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17 G 1 Humanist Dialogues and Defenses of Women’s Education: Conversation as a Model for All Discourse At the beginning of her mid-seventeenth-century dialogue, “On Conversation ,” Madeleine de Scudéry proclaims, “conversation is the bond of society for all humanity, the greatest pleasure of discriminating people, and the most ordinary method to introduce into the world not only civility, but also the purest morals and the love of glory and virtue” (Selected Letters 96).1 In this passage Scudéry is praising the power of speech in the humanist manner derived from the ancient sophists and classical rhetoricians; she is also describing in idealized terms the effects on French society of the salon as an institution. Thus Scudéry is revising the rhetorical tradition by offering conversation as a model for public discourse. As we shall see in this chapter, the women who devised rhetorical theory in England (and France) during the seventeenth century published their works in the humanist genres of dialogue and defenses of women’s education, adapted to conversation the classical vision of speech as civilizing, and theorized discourse as based on conversation, not public speaking.2 Thus they may be said to contribute to the establishment of the public sphere as Jürgen Habermas defines it: that sphere (birthed in the seventeenth-century institutions of salon, coffee house, reading society, and public library) where civil society met the state and where the reading public engaged in critical discussion of issues of public interest—at first matters of taste and soon politics (ix, 2–3, 23, 29).3 To represent this group of aristocratic and middle-class educated women theorists, I have chosen Madeleine de Scudéry, Margaret Cavendish (Duchess of Newcastle), Bathsua Makin, and Mary Astell. I include Scudéry in this chapter, in a book that is mainly on English and United States women, because she was one of the most popular writers of the seventeenth century, was immediately translated 18 Humanist Dialogues and Defenses into English, and is mentioned or alluded to by several of the English rhetors included in this study. The remaining women treated in this chapter were also chosen because of their significance for women’s rhetorical history: Cavendish was one of the most prolific English women writers; Makin was famous for her learning; and Astell was influential on later writers. Because of their gender, it was argued in the Renaissance, women had no need for training in public speaking (Gibson 10–20). Drawing on women’s material circumstances, these seventeenth-century theorists offer, instead, defenses of women’s need for training in conversation, letter writing, and rhetorical methods in order to help educate their children or to protect themselves from persuasion to heresy. Before we turn to early modern women rhetorical theorists , however, it will be helpful to situate these women historically in Renaissance humanism. Seventeenth-Century Women and Renaissance Humanism How is it that, in the seventeenth century, there is a sudden rise of rhetorical theory by women, and why does it appear in humanist dialogues and defenses of women’s education rather than textbooks? The European Renaissance, beginning in the fourteenth century and lasting to the seventeenth century, was a revolution in education, restoring rhetoric and dialectic to a central place in the curriculum. The period begins and ends with rediscoveries of classical rhetorical texts—from the complete corpus of Cicero in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to Longinus in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Monfasani 177, 183). Humanism, then, was not so much a philosophy as it was an education program: humanists studied the humanities—classical Latin and Greek, rhetoric, dialectic, literature, moral philosophy, and history (Kristeller 1–10). Humanists, however, only rarely engaged in the republican public speaking exemplified in Cicero’s work and theory (see Rebhorn). Humanists did give public Latin speeches in praise of important patrons, but otherwise, they published their ideas in certain humanist genres, which included, besides textbooks for rhetoric and dialectic, the print oration, the dialogue, the letter, and the encyclopedia.4 Humanist interest in rhetoric encouraged public debate in print (Norbrook) and influenced the rise in aristocratic and court circles of the academy and the salon, and so of handbooks on conversation (Peter Burke 98–108). Although modeled in classical dialogues by Plato, Cicero, and Augustine and discussed briefly by Cicero in De Officiis 1.37.1, conversation did not become an art until the Renaissance. With the decline of aristocratic battle sports and the rise of...

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