Mere Rhetoric

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the ideas, movements and people who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and today we get to continue on in our theme of the villains of rhetoric. Today though, instead of just focusing on one person like Raymus or Hobbes. We get to talk about three and the reason why we get to talk about three is because a fantastic book that Wayne A. Rebhorn wrote. It's called “Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric.” This is a great volume. It's a compilation of a lot of short pieces by a lot of different authors during the renaissance, starting pretty early and going pretty late. You can see the way that they respond to each other and how they respond to voices that you don't even really see in the book that are just sort of out there. Like, people say this or people say that. But today we're going to be talking about distinct criticisms of rhetoric. The first is from Agrippa. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa who was German as you might suspect and he