors. Fortescue claims not to be an executor; Knyvett claims to understand otherwise. The will is a statement of an individual’s wants, an outward set of signs, organized and situated according to legal conventions, that expresses an inward intention. The will is thus a prime example of the management of the relationship between an individual’s intentionality and a collective intentionality (I want to will something to someone; we as a community are invested in making sure that that will is upheld). The role of executor is a central one in this process but differs from the will itself in that it is fundamentally collective, involving at least two people (the will-­maker and the person they choose to execute the will). This complex set of interactivity between an individual’s intention and the collective intention necessary for the fulfillment of that individual intention provides the legal field in which Knyvett’s literacy plays out. Fortescue claims not to be the executor, but Knyvett not only has an understanding otherwise, she also has this understanding from “those of good credit”—­ one that depends on the understanding of others. If those “of good credit”

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are to be doubted in this matter, if the collectivity has misunderstood or is not to be trusted, Knyvett implies, then the whole system is at risk; either processes of social order and collective intentionality have gone awfully wrong, or Fortescue is not being honest. As such the phrase functions as synecdoche. By the figure she calls out Fortescue’s claim of privacy for a position that is only ever a public, collective one. Knyvett is owed a legacy under the terms of the will; such was her mother’s will, and if Fortescue, as she believes, is the executor, it is her right to claim this legacy from him. This is an understanding she has been given through a community (the community, as her rhetorical style and arrangement have already established, shared by both she and Fortescue), and Fortescue is claiming—­explicitly or implicitly—­that her understanding is incorrect: “This I have been told long since,” Knyvett explains, but Fortescue claims “otherwise.” Knyvett makes clear that she did not develop this understanding on her own, but rather that she built it from what those of good credit told her for a long time. It is a long-­term, collective understanding. By suggesting otherwise Fortescue does not just call her credibility into question. As the role of executor is a fundamentally communal one, the entire system is at stake, or at the very least that system, not just Knyvett, is what Fortescue, in his claim, is pitting himself against. Of course, the nature of such collectivity is that it can always be called into question. Knyvett acknowledges this, but she also raises the point that if the understanding that the community, or one part of the community, holds is incorrect, there are quite material means of establishing this error. The proof of the error need not lie exclusively with any one individual (as, she suggests, Fortescue is claiming). Thus, “seeing you affirm it otherwise, I pray good brother let me know where my mother’s will was proved and about what time, and I will take out a copy of it that thereby I may justly demand no more than is my due.” The will, which is the outward sign that indicates an inward state, is also the material sign of a collective intentionality, one that ought to be upheld. This sign exists; it must have been at some point publicly invoked and recorded (proved); and this should have been done at a correct time and in a correct manner. The sign, the will, engages and reflects this entire complex process. Its function in this way is as with 154

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synecdoche, and it is through this particular use of synecdoche (even if it is not always acknowledged as such) that the particular discursive reality of these writers is shaped. This discursive reality reflects, participates in, and shapes a broader set of realities. In the case of the will this reality is primarily connected to the law and to legal processes. The law is itself one institution in a broader edifice of institutions that shape the social reality that Knyvett and Fortescue, despite their differences and regardless of their intentions in this exchange, share in and perpetuate and influence together. The second half of the letter deals with the conscience. The question of the conscience here resembles the question of the will in its form: How does a sign actually signify a complex condition or process? The law depends upon a community, a set of customs, a history—­the complex appealed to is fundamentally public. By appealing to his conscience, Fortescue is appealing to something that is—­supposedly—­essentially private. The conscience stands in for an idea that there is something fundamental to the individual human that is her or his own. In some ways this is a religious idea, but both the law and religion depend upon such a form, as indicated by instruments such as the oath or the bond, in which an individual offers some sign (often in the form of “word”) of their true internal and private intention. There is an expectation that this intention should in some ways align with upholding the general custom, if not the general good. The conscience, as Fortescue employs it, represents that part of the individual that serves as the internal check or measure of that intention and the will with which it was (or was not) carried out. In Fortescue’s claim (at least as we have it through Knyvett’s response) this conscience is his, more or less, alone—­his to make claims about, and his to understand. Knyvett’s response calls this understanding into question, suggesting that the intersection of forces that make the conscience signify is more comprehensive than a single individual. In paraphrasing Fortescue’s claim about the conscience (his “hope to have a better than they that show it outwardly”), Knyvett situates the conversation in precisely these terms of the inward state and the signs thereof. Knyvett first suggests that, while she is going to reject the premise of his claim, she wants to give Fortescue the benefit of the doubt in terms of making what seems to her an

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unsustainable or even dangerous claim; thus she suggests that she is “loth to mistake you.” In this way she prevents the possibility (or at least goes through the motions of preventing) a direct insult. However, she goes on to imply that Fortescue’s claim about the nature of the conscience is in error: “If there be not a more careful conscience in us all inwardly to discharge all trust and truth to God and man, then our outward show or burden is to hereby [show] how far soever we serveth up our selves.” The nature of the conscience is not a strictly internal thing—­it cannot be separated out from its outward show. Indeed, it is fundamentally social, and fundamentally not private. A careful conscience is not about the individual’s will but about the fulfillment of the individual’s duty to both God and other individuals. The outward show is nothing more than a reflection—­a sign—­of an inward state whose essence depends on having “discharged” this duty to others. For Fortescue, at least in the most negative interpretation, the sign of the conscience is connected strictly to his individual state; for Knyvett, however, the sign is a representation of the individual’s connection to a larger social reality. Knyvett’s explanation is not, of course, directly about the nature of signs or synecdoche’s relation to language and social reality, though this is the circuit of meaning within which it operates; it is, however, about a very specific set of outward signs, those by which the conscience is made manifest. These are in a further sense part of a larger, dynamic relationship—­ the conscience is connected to the fulfilment of external duties, so that the outward signs in fact reflect this inward state. In this case, the definition of conscience offers a meaning that is rhetorically effective for Knyvett: it chides Fortescue for attempting to dodge the question of his handling of the will behind a claim to an inaccessible internal state. Knyvett rejects this claim because it misunderstands that state. The relationship of inward and outward is a commonplace in the period, so Knyvett also shows her understanding of this, and thus in addition to correcting Fortescue also demonstrates social solidarity at the same time. Her continuation reinforces this solidarity. Knyvett reassures Fortescue that she does not intend to accuse him of any malfeasance or even of bad intentions, even as she reiterates that the question at hand is not between she and Fortescue but between both of them and the will of their dead 156

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mother, as expressed through the legal document. “I had no purpose to impeach or [reprehend] your conscience,” she writes, “neither do I, but did not doubt of your good conscience in even dealing and [intention] to preserve the will of the dead.” Here Knyvett turns the movement between outward and inward back onto Fortescue: whether or not he thought she meant to “impeach or reprehend” his conscience, she not only did not intend to do so but she also “did not doubt” the goodness of his conscience. In this assurance, though, Knyvett retreats into her own unseeable, unknowable states to hedge her claims: she did not “purpose,” nor did she “doubt.” In asserting what is unseeable without providing any material evidence, thereof, Knyvett enhances the irony of her statement, as she most clearly either does doubt his good conscience or propose to call that conscience into question. Throughout the argument Knyvett moves as suits her between different levels of synecdochic relationships—­a set of signs, each associated with a larger complex of material objects, of outward and inward states, of individuals and communities small and large. The synecdoche pins one on a social map, connecting the individual to larger social structures. She does so within a framework of law and its underpinnings, even though she herself is not a lawyer or legal expert. But she is a person who understands the law and its social bases, the ideals that it draws upon, and those places where its limits and principles can come under pressure or are up for interpretation. By moving among these various understandings, Knyvett is able to both call her brother to account and still at least attempt to maintain the semblance of a relationship with him. She ends by reiterating the virtue and universality of the will process itself as understood as an upholding of “the will of the dead”: “It is a great duty you know in all people.”

Material Individuals and Communities

Figures served to establish and manage relationships between individuals by situating them in communities and providing expression to invisible things like duty and conscience. The law represented the interests of the community in defining how social relationships and material things could interact. The law related people to people; it also related people to things. Style enabled the gentry to manage this relationship, connecting or disconnecting people

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to property as well as to each other. The shifting interactions of people and property was a feature of the legal landscape, where rights to property could easily transfer to something like rights over people. This was the case with wardships: minors who inherited estates were legally wards of the Crown, and the Crown in turn would contract out those wardships to individuals both responsible enough and wealthy or influential enough to win them. In such a state, minorities were big business, but that business intersected with genuinely personal concerns, so that the ward’s personal welfare and material estate became difficult to disentangle, as did the competing interests other people had in their welfare. In a letter to her son Thomas, regarding a matter that the Norfolk Record Office catalog refers to as “Lord Wynsore’s Minority,” Anne Knyvett captures these convoluted relationships through figures of word and sentence. Thus, in writing about a case of a wardship, Knyvett writes to her son Thomas, “I have sent you here to look on my Lord Chancellor’s order to look on; you shall see how far it differs from law and good conscience.”27 Here she invokes two communal understandings—­one legal, one regarding conscience. Knyvett then relates these two understandings to each other and to the lord chancellor’s order in way that puts style to use. The two objects, “law” and “good conscience,” are placed into a relationship with his order, from which they differ, a relationship accomplished by placing the two nouns (law and conscience) as objects of the same verb, “differs.” Such a figure is referred to either as zeugma or iunctio. For Quintilian this and similar figures are “so common that they can scarcely lay claim to involve the art essential to figures.”28 The motivation for using such a feature is economy, and the figure becomes novel only if one of the nouns might not ordinarily be connected to that particular verb. Such a claim establishes a range of ways that a noun could properly be deployed in a sentence. Many of the sixteenth-­century vernacular handbooks follow Quintilian by making the traditional point that any figure, if used too often or clumsily, becomes a fault, rather than a virtue. Most also at least gesture toward the idea that at a certain point figures move from being striking to becoming simply part of the language. A final ambivalence, though it is more fundamental to figures, comes in the uncertain distinction between 158

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thought and speech. Figures depend on patterns and variations; as such, though they may produce pleasing effects at a nonintellectual (e.g., affective) level, they also serve to emphasize or even create rational effects. So, on the one hand, certain figures, “which consist in change, addition, omission, and the order of words, serve to attract the attention of the audience and do not allow it to flag, rousing it from time to time by some specially striking figure.”29 On the other hand, “there is a more striking class of figure, which does not merely depend on the form of the language for its effect, but lends both charm and force to the thought as well.”30 For Quintilian, then, figures of speech produce effect through their ability to attract the audience’s attention, whether through novelty or beauty or shock, or the way they present ideas, or a combination of all of these. These effects are distinct from figures of thought—­which he treats separately—­where the writer structures ideas rather than the language at the sentence level. In the English manuals, generally, these various nuances are not so richly observed, at least not explicitly. Richard Sherry generally sees the value of figures and tropes in beautifying the language, as does Henry Peacham. Zeugma, for instance, serves for Peacham “as well to the delight of the eare, as to a comendable kind of brevitie,” while Sherry does not discuss the figure’s virtue at all, but simply defines the term, gives its three divisions (wherein the verb comes at the beginning, middle, or end), and provides an example of each. Sherry’s examples make clear that the figure itself emphasizes values, ideas, and objects: “There dyd overcome in hym, lechery, his chastitie, sauciness his feare, madnesse hys reason.”31 As Knyvett employs zeugma here (“I have sent you here to look on my Lord Chancellor’s order to look on; you shall see how far it differs from law and good conscience”), the junction emphasizes the differences among the three elements: the lord chancellor’s order, the law, and good conscience. Law and good conscience indicate, and stand in for, two different kinds of community understandings. The law is rule-­bound, determined, recorded, and enacted through a formal process. Good conscience is also rule-­bound, but its processes, though no less binding, are much less formally established. In both cases they reflect a body of communal values and customs and expectations, and in both cases they represent an authority that goes

