Oratory

The Many Shades of Praise: Diversity in Epideictic Rhetoric in Diplomatic Settings

by Brian Maxson

proofs of an article published in Rhetorik in Mittelalter und Renaissance: Konzepte – Praxis – Diversität, eds. Georg Strack and Julia Knödler, 393-412 (Munich: Herbert Utz Verlag, 2011).

The Many Shades of Praise: Diversity in Epideictic Rhetoric in Diplomatic Settings

Fifteenth-century... more The Many Shades of Praise: Diversity in Epideictic Rhetoric in Diplomatic Settings

Fifteenth-century diplomatic protocol required the city of Florence to send diplomats to congratulate both new and militarily victorious rulers.  Diplomats on such missions poured praise on their triumphant allies and new rulers at friendly locations.  However, political realities also meant that these diplomats would sometimes have to praise rulers whose accession or victory opposed Florentine interests.  Moreover, different allies and enemies required different levels of praise.  Jealous rulers compared the gifts, status, and oratory that they received from Florence to the Florentine entourages sent to their neighbors.  Sending diplomats with too little or too much social status and eloquence could spell diplomatic disaster.  Diplomats met these challenges by varying the style, structure, and content of their speeches.  Far from formulaic pronouncements of goodwill, diplomatic orations varied from one speech to the next in order to meet the demands of the complex diplomatic world into which they fit.  Contextualizing these orations reveals the subtle reservations of diplomats praising a hostile ruler, the insertion of specific citations to flatter specific audiences, and the changing intellectual and stylistic interests of humanists throughout the fifteenth century.  This essay will examine the different shades of flattery practiced by Florentine diplomats and the contexts that explain these variations.

The documents in Andocides' On the Mysteries

by Mirko Canevaro

Co-authored with E. M. Harris

The London Mayoral election will be won by the most effective orator – and this currently favours Boris Johnson

by Andrew Scott Crines

"Ascending the Rostrum: Hannah Mather Crocker and Women's Political Oratory"

by Eileen Hunt Botting

The article is forthcoming in the Journal of Politics, in late 2012 or early 2013. The online version will be available in Spring 2012 on the Journal of Politics website.

The article has an appendix of complete transcriptions of two newly re-discovered oratorical manuscripts by Hannah Mather Crocker, from 1813 and 1814, which show her activism against the War of 1812 and her leadership of a benevolent society in Boston devoted to the vocational education of poor girls of her North End neighborhood in the 1810s.

Although Hannah Mather Crocker (1752-1829) apparently presented a prescription against women's political oratory in... more Although Hannah Mather Crocker (1752-1829) apparently presented a prescription against women's political oratory in her 'Observations on the Real Rights of Women' (1818), she provided philosophical and historical challenges to this conventional rule of early nineteenth-century feminine propriety elsewhere in the first American treatise on women's rights. By analyzing new archival findings of two of her oratorical works from the early 1810s—her 1813 "Fast Sermon" against the War of 1812 and her 1814 "Address" to the advisory board of the School of Industry for poor girls in Boston's North End—I argue that Crocker also provided a personal challenge to this conventional rule. In philosophically, historically, and personally redefining women's political oratory as compatible with feminine propriety—during the post-revolutionary backlash against women's rights—Crocker helped pave the way for the strategic use of the constitutional rights of speech and association in the nineteenth-century American women's rights movement and beyond.

Keywords: Hannah Mather Crocker, political oratory, women's rights, United States, peace

Osservazioni su alcune orazioni ciceroniane in frammenti e perdute, «Quaderni del Dipartimento di Filologia, Linguistica e Tradizione classica dell’Università di Torino» 2001, pp. 177-186

by Ermanno Malaspina

http://www.tulliana.eu/documenti/Quaderni2001.pdf

Lavoro preparatorio in vista della "Cronologia Ciceroniana in CD-Rom": esame di alcune orazioni in frammenti... more Lavoro preparatorio in vista della "Cronologia Ciceroniana in CD-Rom": esame di alcune orazioni in frammenti o deperditae di Cicerone e definizione della loro collocazione cronologica: De/Pro Manilio, Pro Orchivio, Si eum Clodius interrogasset, Palinodia, Pro Sestio de ambitu, De Cornificio
Chronological setting of some lost and unpublished orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero: De/Pro Manilio, Pro Orchivio, Si eum Clodius interrogasset, Palinodia, Pro Sestio de ambitu, De Cornificio. The paper was published in preparation of "Cronologia Ciceroniana in CD-Rom"

Le orazioni in frammenti e deperditae di Cicerone, rassegna 1984-1995, «BSL» XXVII, 1997, pp. 565-590

by Ermanno Malaspina

THE SPIN DOCTOR: SACHEVERELL’S TRIAL SPEECH AND POLITICAL PERFORMANCE IN THE DIVIDED SOCIETY

by Brian Cowan

Parliamentary History, special issue: ‘Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell,’ Mark Knights, ed., 31:1 (February 2012): 28-46

For the complete article, please see the journal Parliamentary History or purchase the book:

http://www.amazon.com/Faction-Displayed-Reconsidering-Impeachment-Parliamentary/dp/1444361872/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1328735017&sr=8-1

Henry Sacheverell’s speech in his own defence on the eighth day of his parliamentary trial (9 March 1710) was by all... more Henry Sacheverell’s speech in his own defence on the eighth day of his parliamentary trial (9 March 1710) was by all accounts a show-stopping performance. The speech was an effective political performance at a show trial originally designed to condemn the principles he had enunciated in his controversial 1709 sermons at Derby and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Sacheverell avoided any forthright or elaborate defence of his beliefs with regard to the legitimacy of resistance during the Glorious Revolution in order to appear humble, orthodox, and loyal to the queen and to the Protestant succession. As such, he presented himself as a sort of living martyr for the high church cause. While this strategy was itself deeply controversial, it was also rather successful in spinning the debate from one about ‘revolution principles’ to one about the persecution of a loyal clergyman.

