Approach to the Eloquence in the Works of Isidore of Seville (original) (raw)
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Isidore of Seville, his Mode of Writing and the Metaphor of Taste
Isidorianum, 2024
The writings in which an author expresses his thought are actually the product of certain cultural practices of his age. The article considers how such practices are manifested in the writings of Isidore of Seville, particularly with respect to the meaning of the metaphor of taste. Isidore borrows this metaphor from texts that explain the process of understanding Scripture and applies it to the achievement of wisdom. On the one hand, the metaphor stresses the transformative aspect of understanding (rather than the informative, scientia). It focuses on the special experience of the reader who senses the sweetness of the text, and not on the application of the text to one’s life. On the other hand, reading and writing were imagined in terms related to food. The text was food that had to be prepared, to ‘read’ meant to ‘taste’, to ‘meditate’ on it meant to ‘ruminate’. Against this background, the writings of Isidore seem to appeal to the memory of the reader and his ability to meditate upon the text and, finally, to experience the taste of wisdom. Only the outermost level of texts was intended to inform the reader.
in A. Lee, Petrarch and St. Augustine: Classical Scholarship, Christian Theology and the Origins of the Renaissance in Italy (Leiden: Brill, 2012), pp. 277-350.
The relationship between eloquence and philosophy lies at the heart of historical constructions of Petrarch's humanism, and the determining role commonly attributed to his understanding of eloquence underpins claims of philosophical indifference or inconsistency. After evaluating the methodological foundations of some of the most important studies of the topic, this chapter reconstructs the development of Petrarch’s thought on the relationship between eloquence and moral philosophy, from the ninth book of the "Africa" and the Coronation Oration to the "De remediis utriusque fortune", and pays particularly close attention to the "De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia" and the "Invective contra medicum". Despite claims that Petrarch’s conception of the relationship between eloquence and moral philosophy was based on a Ciceronian model, this chapter uncovers a number of previously overlooked points of divergence between the two. Unlike Cicero—and the Ciceronian tradition—Petrarch not only saw eloquence and moral philosophy as co-dependent, but also prioritized the moral condition of the orator over the mastery of the technicalities of rhetoric. Of course, certain superficial parallels can still be observed with elements of the rhetorical theories developed by figures such as Cicero, Quintilian, and Boethius, and even with later medieval traditions, but this chapter shows that the distinguishing characteristics of Petrarch’s understanding of eloquence were influenced most strongly by a reading of St. Augustine’s "De doctrina christiana". Offering Petrarch a model for recommending both biblical study and the reading of classical texts, the "De doctrina christiana" also allowed him the opportunity to ape St. Augustine in presenting eloquence as an integral part of a moral theology in which truth and virtue co-existed.
Rhetoric and Anti-Rhetoric in Vico and Croce: From Rhetoric to Stylistics
Thesis, 1993
I show that a special line of thought contained in Vico and Croce has consistently transformed the sign-character of human expressions into an expression of style. For Vico the term “eloquence” is linked indissolubly to the term “knowledge” and in particular to the term “scientific knowledge.” Rhetoric is needed to lead primitive humans towards education. Logical or scholastic arguments alone are not enough because uneducated people do not yet have logic and reason. Vico’s poetical philosophy remains rhetorical and stays within the spectrum of everyday language. This is why Vico opposes formal logic to aesthetics and why style becomes a central notion. Similarly, Croce pushes philosophy from purely intellectual calculations with concepts towards a contemplation of “aesthetic facts.” Style is the subject of an active, living, artistic interpretation of art, it has the meaning of “living expression” but is also a codified form of laws and rules. Both Vico and Croce formulate their opposition to philosophical abstractions in terms of a “philosophy of life” and attempt to read “signs” as expressions of a historical and cultural reason and refrained from turning this historical reason into an abstract conceptual instance. They reevaluate, directly or indirectly, the discipline of rhetoric and the relationship between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.
Veleia, 2015
This paper will explore how the Church historians Socrates and Sozomen interpreted the learning and practice of oratory and of rhetoric in their portraits of Christian figures in their historical accounts of events of the post-Constantinian Church. Their understanding of the impact and role of these disciplines was not only a subject of literary criticism but it was also inserted in a complex rationale that understood that the use and misuse of the practice of rhetoric and oratory functioned as a religious and an identity marker throughout the fourth and fifth centuries AD. Resumen: Este trabajo se centra en las interpretaciones de las apreciaciones estilísticas y de crítica literaria realizadas por los historiadores eclesiásticos Sócrates y Sozomeno en sus descripciones de figuras relevantes de la Iglesia post-Constantiniana. Su valoración del impacto y del papel de la oratoria y la literatura trascendió el campo de la crítica literaria, constituyendo parte del entramado ideológico con el que se juzgaron las creencias religiosas y filiaciones doctrinales de tales figuras en la Iglesia de los siglos iv y v.
God's Librarian: Isidore of Seville and His Literary Agenda
A Companion to Isidore of Seville, 2020
Here I offer a series of impressionistic semblanzas of what I understand to be the essential elements of Isidore of Seville's context, personality, and literary agenda. When viewed through the lens of the Visigothic slate texts and their evidence for a continuous history of Latin literacy in the Iberian Peninsula, he comes newly into focus as operating still very much in a late Roman world. If we read his letters with care, we recognise too that Isidore was altogether less worldly than we have made him out to be; his priorities lay elsewhere, his thought and energy were spent in constant revision of both ancient knowledge and Patristic exegesis, memorialised in the complex transmission of his opera. And by attending in particular to his prefaces to those works, we perceive an anxious determination to render the universal manageable – and on his own terms.