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beyond any one individual’s will. The lord chancellor’s order, by contrast, even though closely and obviously connected to both law and conscience, is emphasized by the possessive form as belonging to one person, named only by his office, through the syntactic junction set outside the community, and through the verb itself as in opposition to the community. Knyvett articulates these oppositions through the scheme, which allows her to economically appeal to two different sets of values and thus present to her reader two different avenues to take in accepting her claims as against the lord chancellor’s. Whatever her own interest in Lord Wyndsore might have been, Knyvett at the very least attempted to frame his situation in personal terms that express concern for his well-­being. This is by no means to say that she did or did not genuinely have such concerns, only that to express them was part of communicating about the processes of the law. They run side-­by-­side with a concern for and understanding of the legal processes themselves that is not necessarily deep but nevertheless effective. This understanding is apparent in her claim that the lord chancellor’s opinion (that of Sir Christopher Hatton at this 1580 writing) ran contrary to law. Knyvett’s purpose for writing was to place this order, and the claim of its difference from law and conscience, into a particular context: “I pray you send it to Mr. Vicechamberlain and let him see the good justice that my Lord useth in this matter. His authority lasteth but the Lord Wyndsore’s minority and then might the common law try it.”32 Here she appeals to her brother’s goodwill to do her a favor, one that involves the invocation of several different legal avenues, while also recognizing the extent of the lord chancellor’s legal authority in this matter. Again, this may or may not exhibit a particularly deep understanding of the workings of the court of wards, nor of the uses of the common law or of the hierarchy of justices. Knyvett’s understanding, however, is functional, and it gains added force through figures that situate her own understanding in relation to those of others. This understanding is built and demonstrated alongside her understanding of the very real difficulties of Lord Wyndsore, at least insofar as Knyvett frames them. “I am sorry but for the young man,” she goes on to explain, “that he shall be put to great hindrance, not knowing where to bestow himself or 160

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his goods.”33 In the last phrase—­“not knowing where to bestow himself or his goods”—­“to bestow” forms a larger verbal pattern with “not knowing where.” In this case the grammatical structure leaves some ambiguity: she is sorry for the young man, or for his being put to hindrance, or for his not knowing. In any case what is clear is that what he is not knowing is where to bestow, and what he doesn’t know where to bestow is indicated by the junction of “himself or his goods.” So, while Knyvett is concerned for the young man, in the end she inevitably emphasizes the inextricability of the young man from his goods. Thus, he does not know where he is to be and is living in uncertainty. In this context she seeks some relief for him: “If Mr. Vicechamberlain will get him but a fortnight’s liberty of my Lord Chancellor to provide for the settling of his goods it will be better than nothing.”34 It is not clear what Knyvett’s motivation is in appealing for this fortnight’s liberty. What is clear is that she ties together two threads in making the argument: the first an appeal to compassion, the other a corresponding appeal to processes of law. By creating a back-­and-­forth movement between the two, and by showing an understanding of both that is appropriate to her station, she was able to mount an argument in a manner that maintained a particular kind of literacy. The negotiation required the invoking of material goods, of individual well-­being, and of the social structures that ensure the continuance of both. Figures in this case provided a movement between particular rhetorical and literacy tactics and the social and material realities that made up the purview of the gentry. In sixteenth-­century Norfolk the creation of property involved moving between a material reality and the constantly evolving technologies for determining that material, and then inscribing that into a set of social negotiations. This, as the above examples show, required setting these relationships within structures of law. In theory property was not a relationship between individuals and material, but simply between individuals and other individuals. In practice, however, such relationships inevitably blurred the boundaries between people’s outward actions with their inward intentions, and their personal identities with the property they claimed to own. Similarly, the topics allowed them to write and manage the “hard

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facts” of the material world, giving themselves a means to shift the reading of materials into interpretations and arguments that allowed them to realize their wills. Style allowed the gentry a way of writing and managing these relationships without having to articulate them explicitly.

Conclusion: Andrew Marvell’s (Lawn)“Mower”

The gentry had a distinct rhetoric based as much on the mundane practices expected of their social position as on the rhetorical theories and pedagogies of formal education. That rhetoric, like the gentry group itself, was structured around controlling the relationship between material and social worlds. The shared expectations of rhetoric, developed through training and enculturation, created a sense of group identity that was also eminently practical for acquiring and maintaining wealth and power. As those shared expectations were translated into the educational curriculum for English writing and reading, though, the practical advantages of managing this relationship was lost in instruction. “Style,” in particular a belletristic style rather than figures, became a dominant focus of learning English. But while style and taste emphasized the communal possibilities of a shared language and sets of literacies, its roots lay in the way that the gentry conceived of their social and material positions and how the material world could be made to support them in these positions. Presence, topics, and figures opened up a multitude of ways of taking advantage of the social and material resources around them. Even as they did so, such techniques slowly fell out of the English curriculum, or at the very least lost touch with their original purposes. In their approaches to reading and writing as a means of building themselves as a group and their own prosperities individually, the gentry capitalized on their classical rhetorical understandings not only to meet the needs of a modernizing world but also to create the needs that new literature, new science, and new rhetoric would need to meet and to justify. Kenneth Burke’s “dull daily repetition” of modern rhetoric is not so far removed from Francis Bacon’s rhetorical and philosophical injunction to “speak to every man singly,” traceable through John Locke, Isaac Newton, and their heirs. But Bacon’s innovations reflect nothing so much as daily 162

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practices of the gentry in the half-­century before the writings for which he is today renowned. As much as printing and other forms of mass media, the approaches that the early modern English gentry took to writing about their daily practices would shape the landscape of modern communication. This study may help account for why that landscape is imminently concerned with profit and loss, and the ease with which it translates values and lives into objects and commodities. This larger claim has been supported by a narrower argument that the practical needs of daily gentry living created new demands that the rhetorical curriculum had to change to meet. This book examines this change in the sixteenth century. However, the implication is that the English curriculum as it stands today, though apparently much different in its theory and pedagogy, nevertheless functions primarily as a means of transmitting very similar values and beliefs to those that underlay gentry rhetoric. Supporting and elaborating such a claim is well beyond the scope of this study. Nevertheless, as the book began with a digression, of sorts, into more famous subjects than the ones that take up the bulk of the study, I would ask the reader’s indulgence now for a wider (though briefer) digression into my own classroom practice. In two different ways and in very general terms, two assignments suggest the extent to which gentry rhetoric is embedded both in the curriculum and in students’ own approach to their (largely American middle-­class) ways of living. The first was a business writing assignment in which students read letters, accounts, and analyses and prepared a report about the communication failures of the Darien Company, a half-­baked scheme initiated by Scottish speculators in the closing years of the seventeenth century to build a colony in Panama. Obviously, in preparing them for the assignment, I coached the students, almost all of whom found the language of the documents off-­putting. Nevertheless, the ease with which, at the beginning of the semester, students were able to analyze and synthesize the different primary and secondary materials was surprising, and often better executed than much of the other work in the class. The accounting systems were much different, but the use of grids and text to keep accounts and organize arguments from those accounts was more familiar to the students than

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were some more current, more specialized, forms of business accounts and arguments. The numeric and narrative accounts of the Darien Company, folded up over three hundred years ago, fit quite neatly into any frame of rhetorical analysis brought by these twenty-­first-­century business students. Of course, the premise of the assignment assumes its conclusion, and, in any case, my excitement to be discussing the early modern period no doubt transferred over to better preparation for the assignment on my part. In another example this was obviously not the case, but the shadow of the gentry looms even more largely. I once gave an exam in which the students had to write a brief explication of Andrew Marvell’s “The Mower.” We had not read the poem in class; students knew in advance they would have to write about an unfamiliar work, though not which one. However, we had read one or two of Marvell’s other “mower” poems very recently, at the end of a semester we had spent talking about English literature from about 1100 to about 1700. It was clear from their written responses that many of the students imagined not a pastoral rustic speaker doing agricultural work, but a guy mowing his lawn. The students knew, of course, that there were not gas-­or electric-­powered lawn mowers in the poem’s day. But they were taken with the image of this man letting his mind wander to thoughts of love while engaged in a routine, mindless activity with which we are all familiar, in one way or another, and in that sense their interpretations lost nothing for the updated setting. The scythe and the mower stand in for the classical Pastoral and Georgic poetic tradition and its humanist use to validate English language and culture, figured in characters like Orpheus, Pan, the shepherd Colin, and the mower Damon. This caring for one’s property while dreaming of possessing (women, acres, power) reflects a classical fantasy that doesn’t contrast very sharply with the modernity that is figured in the name of Echo lawn equipment, or the Acteaonesque John Deere logo, for instance. Whether for the Restoration gentry or the modern American middle class, individual pursuits to cultivate and measure property become elaborate but legible displays on which to build the community and prosperity of the individual and their neighbors and friends. This is gentry rhetoric.

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Not e s Introduction 1. Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 9. 2. Whether and in what ways writing (and, later, print and other media) changes the relationship of the social, mental, and material worlds is a central question of literacy studies, and I incorporate in particular methods developed by researchers in what is sometimes referred to as the sociological approach to literacy. Graf ’s work, specifically the discussion of the period in Legacies of Literacy, has been particularly influential for early modern studies. Ahearn’s description (in Invitations to Love) of the development of a particular kind of love letter under a variety of rapidly shifting media and educational contexts in modern Nepal, though a much different set of contexts than in my study, nevertheless inspired much of what I have attempted in my method, particularly in chapter 3. 3. There are notable exceptions. In The Emperor of Men’s Minds, Rebhorn suggests that it is a focus on power, rather than deliberation, that unites Renaissance rhetorical theory across countries and cultures, though, like several other scholars who have written on the rhetoric of Renaissance England, his argument is ultimately focused on literature. Such literary treatments are often built around the relationship between rhetoric and literature as one of legitimacy—­for instance, the most comprehensive work on rhetorical education in Renaissance England is Baldwin’s William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, which traces in two volumes the grammar school curriculum in order to elucidate Shakespeare’s classicism. Clark’s John Milton at St. Paul’s School takes a similar approach in regard to Milton. Although her argument is different, Enterline’s Shakespeare’s Schoolroom also examines the influence of the grammar school and university in Renaissance drama, but with the argument that the drama took such scholarship more for its failures than its successes in forming up a class of virtuous citizens. Mann’s Outlaw Rhetoric suggests that the vernacular rhetorical and stylistic manuals of the English Renaissance expressed an anxiety about the place of English language and literature in relation to the Latin literature of the continent, which is achieved through metaphoric reference to the outlaw. This theme of poetic



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anxiety reflects ideas tying literature to nation is discussed in Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood and summed up in his article “Before National Literary History.” 4. Tawney, “Rise of the Gentry”; Stone, Crisis of the Aristocracy. 5. Tawney, “Rise of the Gentry,” 2–­3; Yerby, Economic Causes of the English Civil War. 6. Coleman, “‘Gentry’ Controversy and the Aristocracy,” 167. 7. Tillyard, Elizabethan World Picture, 23. Dubrow, in “Friction and Faction,” suggests that “it would be misleading to assume that before 1980 critics universally ignored texts like these [Renaissance gynecological manuals] or universally misread them as translucent background or context. Citing Tillyard as representative of the older generation of critics is as tempting as it is self-serving” (213). These sentences acknowledge early modern criticism’s dependence on Tillyard even as they take a dig at him. Much of what is objectionable in Tillyard can be glimpsed in such claims as that Hooker “represents far more truly the background of Elizabethan literature than do the coney-­catching pamphlets or the novel of low life” (10), thus suggesting with minimal evidence that these more popular and more abundant texts somehow represent the “world picture” falsely. With its close attention to historical texts and contexts, New Historicism has made this an impossible position to sustain. Nevertheless, such as the term captures a coherent school or methodology, it most certainly is marked by attention to detail as a reaction against universalizing criticism. See Irish, “Historicism and Universals,” who sees New Historicism as a somewhat coherent movement unified around an opposition to “universalizing.” 8. Tillyard, Elizabethan World Picture, 9–10. 9. Tillyard, Elizabethan World Picture, 10. 10. In distinguishing the social and the material and in seeing language as the machine by which something called “social reality” is constructed, I largely follow John Searle, while in considering how that distinction relates to power I follow Judith Butler’s model of social construction. Both a stark division between these worlds and the idea that language is at the heart of the social world are highly contentious. Such a contention is largely found for scholars in English departments in Searle’s exchanges with Jacques Derrida; however, the more focused question of whether language is the central element of social relationships and social reality is taken up by Lawson (“Ontology”). For a quick articulation of opposition to Searle’s distinction of social and material, see Krippendorff (“Review”). 11. Micciche, in “Writing Material,” gives a thorough account of this movement in the fields of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies. See also Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric.

