The first history of early modern conversation in English
In the classical period, conversation referred to real conversations,
conducted in the leisure time of noble men, and concerned with
indefinite philosophical topics. Christianity inflected conversation
with universal aspirations during the medieval centuries and the ars
dictaminis, the art of letter writing, increased the importance of this
written analogue of conversation. The Renaissance humanists from
Petrarch onward further transformed conversation, and its genre
analogues of dialogue and letter, by transforming it into a metaphor of
increasing scope. This expanded realm of humanist conversation
bifurcated in Renaissance and early modern Europe. The Concept of
Conversation traces the way the rise of conversation spread out from
the history of rhetoric to include the histories of friendship, the
court and the salon, the Republic of Letters, periodical press and
women. It revises Jürgen Habermas' history of the emergence of the
rational speech of the public sphere as the history of the emergence of
rational conversation and puts the emergence of women's speech at the
centre of the intellectual history of early modern Europe.
Key Features
- The first book-length history of early modern conversation in English
- Synthesizes early modern intellectual history within the frameworks of
rhetoric and conversation
- Places the history of women's speech at the heart of the history of
early modern rhetoric
- Fuses Habermas' historical-theoretical framework to the history of
rhetoric and revises both
