Rhetoric-Rhetoriqueurs-Rederijkers.

The scope of Rhetoric-Rhetoriqueurs-Rederijkers (hardly an imaginative title) is much narrower. It consists of fifteen papers in English and French, delivered at a conference organized in November 1993 by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Unlike other gatherings of conference proceedings, this one has a collective unity derived from the original plan, which focused on a restricted range of sixteenth-century topics. The French rhetoriquers, those late medieval exponents of the highly patterned style in the "arts de seconde rhetorique" are discussed by Francois Rigolot, Kees Meerhoff, and Marc-Rene Jung. Peter Mack and Francis Goyet expound the rhetorical theories of Rudolph Agricola and Melanchthon, while Marijke Spies, Dirk Coigneau, and W. Waterschoot discuss developments in poetics in this century, in both France and Holland. Hermann Pleij contributes a well-argued analysis of the traditions attacking rhetoric. The social context of rhetoric, so often neglected in modern studies of rhetorical theory, is dealt with by Claude Thiry (on the differences between the rhetoriqueurs of the Burgundian and French courts), Coigneau (comparing the communal nature of literary composition within the Dutch "chambers of rhetoric" and a related phenomenon in the French puys), and Jelle Koopmans, who transposes the discussion to the drama.

One important feature of this collection, not brought out by its singularly uninformative title, is the presence of four papers dealing with the visual arts. Peter Sharatt discusses the role played by humanist concerns with ekphrasis and enargeia (also discussed by Meerhoff for poetry) in the reception of book illustrations, notably the prolific illustrator Bernard Salomon. N.E. Sebrennikov compares the allegories of Frans Floris and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, working in Antwerp in the 1560s, who defended the maker of images as a practitioner of "measure", not mere handcraftsmen but deploying an intellectually respectable artistic theory (a battle that medicine had fought a century earlier). Mark Meadow studies the juxtaposition of near and distant in Pieter Aertsen's "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary" both in terms of Serlian architecture and sixteenth-century drama, the large-scale dramatic competitions between the rederijker chambers. Finally, Reindert L. Falkenburg adds a matching discussion of Aertsen as a "Rhyparographer", that is, a practitioner of the paradoxical encomium in his still-life paintings.

In sum this is a valuable collection, shedding much light on several topics outside the main line of Renaissance rhetoric, but nonetheless of interest. The volume, in paperback form only, is well printed and illustrated but rather expensive.

BRIAN VICKERS Centre for Renaissance Studies, ETH Zurich