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12. Maus is responding in particular to a conversation about the relationship between subjects and objects in the period, a relationship she feels is overstated, especially as that relationship is articulated by the essays collection Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (edited by de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass). I am taking work like that of Poole and Brückner as ultimately an extension of this conversation; other texts (among many) that have helped form that conversation for me include Brückner, Geographic Revolution; Traub, “Nature of Norms”; and Harris, Untimely Matter. 13. “Othello’s Black Handkerchief,” 23. Smith’s italics. 14. Along with Jennifer Richards’s work, the conclusions these three writers have reached serve as premises or foundations for my method and my understandings. 15. Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, 14–­15. 16. A further implication: from a literary perspective, these courtly practices and coteries shaped the course of English. From a rhetorical perspective, they merely reflect the way English was developing through its various uses among the gentry. 1. Gentry Learning 1. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, calls this the “Ciceronian” pattern of rhetoric, which he places, for English rhetoric between 1500 and 1700, alongside the stylistic pattern and the formulary pattern, the first of which is simply a selective focus of the Ciceronian pattern, and the second of which consists of exercises or formulae meant to perfect that pattern for its users. The system itself is such a standard and accepted one, however, that many scholars—­Kennedy, for instance—­simply take it as a given. 2. Ong, Ramus. For Howell, too, Ramus’s work signals a revolt against the Ciceronian patterns, though Howell is more phlegmatic about this than Ong. Conley (Rhetoric in the European Tradition) and Mack have both suggested that the influence of Ramus is overstated, however, while Vickers (In Defense of Rhetoric) has argued that positing such a “revolt” represents a misunderstanding of Ramus’s approach to discourse, which was never intended for dialectic to be treated absent the canons involved in rhetoric. This version of the story persists, however, particularly in broad surveys of rhetoric, for example in the introduction to Comiskey’s 2015 Dialectical Rhetoric. Mack succinctly makes this point in his review of E. Armstrong’s work, and much more intricately in his chapter “Ramus” in Renaissance Argument, though the entire book is recommended reading for Mack’s conception of the rhetorical tradition under which most of the writers discussed in this book would have been educated. 3. Bizzell and Herzberg, Rhetorical Tradition, 570.



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4. Agnew, “Teaching Propriety,” 746. 5. Grafton and Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities. 6. The sixteenth-­and seventeenth-­century English grammar school curriculum was laid down by John Colet, dean of St. Paul’s and founder of its grammar school, adapting Erasmus’s ideas to the education of young boys. Erasmus’s De ratione studii provided a template while a central text was his text on style, De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo. Sloane (“Schoolbooks”) suggests that the intent of the copia was to suggest a wider rhetorical process than simply a stylistic one; however, he also notes that the part of the copia where this intent was most forceful was also the least read. In terms of English-­language rhetorics, the focus on style is in some ways complex. The most successful English rhetoric, Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric, offered a treatment of the full Ciceronian rhetoric, though it devoted little attention to memory and delivery; this means that a third of the book focuses on style. (“Of Apt Chusing and Framing of Words and Sentences Together, Called Elocution” serves as the title of the third book.) Though significantly less successful, the other manuals published in the century increasingly focus more heavily on style: the earliest English-­language rhetoric, Leonard Cox, Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke (1532), is concerned with invention (translating Melanchthon’s work on invention), while Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), Henry Peacham, Garden of Eloquence (1577), Abraham Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588), and George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1589) focus almost exclusively on style. 7. As do Bizzell and Herzberg. Though her timeline is different, this is also the general narrative suggested by Crowley (“Bourgeois Subject”). A different timeline emerges from Kennedy’s Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition. His focus being on the classical tradition, largely expressed through theoretical texts, Kennedy sees on the one hand the neoclassicism of the Renaissance through the eighteenth century as something of a flourishing of that tradition. That said, the overall arc of Kennedy’s work sees a seventeenth-century logic and “new science” displacing rhetoric, while seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century theorists and pedagogues seek “to preserve a place for rhetoric in human affairs” (275). 8. Humanists recognized that, while Latin may have been the language of universal knowledge, it was in the vernacular that the social and political world would actually operated. Ernesto Grassi (Renaissance Humanism) has traced out this humanist belief in the power of the vernacular for world-­making, explaining that for Dante “the everyday language of ‘here’ and ‘now’—­not the logical, abstract, timeless language of eternity—­is the ‘fire’ with which man forges the instrument to create his own world” (8).

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9. For the Renaissance this is the suggestion of Murphy in Renaissance Eloquence. For the eighteenth century, Longaker (Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue) argues that style was the means through which thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith imagined that virtue (as embodied by the bourgeois class) was formed. Agnew makes a similar claim in Outward, Visible Propriety, that the earnest belief that taste and style helped shape universal sensibilities and rationalities was made explicit in the eighteenth century. There is also, at least in Renaissance scholarship, an understanding of a more mercenary application of style: Richards (Rhetoric) suggests that stylistic rhetoric shaped the conversational models through which careers at court were made, though, as with Rebhorn above, Richard’s text is ultimately about literary studies. Though he perhaps overemphasizes Ramus’s influence on the period, the positive role of style in late sixteenth-­century England is addressed by Armstrong. The strongest argument regarding the value of the stylistic rhetorical process probably remains Vickers’s In Defense of Rhetoric. 10. Longaker (Rhetorical Style) suggests, for instance, that in adopting an intellectual history approach focused on style, he treats a history of “what the dominant class thought” (4). Implicitly or explicitly, other approaches he identifies (materialist, feminist, or microhistorical) consider themselves as reacting against this focus on the dominant class. 11. By considering not only the theories and pedagogies of the ruling class but the way these were applied, adapted, or reinvented by rhetors outside the ruling class, these microhistories have examined, for instance, women’s rhetoric and the study of rhetoric as it was applied in colonial projects by both colonizer and colonized. My use of microhistory is not meant to uncover a population or community in order to provide a counterhistory of rhetoric. Nevertheless, I hope it supports what I see as a larger shared goal of helping us understand rhetoric’s function and role in society. The exclusion of women from public arenas like universities has meant that historians writing about women’s rhetoric have tended to draw more on practice. Thus, one notable broad survey that focuses on practice as much as theory is Glenn, Rhetoric Retold. More narrowly focused feminist histories also consider rhetorical practice in more depth, as in Johnson, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life. In a short section on women’s rhetoric, Kennedy (Classical Rhetoric) finds for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries women practicing specific styles (preciosity) or sections in works by women either justifying women’s speaking or offering suggestions for instruction. Graban (Women’s Irony) likewise focuses on practice in the work of Anne Askew, a protestant martyr under Henry VIII who is, Graban understatedly explains, “not an unknown figure to feminist historians” (17).



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12. The concept of an early modern period of English rhetoric is something of an invention here. (However, see Barilli [Rhetoric] who treats the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries [up through Kant] as “early modernity.”) In general, historians of rhetoric have tended to build their studies around either date ranges (such as Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England) or more traditional periods like the Renaissance (as in Green and Murphy, Renaissance Rhetoric Short-­Title Catalogue) or the Elizabethan period (Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric). Broader surveys tend to distinguish the Renaissance from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Conley does. In employing the term early modern English rhetoric, then, I mean to offer a genealogy of practice from the fifteenth through the eighteenth century. 13. Walzer (“Rhetoric of Counsel”) equates Renaissance England with Imperial Rome as one of the two most “prominent examples” of times and places where “passionate eloquence that inspired citizens to political action was not possible” (21). 14. It is worth noting, as Miller does in The Formation of College English, that much of this work took place outside the specifically English centers of Oxford and Cambridge, where education still focused on the humanist curriculum, still delivered and assessed in Latin. 15. See Miller, Formation of College English. This should be understood as referring exclusively to rhetorical education: in terms of mathematics and sciences, Cambridge was certainly as robust as Edinburgh: see Morrell, “University of Edinburgh.” It is important to note as well that rhetoric remained a generally unpopular subject at Edinburgh: whatever Hugh Blair’s successes as a teacher may have been, his successor’s rhetoric course enrolled among the lowest number of students in the University’s courses. See Morrell, “University of Edinburgh.” 16. Papers of Nathaniel Bacon, Vol. 1, 24. 17. Coverdale, Christian State of Matrimony, signature l8v. 18. Coverdale, Christian State of Matrimony, m1. 19. Coverdale, Christian State of Matrimony, m1v. 20. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, 194. 21. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, 194. 22. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, 194. 23. Locke, Some Thoughts concerning Education, 194. 24. Coverdale, Christian State of Matrimony, l7v. 25. See Walzer, “Rhetoric of Counsel.” 26. For example: Aristotle (finding the available means of persuasion), Quintilian (the art of speaking well), Francis Bacon (reasoning with the imagination to move

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the will), George Campbell (the art or talent by which discourse is adapted to its end), or Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-­Tyteca (“discursive techniques allowing us to induce or to increase the mind’s adherence to the theses presented for its assent”; New Rhetoric, 4). 27. On Anne’s life and career, see Ives (Anne Boleyn); Warnicke (Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn); and Bernard (“Fall of Anne Boleyn” and the more recent Anne Boleyn). In the historiography on Boleyn, several competing strains have developed since the publication of Ives’s book, with Warnicke and Bernard each challenging Ives and vice versa; however, the differences are principally methodological, and the broad outline of the Boleyn family’s rise is substantiated across these works. 28. “Early modern” is a relatively elastic term that, for historians, is demarcated by the end of the middle ages and the beginning of the industrial revolution. Considering Europe as a whole, these dates are often set between 1450 (the decade of the wide-­scale emergence of print and the rise of Iberian ocean trade) and 1789 (the French Revolution). See Wiesner, Early Modern Europe, 7. In England the medieval period is generally thought to end in 1485 with the ascension of Henry VII, first of the Tudors, just a few years after the establishment of the first printing press in England, while the French Revolution of 1789 is often thought of as a late marker of the end of a long period. Such bookends are convenient, but the term itself marks a changed historiographic approach that focuses less on grand events and moments and more on movements within and characteristics of a period. See Scott, “Introduction.” 29. The original source for this speech is an eighteenth-­century manuscript: British Library, ms Cotton Vitellius B. XII, f.4. The text here is taken from Pope, Literary Correspondence, 19–­20. 30. Erasmus, De Conscribendis Epistolis. “There is charm even in the pretence, when we pretend that we are deviating from our chartered course, or being carried further away by love than we had originally planned. . . . We shall say that this aberration follows from the incredible extent of our love, which knows neither limit nor regularity, that our feelings run away with our pen, and that we are beginning again at the very point at which we should have broken off, because as we write we seem to be carrying on a conversation with the dearest of friends in his very presence” (75). 31. Despite his stature in eighteenth-­century politics, Walpole has not been the subject of many sustained studies. Two mid-­twentieth-­century works by Plumb (King’s Minister and Making of a Statesman) remain authoritative. Two more recent works are Black (Robert Walpole) and Pearce (Great Man). 32. Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, 27.



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33. Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, 35. 34. These ultimately all derive from the work of Aphthonius, a staple of the curriculum. 35. In making such a claim, I am privileging negotiation, disputation, and debate over the set piece oration. The nineteenth century would not necessarily agree: “The age of Walpole was an age rather of keen debate than impassioned eloquence . . . They were emphatically business speakers, eagerly intent upon their object, but destitute of any principles or feelings, which could raise them above the level of the most selfish minds, engaged in a desperate struggle for office and power. We find, therefore, in their speeches, no large views, no generous and elevated sentiments, none of those appeals to the higher instincts of our nature, which are the crowning excellence of our English oratory. Any thing of this kind would have been laughed down by Walpole, as sheer affectation” (Goodrich, Select British Eloquence, 29–­30). It is not clear whether those who see the eighteenth century as a rhetorical low point share Goodrich’s approach. 36. According to Leadam in “Walpole, Robert (1676–­1745),” “Coxe states that he left Eton ‘an excellent scholar.’ The headmaster, John Newborough, a scholar of repute, took a particular interest in him. Upon being told of the success of another pupil, the brilliant St. John, in the House of Commons, Newborough replied, ‘But I am impatient to hear that Robert Walpole has spoken, for I am convinced that he will be a good orator.’ . . . His first speech in the House of Commons is traditionally recorded to have been a failure, arising from embarrassment, but no record remains of its substance or occasion. Nor was he at once successful, though, after a subsequent comparative failure, Arthur Mainwaring, one of Lady Marlborough’s circle, prophesied to detractors that he would ‘in time become an excellent speaker.’” See also Chapman’s 1808 reflections on Walpole’s rhetoric (Select Speeches Forensick and Parliamentary): “The general style of Walpole’s eloquence ‘is plain, perspicuous, forcible and manly, not courting, yet, not always avoiding metaphorical, ornamental, and classical allusions.’ But his chief excellence as a parliamentary speaker consisted in quickness of apprehension, sharpness of reply, and in the dexterity and promptitude with which he turned the arguments of his adversaries against themselves. By his contemporaries he is said sometimes to have aspired to the first order of eloquence” (349). 37. See Jardine and Stewart, Hostage to Fortune, especially chapter 3. 38. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, 152. 39. Whetstone, Remembraunce. 40. “Coterie poets,” that is, as described by, for instance, Marotti in John Donne. 41. By contrast there are some twenty copies of his and his sister’s translations of Psalms extant, and eleven more or less complete copies of the Old Arcadia.

