Transformations of classical rhetoric in the Renaissance

“Non autores, sed artes,” writes Gabriel Harvey in the margins of his copy of Lodovico Guicciardini’s Detti et Fatti (Venice, 1571, p. 18). Taking a cue from the imagined library in a contemporary satirical engraving of Harvey, which shows the Cambridge tutor among both classical texts (Cato, Cicero) and modern reference books (Calepinus’s Dictionarium, Nizolius’s Thesaurus, a floripoetae), this paper examines how quotations from ancient authors were similarly used to adorn their Early Modern hosts, serving the ends of both “art” and “authority.”

It may seem surprising, but Biblical translations into vernacular languages in the Reformation were deeply influenced by classical rhetoric. In William Tyndale’s case, his translations of the New Testament drew extensively on his knowledge of classical rhetorical techniques and frameworks, both in matters of style and interpretation. Tyndale framed his translation as a rhetorical composition in the simple style, hoping it would reach and resonate with as many English speakers as possible.

As scholars like Heinrich Plett (2012) have shown, the ancient concept of enargeia has a long and varied history, in part because of its conflation with Aristotelian energeia (Caloboli Montefusco 2005) and allied terms for visualization and description, like phantasia and ekphrasis (Goldhill 2007). There is, perhaps, a fruitful quality to the vagueness of “vividness” as a concept, as when the author of the treatise On Style (Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας) states simply that enargeia “arises from precise narration and leaving out or cuttin