In order to understand the form, the effectiveness and the purpose of Sacheverell’s trial speech, one must take its pathetic form and its widespread distribution, both in print and manuscript reports, into account. The sympathy garnered for Sacheverell due to his speech was a public relations success for the Tory cause in the short run, but it also entailed a solid commitment to the Hanoverian succession that remained deeply controversial within high church circles.

Classical Rhetoric in America.

by James Farrell

"'Above all Greek, above all Roman Fame': Classical Rhetoric in America during the Colonial and Early National Periods," International Journal of the Classical Tradition 18:3 (September 2011), 415-436.

The broad and profound influence of classical rhetoric in early America can be observed in both the academic study of... more The broad and profound influence of classical rhetoric in early America can be observed in both the academic study of that ancient discipline, and in the practical approaches to persuasion adopted by orators and writers in the colonial period, and during the early republic. Classical theoretical treatises on rhetoric enjoyed wide authority both in college curricula and in popular treatments of the art. Classical orators were imitated as models of republican virtue and oratorical style. Indeed, virtually every dimension of the political life of early America bears the imprint of a classical conception of public discourse. This essay marks the various specific aspects of the reception and influence of the classical rhetorical tradition in the learning, speaking and writing of Americans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

« Être orateur à Rome : Cicéron entre théorie et pratique »

by Charles Guérin

, in C. Jacob éd., Les Lieux de savoir. volume 1: Espaces et communautés, Paris, Albin Michel, 2007, p. 207-226

The Transatlantic Larynx in Wartime

by Tom F. Wright

This essay is a chapter in the forthcoming volume:

'Traffic and Translations : Transatlantic Exchanges between Britain and New England 1610-1910, ed. Robin Peel and Daniel Maudlin (University of New England

Magic for a People Trained in Pragmatism: Kenneth Burke, Mein Kampf, and the Early 9/11 Oratory of George W. Bush

by Jason C. Thompson

'The Hektor-Deiphobos Agon in Euripides' Alexandros' , ZPE 178 (2011) 35-47

by Ioanna Karamanou

James Otis and Writs of Assistance (1761)

by James Farrell

“James Otis and ‘Writs of Assistance’: The Strange History of a Famous Speech,” in RHETORIC, INDEPENDENCE, and NATIONHOOD, ed. Stephen E. Lucas, Volume 2 of A RHETORICAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES: SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN PUBLIC DISCOURSE, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (Michigan State University Press, forthcoming)

Daniel Webster: "Second Reply to Hayne" (1830)

by James Farrell

One and Inseparable: The Union and Deliberative Conduct in Webster’s 'Reply to Hayne,' in CONSTRUCTING THE CITIZEN IN JACKSONIAN AMERICA, ed. Stephen H. Browne, Volume 3 of A RHETORICAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES: SIGNIFICANT MOMENTS IN AMERICAN PUBLIC DISCOURSE, ed. Martin J. Medhurst (Michigan State University Press, forthcoming)

Syren Tully and the Young John Adams

by James Farrell

Classical Journal 87:4 (1992), 373-390.

PhD Thesis: Britain on the American Popular Lecture Circuit 1844-1865

by Tom F. Wright

Completed December 2009; Viva Completed February 2010

This dissertation examines an overlooked area of nineteenth-century transatlantic commentary: the performances of... more This dissertation examines an overlooked area of nineteenth-century transatlantic commentary: the performances of returning American travellers on the antebellum popular lecture circuit. It consists of case studies that consider the rhetorical character and reception history of four ‘travel lectures’ on Britain by prominent Northern male reformers during the period 1844–1865.

Oratorical culture in the antebellum North, and the popular lecture platform in particular, was widely seen as a constitutive aspect of a distinctive civic nationalism. My thesis explores what it meant for these institutional emblems of cultural independence to host performances that explored questions of Anglo-American relations and selfhood.

Furthermore, in a party political climate in which various sentiments and manners were regularly interpreted in terms of perceived ‘Anglophilia’, my work reveals what the contemporary media response to these performances can tell us about the evolution of notions of British and American cultural styles during the period.

In my opening chapter, I contend that oratorical performance and transatlantic commentary were mutually reinforcing cultural practices, and propose a reconsideration of the ‘travel lecture’ as a compelling and previously neglected instance of this interplay. Moreover, I argue that newspaper reports, accounts, and sketches of lyceum performances should be reclaimed as a rich and expressive form of the period.

In subsequent chapters on the travel lectures of Horace Mann, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and John B. Gough, I explore the rhetorical and performance strategies by which transatlantic experience was variously presented as grounds for separation from, re-engagement with, or emulation of British society. Through close readings of lecture reports, I examine the reception history of each oration, tracing the ways in which the contested symbolism of British progress, class relations, and physical and vocal ‘difference’ proved valuable for various communities of American interpreters.

Callicles' Mistake

by Eric Gallager

My first paper in the History of Western Political Thought class I took with professor Justin Litke the first semester of my sophomore year.

In this paper I show the mistake in Callicles' arguments in Plato's Gorgias, and suggest how this mistake could have... more In this paper I show the mistake in Callicles' arguments in Plato's Gorgias, and suggest how this mistake could have been avoided.