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Manuscript collections could certainly be preserved, but they might be less so or simply might be less produced if they were only to indicate the work of a single writer, particularly if this involved collecting individual works together. 42. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 127. 43. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 167. 44. Conley, Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 164. 45. Bacon, Essays or Councils, 13. 46. This sentiment does in a sense have classical roots as well, as suggested in Bacon’s 1605 work Advancement of Learning, where he cites Tacitus in order to flatter James, suggesting that whatever flows from the prince is eloquent (signature a3). What is radical in the Bacon’s work, however, is the possibility that this concept might be grasped by the nonprincely, and that it might not obtain for the princely. 47. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 129. 48. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 142. 49. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 145. 2. Gentry Literacy 1. This is a dominant critical narrative that describes the emergence of an Elizabethan literary culture that wrestled with two overlapping threads of anxiety. One thread had to do with the role of literature in creating and maintaining the nation’s cultural identity in a longer history of letters overshadowed by the classical period and by classical languages. The other thread had to do with the respectability (or lack thereof) of being a writer. In this critical narrative, most sharply and influentially articulated by Helgerson in Self-­Crowned Laureates and Forms of Nationhood, poets and other writers respond to their anxiety about their own social status by creating the idea of authorship, and they place the authoring of imaginative literature as central in turn to the formation of national identity. Even if they articulate the problems differently, however, the twin ideas that early modern literature is essential to the formation of political structures and of individual identity is a staple of criticism since the emergence of new historicism in the 1980s. Greenblatt in Renaissance Self-­Fashioning and Shakespearean Negotiations and Belsey in The Subject of Tragedy, for instance, helped lay the foundations for the idea of the role of early modern literature in shaping the modern subject, while Goldberg in James I and the Politics of Literature and Orgel in Illusion of Power emphasize the function of literature in upholding political power—­though the twin threads of subject-­formation and nation-­formation overlap in all cases.



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Within this context, a number of critics in turn find the roots of this anxiety in literature’s relationship to rhetoric in general and the rhetoric of the humanist tradition in particular. See Parker, Literary Fat Ladies; Magnusson, Shakespeare; and Rebhorn, Emperor. Edward Armstrong, Lyn Enterline, and Jenny C. Mann have all in various ways traced out how early modern English writers of poetry and other forms of imaginative literature saw themselves as trying to justify their literary work in light of a rhetorical tradition that was decidedly focused on classical literature and language as the only fit vehicle for such productions. 2. Sidney, “Defense of Poesie,” 8. On the evolution of the vernacular, see Keilen, Vulgar Eloquence; Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo; Anderson, Words That Matter; Boutcher, “Who Taught Thee Rhetoricke”; Wogan-­Browne and Johnson, Idea of the Vernacular; Blank, Broken English; and Shuger, Habits of Thought. 3. Collinson, “Pulling the Strings,” 123. The only work that focuses exclusively on Churchyard’s Discourse is Bergeron’s “The ‘I’ of the Beholder.” In it Bergeron argues that Churchyard uses the pageant text to construct an image of himself as an author of a literary text. In his reading Churchyard’s positioning of the text as providing a model for conduct and behavior is a strategy in his work of presenting himself as an author. In my reading, on the contrary, as a text concerned with literacy rather than the literary, the modeling of behavior and the concern with authorship are both elements of the modeling of a way of writing for the gentry. In addition to Bergeron’s work, Woodcock (Thomas Churchyard) has written a full-­length treatment of Churchyard that places him alongside Sidney and others in a tradition of Elizabethan soldier-­poets. Beyond these Churchyard’s work is primarily treated as a resource in the discussion of Elizabethan pageantry, as in Collinson’s article. A fuller treatment of the progress is found in Dovey (Elizabethan Progress); and in Cole (Portable Queen). Treatment of Garter’s text or Garter himself is limited to these latter works. 4. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 1. 5. In their concern that literacy was both a path to progress and a moral good, preachers and teachers were laying down the foundations of a belief in the power of literacy that would become incontrovertible by the nineteenth century. This understanding of literacy is central to what scholar Harvey Graff termed “the literacy myth,” the widely held belief that literacy produces social progress, including material prosperity and well-­being. 6. Locke expressed serious doubts about the enforced study of the language but acknowledged that custom had made it so that studying Latin was “absolutely necessary to a gentleman” (Some Thoughts concerning Education, 193).

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7. kny 632, Knyvett-­Wilson Family Collection, Knyvett Correspondence, Norfolk Record Office. 8. kny 632, Norfolk Record Office. 9. Cressy (Literacy and the Social Order) compares the dioceses of Norwich in Norfolk, East Anglia; Exeter in Devon in the southwest; the two dioceses of London; and Durham in the northeast. The southern dioceses are all comparable in their rates, though Norwich has a marginally higher level of illiteracy than London or Exeter. Durham’s gentry show much higher rates of illiteracy at nearly 21 percent, which can be accounted both to a lower overall level of prosperity but also different cultural values. See 118–­41, and especially the tables on 119–­21. 10. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 10. 11. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 1. 12. Olson, “From Utterance to Text.” 13. In this view, for example, extended linear thought processes (as Ong suggests) and generalized and abstract patterns of thought (as Goody suggests) are inextricably connected to practices of writing and reading, not existing in non-­literate societies in which narrative, parabolic, and concrete thought processes are the norm. Ong, “Writing Is a Technology.” 14. Brandt, Literacy as Involvement, 30. 15. Micciche, “Writing Material.” 16. Brandt gives the example of a sentence from a short story: “Cory glanced at the corner behind the wood box where Alton’s rifle usually stood, then made an unspellable, disgusted sound.” The term “unspellable” here signals the processes of reading and writing, functioning as metadiscourse, while the use of the article the, suggesting the fiction that the reader already understands and knows this box, functions as a “libert[y] sanctioned by a relationship already accomplished (and still developing). These liberties,” Brandt explains, “are sanctioned by what writers know about how the joint enterprises of writing and reading work and their sense of a shared history, a joint writer-­reader presence at the scene of the text itself.” Brandt, Literacy as Involvement, 72. 17. Batho, “Landlords in England.” 18. Truelove, “Literacy,” 96. 19. Truelove, “Literacy,” 99. 20. The volume itself is somewhat longer, including an additional thirty pages consisting of two poems, one in commendation of the mariner Humphrey Gilbert and the other in commendation of the mariner Martin Frobisher. The title page describes the verses as “adjoyned to” the main text. As the arrangement of the title page indicates, then, the focus of the text is ostensibly the Queen’s visit.



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However, these adjoining texts provide a useful context for the main text of the book. For one thing their presence suggests that the attention to the Queen is only a part of the volume in hand; they also provide a useful and telling contrast to the Discourse proper. Conventional examples of a common rhetorical exercise, these lyric poems present a first-­person speaker that by and large limits himself (as the speaker is implied to be Churchyard) to providing praise of the poems’ subjects. Even in the poem to Gilbert, where the poem opens with a lyric “I” appealing to a muse and describing how he came to learn of Gilbert’s voyage, the “I” fades into the background for the remainder of the poem. 21. Writing process research has found that in practice it is the beginning or unskilled reader or writer who approaches a text as something to be encoded or decoded. More expert or high-­skilled readers and writers see texts as series of strategies, moves, and activities. For these skilled writers and readers, as Deborah Brandt explains, “their chief concern is not ‘what does that say?’ or ‘what do I make that say?’ but more like ‘what do I do now?’” (Literacy as Involvement, 32). The struggles that unskilled readers and writers face emerge out of an inability to understand the text as a series of tactics and strategies built toward a goal of shared understanding—­the text is impenetrable exactly because these writers and readers see it as enclosed, cut off, separate from themselves. Skilled writers and readers understand that the composing and interpretation of texts is always a process of strategies about how that text will be received, and how it was intended, and these strategies are themselves constantly indicated in the texts. Texts are not read or written for context-­free meanings to be consumed or produced, but rather always carry with them a sense of use and shared purpose. In terms of literacy, context-­free meaning is an illusion, because “knowing how to write or read is knowing what a text means for things on your end, knowing what it is saying about what you need to be doing, right here, right now” (Brandt, Literacy as Involvement, 32.) In Brandt’s conception the distinction between text and context is problematic, if not impossible, because it assumes that there can be such a thing as a context that is separate from language. But whether face-­to-­ face in oral exchange or across time in space through literate exchange, language users create the contexts that give language its meaning. Literacy is dependent on context because context is determined by language, as Brandt explains: “All language use proceeds from a broad sense of ‘what is going on here’ . . . to use and understand language requires knowing how to accomplish language and its setting simultaneously, knowing how to use language not merely to share meaning with others, but also to constitute the conditions necessary for meaning to be shared” (30).

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22. Wheatley, Dedication of Books; Maclean, Learning and the Market Place. Maclean still defines paratext as “preliminary prefaces and poems, dedications, and references to licenses or permissions” (109). See also Allen, “Utopia and European Humanism.” 23. I will cite both Churchyard’s and Garter’s texts parenthetically by signature. I have not kept the signatures in the type forms in which they appear in the original (e.g., I have used Arabic rather than Roman numerals) because the recording of the signatures itself presents some difficulties—­for instance, in Churchyard’s text, no signature appears on most of the fourth leaves in any given signature (i.e., there is no mark at the bottom of a4). 24. Like other paratextual elements, the letter to the reader convention emerges out of the manuscript tradition; in this case, however, this tradition is closely connected to the rhetorical form of the exordium, the opening of a speech in which the speaker establishes his own character and engenders the goodwill of the audience. Dunn, Pretexts of Authority; Saenger, Commodification of Textual Engagements. 25. Goals that are (along with persuasion) twin goals of rhetoric, as Cicero argues in his De Optimo Genere Oratorum: “Optimus est enim orator qui dicendo animos audientium et docet et delectat et permovet. Docere debitum est, delectare honorarium, permovere necessarium.” Cicero and Hubbell, De inventione, 356. See also Hendrickson, “Cicero de Optimo Genere Oratorum.” 26. That these elements are fabrics places them well within the reader’s understanding of signs to be read. Sumptuary laws governed (however ineffectually) the wearing and styling of such fabrics as velvets and silks, specifically as a means of indicating rank. There is a consensus in discussions of sumptuary laws that they are matters of controlling a “semiotics” of style; see Scholz, Body Narratives, 18. For a sense of the evolution of sumptuary law in the sixteenth century (such laws would be largely abandoned over the course of the seventeenth century), see Doda, “Saide Monstrous Hose”; and Melnikoff, “‘Extremities’ of Sumptuary Law.” 27. Such a comprehensive approach is uncharacteristic of other examples of the genre of the royal entertainment, including roughly contemporary examples by George Gascoigne and especially later ones such as Ben Jonson’s masques. From a literary or aesthetic or even generic point of view, it might be enough simply to suggest that such texts are more effective than Churchyard’s. But, really, such a judgment only serves to underscore that, within the next twenty to thirty years, a set of gentry-­driven conventions would dominate the production of vernacular print literacy. Churchyard is merely providing one stepping stone on the path to such gentry literacy.



