Two Elizabethan Treatises on Rhetoric : The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563) / a Brief Discourse on Rhetoricke (1575)

Reynolds, Richard; Medley, William; Coatalen, Guillaume

ISBN 10: 9004322302 / ISBN 13: 9789004322301

Published by Brill, 2017

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 30617504-n

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Two Elizabethan Treatises on Rhetoric : The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563) / a Brief Discourse on Rhetoricke (1575)
• Publisher: Brill
• Publication Date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9004322302
• ISBN 13: 9789004322301
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Sixteenth century Elizabethan treatises on rhetoric in the vernacular are relatively rare. Guillaume Coatalen offers annotated editions of Richard Reynolds’s The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), which has not been edited since the 1945 facsimile edition, and of William Medley’s unknown Brief Discourse on Rhetoricke which survives in a single manuscript dated 1575. While Reynolds’s work is an English adaptation of Aphthonius's Progymnasmata and a preparation for Thomas Wilson’s influential Arte of Rhetoricke (1560), Medley’s is broader in scope and contains the only full treatment of periodic prose in English in the period. Both works are essential to understand how Elizabethan rhetoric in the vernacular evolved, in particular in aristocratic circles, and its links with Continental developments, notably German.

About the Author

Guillaume Coatalen, Ph.D (2002), University of Cergy-Pontoise (France), is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance English literature with a strong interest in manuscripts. He co-edited with Carlo Bajetta and Jonathan Gibson, Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).