Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface.

In a slender two-part study of the early modern preface, Kevin Dunn traces the often contentious reception of classical rhetorical theory in the works of Protestant writers (Luther, Milton) and in select exponents of the new science (Bacon, Descartes, Sprat, among others). More broadly, Dunn proposes that these writers face a crisis of self-presentation that is negotiated in their pretexts. They have inherited from the ancients "rhetorical . . . forms invented to serve as exfoliations of a purely public persona" and must adapt, or radically renovate, those humanist formulae to accommodate a self that is not yet established as a "fully individuated and private entity" (7). Aristotle's Rhetoric held that the preface should be transparent, without designs on the reader's judgment. Roman theorists modified his austere stand to admit a greater stress on the capratio benevolentiae, the approved tactics a speaker might resort to in order to gain his listeners' goodwill. These conventions of classical rhetoric, in particular "the modesty topos with its rhetoric of antirhetoric" (35) proved of limited use as models for Protestant polemicists who saw themselves as embattled prophets, Dunn argues, or, in another sphere, for the philosophers of the new science in the seventeenth century.

Part one of Pretexts of Authority is subtitled "Public and Private Rhetoric in the Protestant Preface," despite a preliminary "detour" (33) into examining Saint Paul's "rhetoric of martyrdom" (38), where Dunn first locates the pending rift between classical ideals of apparent self-effacement and Christian valorizing of the personal experience as exemplary. In this section Dunn concentrates on Luther's editing of his Works and, in a subsequent chapter, Milton's antiprelatical tracts. He argues that Luther chose to publish his corpus in an unrevised form so as to preserve "the historical inviolability of each text" (42), including its unresolved inner tensions. The Lutheran prefaces, composed last and detached from the occasional urgency of theological controversy, worked to craft a second, less contingent, self. Dunn's persuasive claim here is that "Luther presents himself as a text written by God" in the body of his works, while his pretexts serve "as the site for staking out authorial boundaries" (4243). In his reading of Milton, Dunn emphasizes the inevitable collision between classical rhetorical prescriptions and Milton's revolutionary convictions: for the writer of the antiprelatical tracts to embrace the modesty topos would be an affront to God and to the Puritan cause.

In part two, Dunn's conception of the preface becomes more elastic in his account of the new science's challenge to Aristotelianism. Earlier, he succinctly describes the liminal status of the Renaissance preface in a key passage: "The preface, in effect, plays out the paradox of the prophet: it is seemingly marginal to the authorized text, yet it comes before . . . . [The pretext is] the secretly prepossessing, overdetermined authoritative gesture of the writer who, having finished his work, commences to interpret it for the reader, disguising that interpretation as an inaugural moment" (33). This definition works well for the writers studied in part one, but, in Dunn's chapters on Descartes and Bacon, the idea of the preface expands to include "interlocking" works, "each serving as a preface to the next" (84). Bacon's scientific canon is ultimately read as a succession of "preparatory gestures [toward defining] . . . a central work that was never completed - and perhaps never could be" (103). A solid case could be made for redefining the scope of what constitutes a preface, but Dunn tends here to assume the viability of a case he has not argued. In fact, some of the best material in this book seems tangential to his announced project - for example, his excursion into Descartes's fascination with the bourgeois city of Amsterdam, or, in perhaps the most blatant instance, Dunn's choosing as a "means of closure" (138) to his discussion of the discourse of science Dryden's literary Preface to the Fables. At such times Pretexts of Authority seems uncannily to mirror its subject in presenting its reader with a proliferation of pretexts.

JENNIFER BRADY Rhodes College