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28. As Harper explains, “When we consider how bad was the condition even of the streets of London, it will be abundantly evident that a desire for display rather than comfort brought about the increasing use of carriages that marked the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign” (Stage-­coach and Mail in Days of Yore, 7). On the history of coaching, see also Barker and Savage, Economic History of Transport in Britain, who note that Stow mentioned the dramatic rise of coaches in his 1598 survey of London. 29. Such lengthy descriptions were conventional enough as introductions to dramatic performances. In stage plays they might occur in the form of arguments or dumb shows, though these would generally be shorter. In masques and devices like Churchyard’s, such material was also generally shorter, but even in longer examples, Churchyard’s is distinctive in its use of the I-­narrator and its direct address to the reader as it describes both the action of the piece and the staging and properties. Gascoigne for instance presents some description of the settings of pageants in his progress account from two years earlier, but they are generally shorter and included within the flow of the narrative of the pageants themselves. 30. “Rushed to press,” in Collinson’s terms, the text was apparently printed before the conclusion of the Queen’s progress, and at the same time as Churchyard’s was being printed (“Pulling the Strings,” 123). Despite its hasty printing, Garter’s text, like Churchyard’s, underwent a good deal of correction, all the sheets in two signature ranges (D and E) having been reset between copies. 31. Heath, Ways with Words. 32. Heath, “What No Bedtime Story Means,” 50. Street extends Heath’s “literacy events” to the term “literacy practices,” which is intended to enable literacy scholars to trace out how these literacy events are enmeshed in power structures. This distinction forces scholars to think of an example of reading and writing not as an autonomous bearer of meaning, but as a trace of a variety of forces. As Street explains: “The concept of literacy practices . . . not only attempts to handle the events and the patterns of activity around literacy events, but to link them to something broader of a cultural and social kind” (“What’s ‘New’ in New Literacy Studies,” 78). Street calls this an “ideological,” as opposed to “autonomous,” literacy. Street, Literacy in Theory and Practice, 11. 33. Dovey, Elizabethan Progress, 66. 34. One of the arguments of Enterline’s Shakespeare Schoolroom. 35. The inscription, which the Latin text indicates was engraved into the cup along with the Joseph text, reads: “Serenissimae Angliae Reginae Elizabethae, ecclesiae Belgicae Nordovici ob religionem exulantes, hoc monumentum & pietatis & posteritatis ergo consecrabant. 1578.” (d1). The English version leaves this inscription

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out entirely, though it describes both the Joseph text and an inscription within the cup: “Wise as the Serpent, and meeke as the Dove” (d2v). 36. “One of the primary goals of English Renaissance education was the strengthening of aristocratic values, and in order to meet that goal, humanistic values needed to be aligned with the values of the aristocracy. Specifically, it needed to create a new kind of gentleman who could carry out the wishes of the Church and State.” Pendergast, Religion, Allegory, and Literacy, 133. See also Simon, Education and Society. 37. This history of Redmond and his unsuccessful uprising is from Jewson, History of the Great Hospital Norwich, 31. See also Bennett-­Symons, Great Hospital in Norwich. The history may also be found in Bellinger, written for the Cringleford Historical Society 7.10.2002, from the Cringleford Council page of the South Norfolk Council website (https://web.archive.org/web/20050510223338/ http://www.eastspace.net/cringleford/home.asp?r=30999, accessed May 24, 2022). The history of the prereformation hospital is described in Rawcliffe’s Hospitals of Medieval Norwich, as well as in Blomefield, Essay towards a Topographical History of the County of Norfolk, which offers a detailed history of the village of Cringleford. 3. Letters and Presence 1. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity, 10. 2. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity, 7. 3. Though “presence” underpins much of their argument, it is most succinctly described on pages 115–­20. The significance of Olbrechts-­Tyteca and Perelman’s concept of presence for rhetorical theory is discussed at length by Gross and Dearin (Chaïm Perelman). Its significance was noted early on by Karon in “Presence in The New Rhetoric.” “Presence” is also a term for literary scholars, though perhaps not as examined as in rhetorical studies, and certainly less than in media studies. See Leypoldt, “Singularity and the Literary Market”; Soud, “Borges the Golem-­Maker”; and Saint-­Amour, “Literary Present.” 4. Perelman and Olbrechts-­Tyteca, New Rhetoric, 117. 5. Schneider, Culture of Epistolarity, 13. “Epistolarity” is difficult to define tidily, no doubt in part because of the very ubiquity it tries to capture. Although he draws the term from literary scholarship (especially Janet Gurkin Altman’s study of the epistolary novel), where it is defined as “the use of the letter’s formal properties to create meaning,” for Schneider the culture of epistolarity is characterized not only by formal properties but by the way these are shaped by practices and circumstances of early modern letter-­writing culture. Fitzmaurice and Williams



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describe “the letter’s distinctive discursive manner, wherein the writer collapses the temporal and spatial distance with the addressee by seeming to speak to them as if they were present” (“Sincerity and Epistolarity,” 1). 6. Erasmus, De Conscribendis Epistolis, 12. 7. Erasmus, De Conscribendis Epistolis, 20. 8. kny 632, Knyvett-­Wilson Family Collection, Knyvett Correspondence, Norfolk Record Office. 9. kny 632, Norfolk Record Office. 10. Letter writing was meant to recreate an oral experience in a way that differed from other forms of literacy (Schneider, Culture of Epistolarity, 29–­30). The physical presence of an interlocutor thus somehow guaranteed a sense of truth and trustworthiness. Anxiety over the loss of the physical interlocutor was coupled with anxiety over the problems of transmission itself, anxiety over “the threat of miscarriage, interception, misinterpretation, the letter’s danger as evidentiary proof, and so on” (110). 11. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 25, 282. This technological concern is echoed in contemporary communication scholarship, where one function of modern media is to create “presence.” See also Kwan Min Lee, “Presence, Explicated.” 12. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 10. 13. Agnew, “Civic Function of Taste,” 28. 14. Daybell, “Introduction.” 15. In Writing Matter, Goldberg details many of these practical concerns. Two other useful sources for the study of the material conditions of letter writing in the period are Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters; and Wolfe and Stewart, Letterwriting in Renaissance England. 16. Erasmus, De Conscribendis Epistolis, 16. 17. Fulwood, Enimie of Idlenesse, signature a7. 18. Fulwood, Enimie of Idlenesse, c7v. 19. Newbold, “Traditional, Practical, Entertaining.” 20. Fulwood, Enimie of Idlenesse, 1568, h5, h7v. 21. See Rainolde’s “contentes of this Booke,” signature a4. 22. Egerton ms 2713, folios 220–­23. All quotations from this letter are found in folio 220, British Library. 23. “Articles of Religion.” 24. My discussion in this paragraph only scratches the surface of a rich scholarship. See, for example, Lane, Ware, Haigh, “Communion and Community”; and “Taming of Reformation.” 25. Erasmus, On Copia, 43.

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Notes to Pages 70–87

26. George Whetstone, “Remembraunce,” signature b2; Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie (1869), 152. 27. But it may just as well be that there was nothing more personal to Bacon than his fortune or the details of his estates. The letter itself may be found in the Sir Nicholas Bacon Collection of English Court and Manorial Documents, Bacon ms# 4071, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. The transcription is from E. R. Sandeen, “Correspondence of Nicholas Bacon.” The letter is also transcribed in MacCullough, Letters from Redgrave Hall. 28. Collinson, “Bacon and the Via Media,” 258. See Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, 93, for a discussion of the importance of antithesis to English rhetoric and its connection by English writers on style to the classical tradition. 29. These letters are found in the Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. 1, 23–­26. All of these correspondences are drafts, all of them in Nathaniel’s hand. The possible conclusions from this are that Anne composes, Nathaniel composes, or they are composed together, but the style seems distinct from Nathaniel’s, and so presumably distinctly Anne’s, or at the very least a collaboration. 30. Burke, Rhetoric of Motives, 26, Burke’s italics. This is one of Burke’s more famous quotations and widely cited by rhetorical scholars. My sense of its importance is influenced by Quigley, “‘Identification’ as a Key Term”; Roberts-­Miller Fanatical Schemes; and Lyon, Deliberative Acts. 31. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. 2, 25–­26. 32. These letters are found in kny 633–­36, Norfolk Record Office. 4. Places of Argument 1. Thomas Wilson, Arte of Rhetorike, a2r. 2. Gee, Social Linguistics and Literacies, 53. 3. I have taken my translations of the topics from the internet classics archive based on that of W. A. Pickard-­Cambridge. Pickard-­Cambridge’s translation, however, is a particularly “rhetorical” one, in the sense that it downplays the technical role of dialectic, using “reason” and “argument” instead of “syllogism,” which is preferred by Octavius Freire Owen. For scholars of Aristotle these categories presented (and still present) technical difficulties, appearing in similar form and to distinct but related purposes throughout the books of the Organon (such as the Categories, perhaps most obviously) where their complications lie in how they negotiate technical distinctions, such as between problems and propositions. For someone willing to leave aside these technicalities, however, they provide a relatively easy means of thinking through a negotiating problem. 4. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 5.



Notes to Pages 88–103

181

5. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 36. 6. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 30. 7. Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 36. 8. I take this estimate from Peter Mack’s accounting of university lectures and booklists in Elizabethan Rhetoric. 9. Cicero, Topics, 90. 10. Aristotle, Topics, 1.6. 11. Aristotle, Topics, 1.5. 12. A lively literature treats the rhetorical topics. Warnick (“Two Systems of Invention”) and Muckelbauer (Future of Invention) provide insightful histories of past and present uses of the topics in rhetorical study. 13. Cox, Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke. The second printing appeared in 1535. 14. Cox, Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke, f1v. 15. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. 1, 28. 16. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. 1, 32. 17. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon, Vol. 2, 106. 18. Mack, “Review of E. Armstrong A Ciceronian Sunburn.” 19. This view is also fundamental for Howell; see Eighteenth-­Century British Logic and Rhetoric, 78. 20. Ong, Ramus, 288. 21. A clear example of this can actually be found in the manuscript circulation of certain of Nicholas Bacon’s speeches, where sets of brackets and what they group are repeated identically from one manuscript to the next. 22. Ong, Ramus, 289. 23. Mack explains that “Ramus ensures that rhetoric and dialectic work together by clarifying the division between the two subjects” (Renaissance Rhetoric, 353). To be clear, Mack is no unconditional defender of Ramus either; for instance, discussing his commentaries on and discussions of other authors, Mack says Ramus “applies his own principles to other men’s books in an unfair and pointless way” (342). 24. Ong, Ramus, 8–­9. 25. The earliest English surveying manual would be John Fitzherbert’s Surveyenge, first published 1533 and then repeatedly throughout the century. Like the next significant tract, Valentine Leigh’s 1577 The Moste Profitable and Commendable Science, of Surueying Oflandes, Tenementes, and Hereditamentes, this book concerns itself only minimally with measurement, and more with the processes and forms of describing the land verbally. Digges’s books mark a turn toward a focus on measurement and geometry as central to the surveyor’s practice.

182

Notes to Pages 103–117

26. This new science, it should be noted, had ancient roots: both Digges and fellow surveying author Richard Benese point to ancient Egypt’s managing of land after the Nile’s periodic floods as the source of the science of surveying. 27. Digges, Tectonicon (1605), a3v. 28. Benese, This Boke Sheweth, signature a1v. 29. This dynamic development in technology thus speaks to developments in modern subjectivity, economics, and literary production—­as Poole and Brückner (“Plot Thickens”) have explained: “In playing with ‘plot’—­a word which increasingly implied structures imposed upon both land and text—­late Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists self-­consciously call attention to this very process of solidifying lexical, geographic, and narrative boundaries. . . . Moreover, ‘Plot,’ an English idiosyncrasy, does not originate in Aristotle’s mythos or praxis. Rather, it is grounded in the English dirt, in the practicalities of calculating taxes and space for sheep” (618, 640). 30. Brückner and Poole, “Plot Thickens,” 618. 31. Taylor’s understanding of the function of the survey operates in contemporary literary scholarship as well. See Sullivan, “Arden Lay Murdered.” 32. David Fletcher, “Map or Terrier?” There is a substantial literature on surveying and mapmaking in the period. Here I have relied on Fletcher, but also Henderson, “Maps of Cranborne Manor”; Barber, “John Darby’s Map”; Edwards, Writing, Geometry, and Space; and Smith, Maps and Plans. Poole and Brückner’s article also offers a healthy set of resources, particularly on the intersections of cartography and literature. 33. lest q36, Norfolk Records Office. 34. Higgins, Grid Book, 126. See also Acheson, Visual Rhetoric; Tebeaux, “English Agriculture and Estate Management Instructions”; and Blomley, “Territorialization of Property in Land.” 35. Folger L.e. 116. 36. “____” signifies in this description an underscore. 37. Such tables and logs were also mundane parts of life. The modifications in type that enabled the graphic representation of Ramus’s webs of dichotomies were quite old, used since the fifteenth century in the print representation of family trees. Such genealogies could also be kept by hand, of course, and mathematical and functional records were also created and kept by hand and so ubiquitous that they might easily be repurposed: a collection of papers from the L’Estrange family, for instance, is bound with used accounts-­received ledger-­lined pages serving as endpapers.



