Textual Conversations in the Renaissance

Ethics, Authors, Technologies

Benedict S. Robinson, Zachary Lesser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351895422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

'Conversation is the beginning and end of knowledge', wrote Stephano Guazzo in his Civil Conversation. Like Guazzo's, this is a book dedicated to the Renaissance concept of conversation, a concept that functioned simultaneously as a privileged literary and rhetorical form (the dialogue), an intellectual and artistic program (the humanists' interactions with ancient texts), and a political possibility (the king's council, or the republican concept of mixed government). In its varieties of knowledge production, the Renaissance was centrally concerned with debate and dialogue, not only among scholars, but also, and perhaps more importantly, among and with texts. Renaissance reading practices were active and engaged: such conversations with texts were meant to prepare the mind for political and civic life, and the political itself was conceived as fundamentally conversational. The humanist idea of conversation thus theorized the relationships among literature, politics, and history; it was one of the first modern attempts to locate cultural production within a specific historical and political context. The essays in this collection investigate the varied ways in which the Renaissance incorporated textual conversation and dialogue into its literary, political, juridical, religious, and social practices. They focus on the importance of conversation to early modern understandings of ethics; on literary history itself as an ongoing authorial conversation; and on the material and textual technologies that enabled early modern conversations.

Part 1
Conversational Ethics

Chapter 1
The Art of Conversazioni

Practices in Renaissance Rhetoric

Arthur F. Kinney

Life begins only at the point where utterance crosses utterance.

V.N. Vološinov¹

People construct the social world using language, they deliberately and continually formulate reality through reference, description, and a variety of other speech functions …. More than just a tool for describing the world, language, no less than perception and bodily mobility, is a means of access to the world.

William F. Hanks²

Publicke affaires are rockes, private conversacions are whirlepooles and quickesandes. It is a like perilous to doe well and to doe ill.

Sir Walter Ralegh³

Asked to compose an essay on the state of Renaissance studies at the close of the twentieth century, Anne Lake Prescott, in her characteristically witty way, saw the pun inherent in the word “state” and, like humanists of the sixteenth century, found her model in Erasmus’ Moria, Sir Thomas More. She begins this way:

Eu1frwn [Happy]: Here in this garden—planted not in Antwerp this time, but in the State of Renaissance Studies—and seated on our grassy bench shall we imagine a Utopia? There is only a single person here, but since she is of at least two minds we could have a dialogue of one.

Dnsxerh/j [Grumpy]: Certainly the stern traveler whose bench we have borrowed would say that, like Tudor England, the SRS suffers from vanity, greed, a more punitive than persuasive way with criminals (humanists, formalists, liberals, essentialists), subservience to authorities, and pride in (critical) ancestry.

Eu1frwn: In my gloomy mood I would agree.

Dnsxerh/j: You forget—I am your gloomy mood. Our dialogue’s real point is this very division.⁴

and she transported this pun-turned-paradox into her very title: “Divided State.”

But writing coherently about potential incoherencies—or at least the multiplicities of meaning harbored in language—was nothing new for Prescott. She was then completing a book on “how early modern English writers read, cited, judged, enjoyed, reviled, imagined, and appropriated François Rabelais—or, often, the name Rabelais—before Thomas Urquhart’s obstreperous 1653 translation made him part of English literature,” and had found, because of these disparate responses, that Rabelais himself had become not one person (or writer) but at least three: “Rabelais the atheist scoffer, Rabelais the dirty-minded drunk, Rabelais the maker of silly stories.”⁵ If the subject, Rabelais, had initially seemed focused, the situation grew increasingly complex, her study resonating with her earlier book on Marot, Du Bellay, Ronsard, Desportes, and Du Bartas. That book, she declared, “attempts to explore what intelligent or at least literate Englishmen during the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth centuries thought of the major French Renaissance poets and what they made of them—‘made of’ both in the sense of understanding or interpreting and in the sense of refashioning or reworking.” As with the book on Rabelais, transporting these poets into new surroundings meant divided focus: the poets and their works, and then the English readers and English reception. “Just as the image on the retina does not merely reproduce what is really ‘out there’ so our response to a friend, a poem, a public figure, is in part a ‘feigning,’ an act of the imagination. And the very fantasies we create, the sometimes astonishing distortions and selectivity of our perceptions, show in part who and what we are.”⁶ She had begun with the idea of conversation, of placing the French and English in dialogue, and she wound up exploring—and in time writing—dialectic, a kind of advanced dialectic with infinite regress. It was as if practicing Renaissance rhetoric, she became a participant in it, her own readings of Rabelais and Ronsard caught in a web of other people’s responses. This, in turn, might not have surprised her own subjects. The Renaissance reveled in conversation. In large part, that was because it reveled in rhetoric, too.

Dialogue, Dialectic, Disparity

We know that Tudor England viewed conversation rhetorically. Their chief testament—the Conversazioni civile of Stephano Guazzo—had been Italian (for the Tudors, the cradle of civilization), but it had been translated into French, the language of Rabelais and Ronsard, and from there it was Englished by George Pettie (Books I–III, 1581) and Bartholomew Young (Book IV, 1586). In 1560, Thomas Wilson had written in The Art of Rhetoric that it was rhetoric (from the likes of Aristotle and Cicero) that had humanized and educated men, but for Guazzo and his followers, it was the informed practice of conversation.

