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Reviews 219 Parergon 21.2 (2004) While these women participated in acts of violence to solve conflict, the nuns at Port Royal, according to Carol Baxter, used acts of solidarity to prove their point. This article demonstrates not only the tenacity but also the deep and intricate bonds of these seventeenth-century convent women in their resistance to the patriarchal power of both Pope and King. Catherine Lawless‘s article about women on the margins in Renaissance Florence, whilst excluding prostitutes, discusses the various groups of other women who were engaged in pre- or extra-marital sex with men from the upper echelons of society. Lawless illuminates the lives of these women both during their affairs and after them. The remaining essays cover other important topics such as the perils of women travellers in the Middle Ages, the importance of marriage portions and the way in which they might benefit a bride and her children, and the myriad problems that widowed women in medieval Ireland could face with ‘dower’ lands. I found one of the most helpful aspects of this collection to be the common bibliography, which students will find especially effective as a study tool. This is a book that scholars considering aspects of medieval and Early Modern women’s history will find both interesting and helpful. Most of the essays provide comprehensive footnotes that add a greater understanding to the topic being discussed. The anthology as a whole more than meets the aim of the editors, which was to ‘present a more nuanced picture’ of women in the medieval and Early Modern periods. Lorna Barrow Department of History University of Sydney Mews, Constant J., Cary J. Nederman and Rodney M. Thomson, eds, Rhetoric and Renewal in the Latin West, 1100-1540: Essays in Honour of John O. Ward (Disputatio 2), Turnhout, Brepols, 2003; cloth; pp. viii, 270; RRP €55; ISBN 2503513409. This is an outstanding and unusually coherent collection of essays that confirms John O. Ward’s contention that rhetoric played an important and constructive role in medieval Europe. Thomson opens the volume with a personal memoir of Ward and a critical bibliography of his works. This is followed by Martin Camargo’s extremely helpful historiography of rhetoric (‘Defining Medieval Rhetoric’), 220 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) which underlines Ward’s innovative corrections to the field. In contrast to earlier scholars like Faral and Baldwin, who took a reductionist view of medieval rhetoric as an adjunct to the study of poetry, Ward stressed the continuity between ancient and medieval rhetoric and contrasted the pragmatic application of medieval rhetoric to political and religious issues with the intellectual and antiquarian approach of Renaissance Humanists. The next four essays, grouped under the rubric ‘Abelard and Rhetoric’, explore the connection between Abelard’s theology and his interest in rhetoric. Constant J. Mews makes a compelling case for seeing Abelard as a prototype of Hobbes and even Derrida with his rejection of universals and assumption that logic and rhetoric are not concerned with ‘real’ things (the domain of physics) but with the imposition of words. Drawing on Cicero’s De inventione, Abelard concluded that all language, including that of scripture, is conventional and invented by humans to meet specific needs (p. 50). Abelard was fully aware that Scripture and the writings of the church Fathers make use of rhetorical devices that are subject to rhetorical analysis, and that neither offer dialectical statements that are either true or false (p. 53). In ‘Abelard on Rhetoric’, Karin Margareta Fredborg provides an edition of a twelve page digression on rhetorical argumentation in Abelard’s gloss on Boethius’s De differentiis topicis. Peter von Moos (‘Literary Aesthetics in the Latin Middle Ages: The Rhetorical Theology of Peter Abelard’) supports Mews’ emphasis on Abelard’s appreciation of the rhetorical nature of Scripture in terms of its ‘polyvalency, figurativeness and ambiguity’ (p. 34). The development of a historical/philological perspective usually associated with the Renaissance was therefore in place much earlier in Abelard, who was deeply influenced by Augustine’s profound distrust of the deficiencies of language (Confessions, Bk. 11. 19. 21). Von Moos draws a telling comparison betweenAbelard and Wittgenstein. He...

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