Notes to Pages 117–123

183

38. The one book-­length study of lord keeper Nicholas Bacon is Robert Tittler’s Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman. MacCulloch (Suffolk and the Tudors) also provides good insight into the lord keeper’s building of an estate in East Anglia. 39. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon, Vol. 1, 30. 40. McRae, God Speed the Plough, 181. 41. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon, Vol.1, 30. 42. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon, Vol. 1, 30. 43. Thomas Wilson’s own treatment of dialectic, The Rule of Reason, essentially follows Aristotle’s topics, covering the four orders and ten classes (predicables and predicaments, as he calls them, following Aristotle’s Categories rather than Topics), though he numbers and lists these slightly differently. Wilson’s descriptions appear in the opening pages of the text, roughly signatures b4v through d1r of the 1584 edition (stc 25814). Wilson, Rule of Reason. 44. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorike, c4. 45. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorike, c4. 46. Like the surveying of the land itself, many of these elements of land ownership were themselves the subject of instructional manuals offering the latest scientific thought on developing and improving resources and techniques. Authors and printers keen on changes in soil treatment, livestock management, and a host of other topics that generally fell under the heading of “husbandry” took advantage of a burgeoning print market and the economic conditions of the gentry and would-­be gentry, producing a small but steady stream of improvement texts. See Salter, Popular Reading in English; Kuipers, “Field Knowledge in Gentry Households”; and Reynolds, “Here Is a Good Boke.” 47. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. 2, 105. 48. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. 2, 106. 49. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. 2, 106. 50. Smith, Papers of Nathaniel Bacon of Stiffkey, Vol. 2, 106. 51. Additional ms 33597, folio 40, British Library. 52. Additional ms 33597, folio 40, British Library. 53. Miller, “Aristotle’s ‘Special Topics,’” 61. 54. Traub, “Nature of Norms,” 44. 5. Gentry Style 1. Crowley, “Composition Is Not Rhetoric.” 2. Longaker, Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue; Agnew, Outward, Visible Propriety; Fahnestock, Rhetorical Style.

184

Notes to Pages 123–136

3. Engelhardt, “Sherry’s Treatise of Schemes.” 4. Erasmus, Copia; Sloane, “Schoolbooks and Rhetoric,” 119. 5. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorike, 163–­64, signature n2r–­n 2v. 6. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorike, 163, n2r. 7. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorike, 172, n6v. 8. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorike, 173, n7r. This page is misprinted as “155” in the text. 9. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorike, 173, n7r. 10. Figures in this sense are not an additional function of language, but fundamental to language, at least as language was conceived of and practiced by the gentry of Elizabethan England. 11. One of the mainstays of early modern English historiography is the idea of the “Tudor revolution in government,” a term and concept developed by Geoffrey R. Elton in his book of the same name. This revolution—­contested by historians in its details but accepted, I think, as a tenable explanation for some unquestionable historical developments—­consisted of a rise of a whole complex of administrative machinery to develop, deliver, and regulate the laws of the nation. While these developments certainly affected systems of justice in terms of criminal offenses and accusations, the bulk of these laws (and in much of the concept of justice itself) had to do with property. The new complexities in the courts were intended not only to facilitate this new “revolution” in government but also to respond to very real changes on the ground and in the structures of self-­ governance that developed in response to or in light or in spite of these more theoretically centralized changes. See Elton, Tudor Revolution in Government. Practically, this meant the emergence or strengthening of multiple courts. To describe the evolution of this system would take multiple volumes (indeed, the classical text on this, from the early twentieth century, takes five volumes just to get to the Elizabethan period). The overall arc is something like this: in more feudal periods, justice was delivered and property regulated more or less locally, either through the court of the local magnate or the local church. Any decision reached through this could in theory be appealed to the Crown, which would be present in a region through a set of regular sessions held by judges (like the sheriff), who were representatives of the Crown, or else through the Crown itself as the monarch made her or his progress through the country. Alternately, one could go oneself to the monarch’s court, though this would have been rarer. 12. This is a much abbreviated and simplified presentation of the complicated topic of language and the law in early modern England. Williams, “Law, Language, and the Printing Press”; Gillies, “Anglicisation of English Law”; Ormrod, “Use of English”; and Ross, “Commoning of the Common Law,” present useful overviews.



Notes to Pages 137–140

185

13. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorike, 172, n6v. 14. Cowell, “Dye of Desire.” Cowell refers to Kennedy and Murphy, good starting places for the classical and medieval discussion of colors and the other divisions. 15. Quintilian, Institutes, 9.1 My citations are taken from the LacusCurtius website, which bases their text on the 1920–­22 Loeb edition, translated by H. E. Butler. Page numbers refer to that edition. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/ Roman/Texts/Quintilian/Institutio_Oratoria/9c*.html#ref156 (accessed April 6, 2022). 16. Quoted in Aylmer, “Meaning and Definition of Property,” 89. 17. Aylmer, “Meaning of Property,” 90. 18. See Aylmer, “Meaning and Definition of Property.” 19. Schroeder, “Chix Nix Bundle-­o-­Stix.” 20. The economics of circulation and credit were not entirely formalized in this particular moment, so that the law might or might not be employed in a systematic way in, for instance, the drawing up of lines of credit or the extending of credit from one party to another. Furthermore, repeated correspondences show evidence of protracted negotiations for repayments, loans, further loans, and further repayments, all intricately connected as the below correspondence suggests. There were established conventions. Many loans were indeed drawn up as bonds, with formal acquittances indicating their repayments, often at certain times of the year corresponding with the same sort of saint’s days that indicated law and academic terms. Michaelmas, for instance, or a day in relation to it (like the first Monday following), would serve as a customary day for repayment. But any number of factors could speed up or slow down repayment processes, as we see in this letter from Downing, which is found in Egerton ms 2714, folio 34, British Library. 21. As a way of emphasizing that “calling in a loan” is figurative, a Google search of the phrase called up a page from translation forum WordReference, in which user ranomrr, who presents themselves as a native French speaker, asks, “Could you help me for understanding the following terme: call in loans,” suggesting that, whatever else, the phrase is not immediately evident at least to one non-­native speaker (https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/to-call-in-loans.1380977/, accessed December 30, 2020). 22. Add ms 33597, folio 24, British Library. 23. The oed places the earliest such use at 1611, fifteen years later than this letter. “measure, n.” oed Online. 4.e. 24. Wilson, Arte of Rhetorike, 177, n1r. 25. Hobbes, Art of Rhetoric, 517.

186

Notes to Pages 141–150

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

kny 466, Norfolk Record Office. kny 785, Norfolk Record Office. Quintilian, Institutes, 9.3.62–­64. Quintilian, Institutes, 9.3.27. Quintilian, Institutes, 9.3.28. Sherry, Treatise, b7r. Peacham’s manual takes the same approach as Sherry’s, briefly defining each term, then giving examples, though it follows the examples with a further explanation of the virtue of each figure. Wilson’s text does not treat the figures at any length on their own, instead dealing with the methods by demonstration as it discusses the colors of rhetoric, which it treats at greater length. 32. Sherry, Treatise, b7r. 33. Sherry, Treatise, b7r. 34. Sherry, Treatise, b7r.



Notes to Pages 150–161

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In de x

absence, 70, 72, 82, 85–­87, 88, 92 accident, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107, 109, 117 acres, measurement of, 110–­11, 116, 118, 123–­24 activity, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107 actors, and race, 7 adages, 54 Advancement of Learning (F. Bacon), 104, 173n46 Agnew, Lois, 14, 73, 136; Outward, Visible Propriety, 169n9 Agricola, Rudolph, De Inventione Dialectica libri tres, 105, 106 Ahearn, Laura M., Invitations to Love, 165n2 Anderson, Benedict, 34–­35, 41; Imagined Communities, 15 antithesis, 90, 147–­48 anxiety, 33, 65, 72, 92, 165n3, 173n1, 180n10 The Arcadian Rhetorike (Fraunce), 114, 168n6 argument: about, 10, 163–­64; combining factors in, 161; in letter writing, 94, 95; presence in, 68; and record keeping, 121–­22, 123, 124–­25; repetition in, 152–­53; in rhetorical system, 13, 24, 104–­5, 109; and style, 137; synecdoche in, 150; and topics, 103, 111 Aristotle, 103, 105, 106–­7, 109, 184n43; Organon, 105, 113, 181n3 Armstrong, Edward, 169n9, 173n1



arrangement, as rhetorical canon, 13, 14, 22, 27, 94, 95, 104, 137, 152 ars dictaminis, 77 The Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham), 168n6 Arte of Rhetorike (Wilson), 79, 101, 125–­26, 137, 168n6 The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke (Cox), 108–­9, 168n6 Art of Logik and Rhetorik (Fenner), 114 Askew, Anne, 169n11 Bacon, Francis: Advancement of Learning, 104, 173n46; influence of, 19–­20, 103–­4, 105; influences on, 9; Novum Organum, 103; as rhetorician, 28, 29–­32, 69, 162–­63 Bacon, Nathaniel, 16, 93, 96, 110–­12, 123, 127, 128–­30, 181n29 Bacon, Nicholas (father): about, 28–­29, 30; appeal to, 95–­96; influence of, 19–­20; as letter writer, 75; negotiation by, 110–­12, 123–­25; as rhetorician, 9, 88–­92 Bacon, Nicholas (son), 88–­90, 91–­92 Bacon family, 9 Baldwin, T. W., William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 165n3 Batho, Gordon, 42 Belsey, Catherine, The Subject of Tragedy, 173n1

203

Benese, Richard, 183n26; The Manner of Measuring of All Manner of Land, 117–­18 Bergeron, David, 174n3 Bible, 35 Bishop of Norwich, 82, 112 Bizzell, Patricia, 14, 168n7 Blair, Hugh, 15–­16, 170n15 Boleyn, Anne: about, 19–­20, 23–­24; as rhetorician, 8–­9, 18–­19, 20–­23 Boleyn, Thomas, 20 Book of Common Prayer, 83 Brandt, Deborah, 40, 44, 175n16, 176n21 Brückner, Martin, 118, 167n12, 183n29 “bundle of sticks,” 143 Burghley, William Cecil, 28 Burke, Kenneth, 93–­94, 162 business, and rhetoric, 163–­64 Butler, Judith, 166n10 Campbell, George, 15 canons, of rhetoric, 13, 22, 167nn1–­2. See also arrangement, as rhetorical canon; delivery, as rhetorical canon; invention, as rhetorical canon; memory, as rhetorical canon; style, as rhetorical canon Catholic Church, 20, 23–­24, 83 certainty: and definition, 109; in letters, 74; in measurement, 132; in negotiations, 103, 106; and new science, 129; and new technology, 116; in thought, 115–­16; visual presentation of, 119–­20, 123. See also uncertainty Christianity, 47, 50, 60, 64, 83–­85 The Christian State of Matrimony (Coverdale), 17 Church of England, 81, 82, 83–­84 Churchyard, Thomas, 9, 36–­37, 38–­39, 41, 67; A Discourse of the Queenes Maiesties Entertainement in Suffolk

and Norffolk, 35–­36, 43–­54, 174n3, 175n20, 178n29 Cicero, 13, 14, 79, 80, 167nn1–­2; De Optimo Genere Oratorum, 177n25; Topics, 106–­7 Clark, Donald Lemen, John Milton at St. Paul’s School, 165n3 classes, social, 9, 15, 35, 39, 41–­42, 49, 142, 169nn10–­11 Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition (Kennedy), 168n7, 169n11 coach, as symbol, 48–­49, 50, 52, 178n28 Coke, Edward, 143 Colet, John, 1, 23, 168n6 Collinson, Patrick, 90 colors, in rhetoric, 141, 187n31 Comiskey, Bruce, Dialectical Rhetoric, 167n2 Common-­wealth of Oceana (Harrington), 5 communication: changes in, 67–­68; figures as, 141; letters as, 69, 76, 131; modern, 163; in negotiations, 76; presence in, 72; style in, 135–­36 Communion, 83–­84, 86 community: about, 34–­35; collective understanding in, 152–­53, 154; importance of, 38; and individuals, 106; as information source, 147; and letters, 70–­71; and local presence, 81–­ 84; and material world, 157, 159–­60; and measurement, 116–­17, 129; and negotiation, 7–­8, 130 composition: in speech, 13, 138–­39; in writing, 13, 69, 75–­76, 77, 176n21, 181n29 Conley, Thomas, 30; Rhetoric in the European Tradition, 167n2 conscience, 153, 155–­57, 158, 159–­60 contentment, 127–­28, 129–­30 context, 36, 40, 44, 47, 48, 176n21

204 Index

courtesy, 36, 45 court system. See legal affairs Coverdale, Miles, 18; The Christian State of Matrimony, 17 Cowell, John, 143 Cox, Leonard, The Arte or Crafte of Rhethoryke, 108–­9, 168n6 credit, monetary, 99, 145, 146, 148–­49, 153–­54, 186n20 Cressy, David, 39–­40, 175n9 The Crisis of the Aristocracy (Stone), 4 Cromwell, Thomas, 23–­24 Crowley, Sharon, 136, 168n7 curriculum: background of, 13–­15, 168n6; changes in, 1–­2, 73, 102, 104–­5, 113, 162–­63; dialectical, 101; goal of, 19–­ 20; humanist, 36; Latin, 16; presence in, 68–­69; rhetorical, 101; and rhetorical canons, 135; and topics/changes in, 133. See also education Dante, 168n8 Darien Company documents, 163–­64 Day, Angel, English Secretary, 79 Daybell, James, 73 debt, 144–­49, 186nn20–­21 De Conscribendis Epistolis (Erasmus), 70, 79, 82 De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo (Erasmus), 137–­38, 168n6 Defense of Poesy (Sidney), 33 definition, as rhetorical topic, 103, 109–­10, 126, 131 de Grazia, Margreta, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, 167n12 De Inventione Dialectica libri tres (Agricola), 105, 106 delivery, as rhetorical canon, 13, 76–­77, 104, 114, 137 De Optimo Genere Oratorum (Cicero), 177n25

