Guillaume Coatalen, Two Elizabethan Treatises on Rhetoric: The Foundacion of Rhetorike by Richard Reynolds (1563) and A Brief Discourse of Rhetorike by William Medley (1575)

Brill, 2017

ISBN13: 9789004322301
E-ISBN: 9789004356344

Sixteenth century Elizabethan treatises on rhetoric in the vernacular are relatively rare. Guillaume Coatalen offers annotated editions of Richard Reynolds’s The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563), which has not been edited since the 1945 facsimile edition, and of William Medley’s unknown Brief Discourse on Rhetoricke which survives in a single manuscript dated 1575. While Reynolds’s work is an English adaptation of Aphthonius’s Progymnasmata and a preparation for Thomas Wilson’s influential Arte of Rhetoricke (1560), Medley’s is broader in scope and contains the only full treatment of periodic prose in English in the period. Both works are essential to understand how Elizabethan rhetoric in the vernacular evolved, in particular in aristocratic circles, and its links with Continental developments, notably German.

Biographical note

Guillaume Coatalen, Ph.D (2002), University of Cergy-Pontoise (France), is Senior Lecturer in Renaissance English literature with a strong interest in manuscripts. He co-edited with Carlo Bajetta and Jonathan Gibson, Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

Readership

Specialists working on Renaissance rhetoric and more specifically sixteenth century English rhetoric. Historians researching Puritan discourses and Elizabethan court culture.

Table of contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
Sigla and Abbreviations

Introduction

Richard Reynolds, The Foundacion of Rhetorike (1563)

William Medley, A Brief Discourse of Rhetorike (1575), Cecil Papers MS 238/6

Bibliography
Index Nominum
Index Rerum