- 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 more relevant than any other time in Western history.
- As European monarchies coalesced and logic and science dominated in the later Renaissance, language lost much of its vital potential. The focus turned to 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 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 given to 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 the Humanist 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 (vita activa), because it is how situated challenges are addressed.
- Placed the human knower at the center of its cosmology. This knowing was based on a material experience of the world.
- Rejected rationality as the primary human aspect, because humans primarily do not encounter the changing world through rationality but through the senses and the linguistic symbols we establish.
- Well-know Humanists include Petrarch, Erasmus, and Vico (who is a throwback to Humanism during the Enlightenment).
- 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 objective truth as a counterpoint.)
- Well-known Rationalists include Descartes, Bacon, and maybe even Ramus (see his notes for more information).
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