De ratione studii (Erasmus), 168n6 Derrida, Jacques, 166n10 Descartes, Rene, Discours de la Methode, 104 description: in communication, 68; in entertainments, 46–­47, 53, 178n29; in land measurement, 117, 119, 122; in letter writing, 69, 70, 74, 81, 87–­88; in narrative, 41; thick, 3; in writing, 67 devices, 46–­49, 49–­54, 178n29. See also entertainments dialectic, 14, 101–­2, 104–­5, 113–­14, 115–­16, 167n2, 181n3, 182n23, 184n43 Dialectical Rhetoric (Comiskey), 167n2 dichotomies, 114–­15, 123, 183n37 Digges, Leonard, 117, 183n26; A Geometrical Practice, Named Pantometria, 117–­18, 119, 182n25; Tectonicon, 117, 119, 182n25 Digges, Thomas, 183n26; A Geometrical Practice, Named Pantometria, 117–­18, 119, 182n25 Discours de la Methode (Descartes), 104 A Discourse of the Queenes Maiesties Entertainement in Suffolk and Norffolk (Churchyard), 35–­36, 43–­54, 174n3, 175n20, 178n29 dispraising, 80–­81, 125–­26 Donne, John, 29 Downing, George, 144–­46, 186n20 drama, 118, 165n3, 178n29, 183n29 Dutch, as refugees, 59–­60, 63 Dutton, Mistress, 93, 94–­95 early modern period, 14, 19, 69, 73, 102, 170n12, 171n28 education: background of, 1–­2, 4; Christian, 83; legal, 140, 142; for letter writing, 78, 81, 99–­100; for material world, 101–­2, 162; rhetorical, 5, 90, 113, 135, 170n15; and style, 141;

Index 205

education (continued) topics in, 10, 108–­9; vernacular, 14–­15, 16–­18, 36. See also curriculum Egypt, 183n26 Elizabeth I, Queen: and gentry, 29; hospital as gift of, 63–­64; in interactions with Norfolk Dutch, 59–­62; in interactions with Norfolk English, 33–­34, 43, 46–­49, 50–­54, 55, 56–­59, 62–­63, 64–­65; knighthoods bestowed by, 37; mentioned in writing, 43–­46, 54–­56; visit to Norwich of, 9, 35, 43, 175n20 Elizabethan period, 1, 5–­6, 78 elocution, 115, 135, 138–­42. See also style, as rhetorical canon The Emperor of Men’s Minds (Rebhorn), 165n3 England, 16–­18, 33–­35, 62, 170n13, 171n28, 173n1 English: comforting with, 54; in court cases, 140; in education, 16, 18, 40, 108–­9, 162–­63; and gentry, 1–­4; influences on, 167n16; and Latin, 165n3; in letter writing, 77–­79; and rhetoric, 136–­37, 141–­42, 168n6, 170n12; royalty celebrated with, 57–­58, 61–­62, 64–­65, 178n35; use of expanding, 19; in written works, 33–­34, 35–­36, 38–­39, 173n1 English Secretary (Day), 79 The Enimie of Idlenesse (Fulwood), 79–­80 Enlightenment, 16 Enterline, Lyn, 173n1; Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 165n3 entertainments, 43–­48, 55, 177n27. See also devices epistolarity, 72, 92, 179n5 Erasmus, Desiderius, 1, 13, 22, 23, 78, 135, 171n30; De Conscribendis Epistolis, 70, 79, 82; De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo, 137–­38, 168n6; De ratione studii, 168n6

error, 109, 120, 154 An Essay concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 104 essence, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107 ethics, as classical virtue, 13, 15 ethos, 23, 68 exordium, 27, 94–­95, 177n24 fabrics, for clothing, 46, 177n26 Fahnestock, Jeanne, 136 family, 1, 8–­11 Fenner, Dudley, 115; Art of Logik and Rhetorik, 114 Ferrer family, 122 figures: in elocution, 139, 141–­42, 186n21; in legal work, 142, 144–­49, 157–­59, 160, 161, 187n31; and material world, 162; present-­day, 164; purpose of, 90–­ 91; and synecdoche, 149–­51, 152, 153 finance, 91, 127–­28, 148–­49 Fitzherbert, John, Surveyenge, 182n25 Fitzmaurice, Susan, 179n5 Fletcher, David, 119 foreigners, 59–­60 Forms of Nationhood (Helgerson), 165n3, 173n1 Fortescue, Thomas, 151–­57 Fraunce, Abraham, 114–­15; The Arcadian Rhetorike, 114, 168n6; Lawier’s Logik, 114 friendship, 146–­49 Fulwood, William, The Enimie of Idlenesse, 79–­80 Garden of Eloquence (Peacham), 137, 168n6, 187n31 Garter, Bernard, 9, 36, 38–­39, 41, 67; The Joyfull Receyving of the Queenes Most Excellent Majestie into Hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich, 35, 54–­59, 178n30 Gascoigne, George, 177n27, 178n29; Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth, 33–­34

206 Index

Gawdy, Bassingbone, 37 Gawdy, Clippesby, 37–­38 Gee, James Paul, 102 Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life ( Johnson), 169n11 gentry: about, 2, 4, 9–­11; education of, 101–­3; group identity of, 41–­42, 56; letters of, 69, 72–­74, 78; life skills of, 16–­17; literacy among, 39, 42–­43, 175n9; rhetorical legacy of, 162–­64; rise of, 4–­6; and style, 135–­36, 137, 141, 142; and topics, 106, 108–­9, 123, 125 genus, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107, 109, 110 geology, 124–­25 A Geometrical Practice, Named Pantometria (L. Digges and T. Digges), 117–­18, 119, 182n25 geometry, 118–­19, 124–­25, 182n25 George I, King, 24 Gerrard, Gilbert, 44 gifts, 58–­59, 60–­65 Glenn, Cheryl, Rhetoric Retold, 169n11 Goldberg, Jonathan: James I and the Politics of Literature, 173n1; Writing Matter, 72–­73 Goody, Jack, 40, 175n13 Graban, Tarez Samra, Women’s Irony, 169n11 Graff, Harvey, 174n5; Legacies of Literacy, 165n2 Grassi, Ernesto, 168n8 Greek, 35–­36, 65 Greenblatt, Stephen: Renaissance Self-­Fashioning, 173n1; Shakespearean Negotiations, 173n1 Greenway, Mr., 81–­83, 84–­87 Gresham, Anne (spouse of Nicholas Bacon), 93–­96, 181n29 Gresham, Anne, Lady (step-­mother to Anne), 93, 94, 95–­96

Gresham, Thomas, 93, 95–­96, 112, 127–­30 grids and tables, 119–­23, 163–­64, 183n27 Habermas, Jürgen, 15 Hall, Kim, 7 Harper, Charles G., 178n28 Harrington, James, Common-­wealth of Oceana, 5 Harvey, Gabriel, 114 Hatton, Christopher, 29 Heath, Shirley Brice, 56 Helgerson, Richard: Forms of Nationhood, 165n3, 173n1; Self-­ Crowned Laureates, 173n1 Henry, Earl of Pembroke, 114 Henry VIII, King, 1, 8–­9, 20–­21, 23–­24, 63 Herzberg, Bruce, 14, 168n7 Higgins, Hannah, 121 Hobbes, Thomas, 149–­50 Holland, Mary, 37–­38, 70–­72 Hooker, Richard, 166n7 hospital, as royal gift, 63–­64 Howell, W. S., 103–­4, 105, 167n2 humanism and humanists, 1–­2, 19, 23–­24, 35–­36, 79, 105–­6, 168n8 Illusion of Power (Orgel), 173n1 Imagined Communities (Anderson), 15 Imitation of Christ (Thomas á Kempis), 54 In Defense of Rhetoric (Vickers), 167n2, 169n9 Institutes (Quintilian), 13 internet technology, 76 invention, as rhetorical canon: about, 13; and dialectic, 113–­14; in education, 104–­5, 135, 168n6; in letter writing, 22, 94, 95; and new science, 133; role of, 101; and style, 136–­38 Invitations to Love (Ahearn), 165n2 irony, 86, 114–­15

Index 207

James I and the Politics of Literature (Goldberg), 173n1 Jardine, Lisa, 28 John Milton at St. Paul’s School (Clark), 165n3 Johnson, Nan, Gender and Rhetorical Space in American Life, 169n11 Jonson, Ben, 177n27 Joseph (Biblical character), in text, 60–­61, 178n35 The Joyfull Receyving of the Queenes Most Excellent Majestie into Hir Highnesse Citie of Norwich (Garter), 35, 54–­59, 178n30 judgment, in dialectic, 104–­5 judgment, in rhetoric, 105, 114 Karon, Louise A., 179n3 Kennedy, George A., Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition, 168n7, 169n11 Kent, Francis, 131 knighthood, 35–­39 knowledge, 33, 104, 108, 119 Knyvett (son), 37 Knyvett, Anne, 158 Knyvett, Edmund, 96–­99, 150 Knyvett, Muriel, 37, 81, 82–­83, 84–­87, 96–­99, 150–­57 Knyvett, Thomas (father), 37, 81, 82, 130–­33, 144–­46, 158 Knyvett family, 9 land: description of, 110–­11, 117–­22, 132–­33; importance of, 1; negotiation over, 9–­11, 108, 112–­13, 123–­25, 130–­32; as property, 143 language, 6–­7, 58–­59, 72–­73, 101–­2, 166n10, 176n21 Latin: in court cases, 140; in education, 1–­2, 16; and English, 57–­58, 165n3; as

literacy indicator, 35–­36, 57; move away from, 14, 17–­18, 19–­20, 77–­78; royalty celebrated with, 61–­62, 64, 65, 178n35; strengths of, 33, 168n8 Lawier’s Logik (Fraunce), 114 laws, sumptuary, 177n26 Legacies of Literacy (Graff), 165n2 legal affairs: and community, 157–­62; and elocution, 140–­41; evolution in, 185n11; and family, 10–­11; in financial business, 186n20; importance of, 1; and individuals, 157–­62; and letter-­writing, 91; and measurement, 116; sumptuary laws in, 177n26; and synecdoche, 150–­53, 155–­57; in writing, 142–­44, 146–­48 Leigh, Valentine, The Moste Profitable and Commendable Science, of Surueying Oflandes, Tenementes, and Hereditamentes, 182n25 Lestrange family, 120, 121–­22, 183n37 letters and letter writing: about, 3–­4, 9; about debt, 144–­49; context in, 165n2; conventions in, 70–­72; family matters in, 88–­96, 150–­57, 159–­60, 181n29; importance of, 69–­70, 179n5; literary presence in, 72–­73, 96–­100, 180n10; local presence in, 81–­83, 84–­88; negotiations in, 110–­13, 123–­25, 127–­28, 130–­32; privacy levels of, 74–­76; in rhetorical education, 76–­81; skills used in, 21–­23 Limbert, Stephen, 59, 62–­65 literacy: context in, 176n21; events for, 56, 178n32; in group identity, 42–­43; and individuality, 73; of involvement, 44; in letter writing, 35–­36, 38, 76; in negotiations, 161; programs for, 102; role of, 39–­41, 174n5 literature, 67–­68, 73, 133, 165n3, 173n1

208 Index

Locke, John, 17–­18, 19, 105, 136, 169n9, 174n6; An Essay concerning Human Understanding, 104; Some Thoughts concerning Education, 17, 104 logic, 14, 115, 126–­27 Longaker, Mark, 136; Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue, 169nn9–­10 Loomba, Ania, 7 Mack, Peter, 1, 113–­14, 115, 182n23; Renaissance Argument, 167n2 Maclean, Ian, 177n22 Mainwaring, Arthur, 172n36 Mann, Jenny C., 173n1; Outlaw Rhetoric, 165n3 The Manner of Measuring of All Manner of Land (Benese), 117–­18 maps, 119, 122 Marvell, Andrew, “The Mower,” 164 Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 114 masques. See devices; entertainments material world: about, 2–­3, 9–­10, 161–­62, 166n10; and argument, 101–­2; and community, 157–­58; in education, 81; and figures, 139–­40; letters influencing, 70, 74; and literacy, 40–­41, 43, 46, 51–­54, 56–­57; and social world, 6–­8; in writings, 67 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 7, 167n12 meaning, 40–­41, 52, 152, 156, 176n21 measurement, 116–­19, 182n25 memory, as rhetorical canon, 13, 104, 137 metadiscourse, 175n16 metaphor, 86–­87, 114–­15, 136, 141, 143 metonymy, 114–­15, 149 Micciche, Laura R., 41 microhistory, 169n11 Middelton, William, 81, 82–­83, 84–­87 Miller, Carolyn, 133 minister, Dutch, 59–­62 money, 58–­59, 87, 119, 120–­21, 143–­46