[C]onversation is the full perfection of learning, and that it more avayleth a student to discourse one hours [sic] with his like, then to studie a whole day by himselfe in his studie. Yea and in conferring with his companions, if he have understood any thing amisse, he therby most commonly commeth to the right meaning of the matter, and cleereth his mind of many errours, and beginneth to perceive that the judgement of one alone may bee easily darkened with the veile of ignorance, or of some passion, and that amongst a multitude, it seldome falleth out that all are blinded: and finally, upon proofe he knoweth that vertue and knowledge set foorth in bookes, is naught else then a painted vertue: and that true vertue and learning, is gotten rather by practice then by reading.⁷

It was not solitary reading but communal conversation—humanitas—that Guazzo and his translators advocated. The alternative was unthinkable:

For to say that every man should have an eye only to his owne affaires, is nothing els, but to make man like to beasts. And besides, it is most certaine, that solitarinesse putteth many evil thinges into our heades, and maketh us beleeve that which is not. Neither hath it any thing in it but horror and terrour, enemies to nature. According whereto, it is daily seene that a man being by him selfe is fearefull, and being in company, is couragious …. For he that useth not company hath no experience, he that hath no experience, hath no judgment, and hee that hath no judgment, is no better then a beast. (vol. 1, pp. 46–7)

Such trust in the humanist community and the larger world was not, however, to suggest naiveté; Master Anniball Magnocavalli, the philosopher and physician who is providing this counsel to Guazzo in their dialogue (their conversation), acknowledges

that as some diseases of the body are infectious, so the vices of the minde take from one to another, so that a drunkard draweth his companions to love wine, a Carpet knight corrupteth and effeminateth a valiant man: and so much force hath continual conversation, that oft times against our wils, we imitate the vices of others. Thereupon it is saide, that the friends and familiers of Aristotle had learned to stammer: the friends of Alexander in discoursing, had got his roughnesse of speech: and dout not, but in haunting the companie of the evil, a man shal find by experience that a man is a woolfe to a man, not a God as I said before, and that according to the proverbe, A friend of fooles wil become like unto them, and hee which toucheth pitch shalbe defiled therwith. But in like case also, and by the same reason on the contrary side, vertue bringeth forth the like effect. And as a dead coale, laide to a lively, kindleth: so a naughty person meeting in companie with the good, partaketh with their conditions. Neither is a good aire and a mans owne native soile more helpeful to the health of the body, then the conversation and companie of the good is to diseased minds. (vol. 1, p. 44)

Conversation, it would seem, as it educates man, teaches him discernment. In the State of Guazzo, ugly alternatives are quickly dismissed—by a kind of fiat—and the largely unquestioned value of conversation is pursued at length. Anniball’s dialectic with Guazzo never really allows a divided mind.

We do. Like Prescott and like many handbooks of rhetoric in Tudor England, we recognize linguistic practice as rhetorical exercise: the art of persuasion, the act of feigning, simulation and dissimulation. Conversations are constructed out of language, and language is itself a construction, formed by various forces in which various meanings (perhaps even contradictory meanings) reside. As the deployment of language, speech and conversation are never innocent. One of our best authorities on conversation—which she terms “social dialogue”—is Lynne Magnusson, who has this to say:

The sustained production of ordinary conversation is a remarkable social accomplishment. There are so many things that could go badly wrong, and yet they rarely do. The potential for trouble is always there and at virtually every level—the textual, the ideational, the experiential, and the interpersonal. At the textual level, speakers in conversation regularly produce well-coordinated speech exchanges, with speaker change recurring and one member talking at a time, despite the fact that turn order, turn type, and turn size are not prespecified or governed by any obvious set of rules. At the ideational level, speakers generally manage to make sense of one another’s contributions, despite the fact that the interpretation of speakers’ meanings draws upon complex processes of inference-making. The meanings communicated are not by any means transparent, even in what we think of as rudimentary exchanges: to make sense, hearers must draw not only upon what is communicated “in” words (words which are at best ambiguous and imprecise) but also upon what text and context co-construct as shared or tacit knowledge. At the experiential level, speakers are constantly managing to do things with their words—both in the sense that J.L. Austin expounded when he demonstrated that utterances themselves act upon the world and others and also in the sense that utterances can persuade or compel people to take actions that go beyond words. And finally, at the interpersonal level, talk enacts relationships—and the continuance of talk, in spite of the potential for eruptions of aggression and in spite of people’s opposing impulses to assert themselves at the expense of others and to avoid the interference of others, works to cement and maintain relationships.⁸

It is true, of course, that, in order to continue, any conversation needs some kind of give-and-take, some kind of willed blindness or ignorance, some tacit compromise of subject and position. But that recognition has to be maneuvered alongside the fact that “the most commonplace speech acts negotiated in everyday conversation,” as Magnusson says elsewhere, such as “advising, promising, inviting, requesting, ordering, criticizing, even complimenting”—that is, speech interchanges that abbreviate or are extracted from longer, fuller conversations—do so at considerable risk.⁹ Language is, after all, not only self-promotion but self-projection (an idea as old as Aristotle, from whom the Renaissance inherited it), and the self, always fra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 Conversational Ethics
• Part 2 Authors in Conversation
• Part 3 Technologies of Conversation
• Bibliography
• Index