- Covers roughly the 14th-17th centuries.
- During the early Renaissance, the potency of language influenced many aspects of life and culture, such that rhetoric was perhaps less a unified field of study during this period even though its practice was in an ascendancy.
- As European monarchies coalesced and logic and science dominated in the later Renaissance, language lost much of its vital potential. The focus was on stripping language of anything that could be ornamental.
- The prevalent intellectual current earlier in the period was Humanism; by the end of the Renaissance rationalism, reductionism, and science held sway.
- Descartes's Discourse on Method (1637) may been seen as the beginning of modern science and the end of Renaissance rhetoric.
- The founding of the Royal Society of London in 1660 is perhaps the final watershed moment in this transition.
- For the purposes of rhetorical history, the period could be said to be animated by the tension between Humanism (particularly Italian Humanism) and rationalism. (Keep in mind that Humanism was a distinct movement; people identified themselves as Humanists and articulated Humanist principles. Rationalism wasn't/isn't necessarily a discrete movement; it is a retroactive designation regarding the focus on reason and empiricism that has largely characterized the time from the Enlightenment to Modernity. Indeed, rationalism isn't a distinct movement because it simply has become the implicit means of legitimation for the contemporary world.)
- Humanism:
- Invested in Classical learning.
- Believed in situated rather than transcendent knowledge, hence their validation of history, fables, and literature as evidence for how knowledge functioned in a particular situation.
- Philology, or the study of language in Classical texts, was a particular interest.
- Interested in civic participation, because it is how situated challenges are addressed.
- Placed the human knower at the center of their cosmology. This knowing was based on a material experience of the world.
- Rejected rationality as the primary stuff of humanity, because humans primarily do not encounter the changing world through rationality but through the senses and the linguistic symbols we establish.
- Humanists:
- Rationalism:
- Believed that transcendent truth was existent and accessible through reason alone.
- Saw the human as, in its highest form, a rational entity able to extricate itself from its contingent situation through reason.
- Viewed sense experience as fraught, because it was necessarily subjective and imperfect.
- Endorsed a reductionary view of language. Language should function as an objective conduit; ornamentation causes it to do otherwise. (Of course, a concept like "ornamentation" requires the existence of an objective truth.)
- Rationalists
- Descartes, Bacon, ~Ramus
- Ramus was a French Humanist, but his positions, especially as regarding language and rhetoric, are at odds with the prevailing Italian Humanism. Ramus split dialectic and rhetoric, giving invention and arrangement to logic and style and a bit of delivery to rhetoric, which he devalued. Our book even states: "His attack on classical thought and language is so vigorous that one might question whether he can be called a humanist at all" (568).
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