More, Thomas, 1, 23–­24 The Moste Profitable and Commendable Science, of Surueying Oflandes, Tenementes, and Hereditamentes (Leigh), 182n25 Moumford, John, 110–­11 “The Mower” (Marvell), 164 Murphy, James Jerome, Renaissance Eloquence, 169n9 nation, concept of, 34–­35 negotiation: about, 1, 7–­8, 9–­10; and definition, 108–­11; in law, 140–­41; and material world, 161; and topics, 13, 107–­8, 112–­13, 119–­20, 121–­22, 123–­28, 130–­33 Newbold, W. Webster, 80 Newborough, John, 172n36 New Historicism, 166n7, 173n1 New Rhetoric (Perelman and Olbrechts-­ Tyteca), 68–­69 new science: in curriculum, 104, 113; historic placement of, 123, 132–­33, 162, 183n26; as measurement, 116–­19; responses to, 19, 103, 105–­6; and topics, 10, 108, 122, 132–­33 Newton, Isaac, 19; Principia, 104 Nile River flood, 183n26 Norfolk: connections in, 7–­8, 9, 82; as example, 9, 38, 44–­45; law in, 161; literacy in, 39; prominent citizens of, 20, 24–­25, 28, 87–­88, 112, 130 Norwich, Norfolk, 39, 43, 54–­55, 147, 175n9 Novum Organum (F. Bacon), 103 objects and subjectivity, 6–­7, 167n12 obligations, 93, 96 Observations of the Magnificency and Opulency of Cities (Raleigh), 4–­5 occasions, 30–­31

Index 209

Olbrechts-­Tyteca, Lucie, New Rhetoric, 68–­69 Olson, David, 40 Ong, Walter, 40, 114, 115–­16, 136, 167n2, 175n13 orations, 55–­59, 62–­64, 125–­30 order, categories of, 103, 107, 109–­10, 117, 126, 131, 157–­58, 161–­62, 164 Organon (Aristotle), 105, 113, 181n3 Orgel, Stephen, Illusion of Power, 173n1 Othello, 7 Outlaw Rhetoric (Mann), 165n3 Outward, Visible Propriety (Agnew), 169n9 Owen, Octavius Freire, 181n3 pageants. See devices; entertainments paratext, 177n22, 177n24 Parker, Patricia, 136–­37 passivity, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107 Paston, Clement, 146–­49 Paston, William, 130–­32 Paston family, 9 pathos, 23, 68 Peacham, Henry, 141, 159; Garden of Eloquence, 137, 168n6, 187n31 Perelman, Chaïm, New Rhetoric, 68–­69 persona, 16, 67, 80, 93 personation, 67–­68, 70 persuasion, 2, 8, 16, 22, 23, 148 Petrarch, Francesco, 13 Pickard-­Cambridge, W. A., 181n3 Pirrhus, King, 101 place, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107 plats, 117, 118, 119 Plett, Heinrich, 68 plot (word), 118, 183n29 poets, 29, 33–­35, 36, 65, 173n1, 174n3 Poole, Kristen, 118, 167n12, 183n29 position, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107 practice, rhetorical, 1–­3, 11, 15, 19, 79, 102–­3, 169n11

praising, 46, 52, 80–­81, 125–­26, 175n20 presence: literary, 67–­68, 72–­74, 80, 96–­100, 179n3, 180n10; local, 81–­87; in modern media, 180n11; and obligations, 93–­96; personal, 88–­92; physical, 70, 72, 179n10; rhetorical, 9, 96–­100 Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth (Gascoigne), 33–­34 Principia (Newton), 104 print publications, 15–­16, 163, 184n46 progymnasmata, 25, 67, 80–­81 property, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107, 109, 131, 157–­58, 161–­62, 164 Protestantism, 20, 35, 48, 59, 63, 83–­84 puns, 118 Puttenham, George, 28, 88; The Arte of English Poesie, 168n6 quality, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107, 126, 131 quantity, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107, 126, 131 questions: on absence, 82, 86; and argument, 105; categories of, 114–­15; and probability, 13; on quality, 111; on quantity, 111; rhetorical, 25–­26; and uncertainty, 103, 116 Quilligan, Maureen, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, 167n12 Quintilian, 68–­69, 141, 158–­59; Institutes, 13 race, language of, 7 Rainolde, Richard, 80–­81 Raleigh, Walter, Observations of the Magnificency and Opulency of Cities, 4–­5 Ramus, Peter, 14, 113–­16, 122, 123, 167n2, 169n9, 182n23, 183n37 readers and reading: about, 3, 5–­6; of Bible, 35; and definition, 109; of English language, 36, 38; gentry, 58;

210 Index

importance of, 52–­53; of letters, 73, 76, 80, 84; and literacy, 178n32; and material world, 7, 9, 41, 43; and presence, 93–­95, 96, 99; and process, 176n21; and rhetorical canons, 135; and social world, 41, 43; and thought, 175n13; and topics, 129, 132, 161–­62; and writers, 44–­45, 46–­47, 49–­50, 51, 55–­56, 64–­65, 175n16 Rebhorn, Wayne, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, 165n3 record keeping, 119–­25, 183n37 Redmond, George, 63 relation, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107 Renaissance, 165n3, 168n7, 169n9 Renaissance Argument (Mack), 167n2 Renaissance Eloquence (Murphy), 169n9 Renaissance Self-­Fashioning (Greenblatt), 173n1 repetition, 94, 95, 148–­49, 152, 162 rhetoric: about, 8–­9; canons of, 13, 136–­38; changes in, 13–­15, 168nn6–­7, 169n11; decline of, 103–­4; in education, 101–­2, 104–­5, 113–­14, 170n15; everyday use of, 2–­4; Francis Bacon on, 29–­31; and gentry, 6; of historical figures, 18–­20; legacy of, 162–­64; and literary presence, 96–­100; and literature, 173n1; and new science, 133; patterns of, 167nn1–­2; Renaissance, 165n3; study of, 170n12; and women, 169n11 Rhetoric (Richards), 169n9 Rhetorical Style and Bourgeois Virtue (Longaker), 169nn9–­10 Rhetoric in the European Tradition (Conley), 167n2 Rhetoric Retold (Glenn), 169n11 Richards, Jennifer, 7; Rhetoric, 169n9 Rome, 1–­2, 170n13 The Rule of Reason (Wilson), 184n43

schemes, 141, 142 Schneider, Gary, 69, 72, 179n5 scholarship, literary, 3–­4 science, new. See new science Searle, John, 166n10 Sears, Charles Baldwin, 136 Self-­Crowned Laureates (Helgerson), 173n1 Seneca, 90 Shakespearean Negotiations (Greenblatt), 173n1 Shakespeare’s Schoolroom (Enterline), 165n3 Sherry, Richard, 159, 187n31; A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes, 137, 168n6 Sidney, Philip, 29, 172n41; Defense of Poesy, 33 signs: in letter writing, 153, 154–­56, 157; of material world, 43, 49, 52, 55–­57, 101, 177n26; royalty reading, 46, 58, 60, 61; substitution of, 149–­51 Smith, Adam, 136, 169n9 Smith, Ian, 7 social world: about, 2–­3, 165n1; in education, 14–­15, 81; letters influencing, 70, 74; and literacy, 40–­41, 43; and material world, 6–­8, 157, 161–­62, 166n10; in writings, 67 Some Thoughts concerning Education (Locke), 17, 104 speakers, 13, 55, 62, 68, 101–­2, 139, 172nn35–­36 Stallybrass, Peter, Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, 167n12 state, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107 Stewart, Alan, 28 Stone, Lawrence, 5; The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 4 Strangers, 63 Street, Mr., 178n32 style, as rhetorical canon: about, 10–­11, 13, 16, 162; and argument, 114;

Index 211

style, as rhetorical canon (continued) connections aided by, 157–­58; and dominant class, 169n10; elements of, 151; and elocution, 138, 141; emphasis on, 14–­15, 24–­26, 135–­36, 168n6, 169n9; importance of, 101; and invention, 136–­38; in legal writing, 142; in letter writing, 22, 87–­88, 90–­91; perceptions of, 136–­38 Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (de Grazia, Quilligan, and Stallybrass), 167n12 subjectivity, 6–­7, 74, 167n12 The Subject of Tragedy (Belsey), 173n1 Suffolk, 28, 45 Surveyenge (Fitzherbert), 182n25 surveying, 110–­13, 116–­19, 182n25, 183n26 syllogisms, 105–­6 synecdoche, 110, 114–­15, 129, 147, 149–­50, 153–­55, 157 Talon, Orner, 14 Tawney, R. H., 4–­5 Taylor, Eva, 119 Tectonicon (L. Digges), 117, 119, 182n25 terms and terminology, 11, 13, 109–­13, 118, 120, 131, 142 text: approaches to, 176n21; and entertainments, 61–­62, 178n30; and group identity, 9, 42; history of, 78–­80, 103–­4; law, 143; and literacy, 36, 40; and literary presence, 73; and material world, 41; on measurement, 117–­19; rhetorical canons in, 137; on style, 14–­15, 166n7, 168n7. See also Churchyard, Thomas; Garter, Bernard thanks, 58–­59, 94 Thomas á Kempis, Imitation of Christ, 54 thought, 40, 73, 101, 115–­16, 141, 158–­59, 175n13

Tillyard, E. M. W., 5–­6, 166n7 time, as rhetorical topic, 103, 107 topics: about, 10; and argument, 94, 102–­3; categories of, 103, 181n3; and definition, 109–­13; demonstrative, 125–­26, 127–­29; dialectical, 115; history of, 103, 105–­8; and material world, 162; and measurement, 116; in negotiations, 130–­33; organization of, 184n43; in visual representation, 119–­20, 122, 123, 124 Topics (Cicero), 106–­7 Traub, Valerie, 133 A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (Sherry), 137, 168n6 tropes, 114–­15, 139, 141, 142, 145 Truelove, Alison, 42 Tutoft, Jane, 16 uncertainty: in discussion, 102–­3; in negotiations, 106, 108, 109–­10, 126, 128, 132, 135; in valuation measurements, 116, 117–­18, 119–­20 universalities, 5–­6, 138, 166n7, 169n9 Valla, Lorenzo, 13 vernacular: in education, 16, 36; in letter writing, 68, 78, 88; and literacy, 8, 40, 41, 54, 64, 177n27; in negotiations, 130; power of, 14–­15, 168n8; on rhetorical topics, 108 Vickers, Brian, 30; In Defense of Rhetoric, 167n2, 169n9 virtue, 1, 13–­14, 52–­53, 62–­64, 136, 169n9 Walpole, Robert, 8–­9, 18–­20, 24–­27, 172nn35–­36 Walzer, Arthur, 170n13 Whately, George, 15 Whetstone, George, 28 Williams, Graham Trevor, 179n5

212 Index

William Shakespeare’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (Baldwin), 165n3 Wilson, Thomas, 137–­39, 141, 149–­50, 187n31; Arte of Rhetorike, 79, 101, 125–­26, 137, 168n6; The Rule of Reason, 184n43 Wolsey, Cardinal, 21–­22, 23–­24 women, 16, 36, 39, 169n11 Women’s Irony (Graban), 169n11 Woodhouse, Henry, 146–­49 wool trade, in negotiation, 126, 127–­29 writers and writing: about, 1, 3–­4, 5–­6, 162–­64; and community, 113; and definition, 109; education for, 18, 101–­2; of English language, 33–­34, 36; and group identity, 42; and law, 142, 144; and literacy, 178n32; and

literature, 173n1; and material world, 7; in negotiations, 126; and print, 15; and process, 176n21; purpose of, 16–­17; and readers, 41, 175n16; and rhetorical canons, 13, 135–­36; and style, 137–­39, 162; and synecdoche, 150; and thought, 175n13; and topics, 10, 128–­29, 130–­32, 161–­62. See also Churchyard, Thomas; Garter, Bernard; letters and letter writing Writing Matter (Goldberg), 72–­73 Wyndham, Francis, 93, 95, 96 Wyndsore, Lord, 158, 160–­61 yeomanry, compared to gentry, 39, 42 zeugma, 158, 159

Index 213

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