Philip Melanchthon's importance for the history of Renaissance rhetoric has been reclaimed in a number of recent studies. One of his most innovative and durable legacies was in the doctrine of the figures (schemata), examined and evaluated in this essay. A comparison with classical theory shows that in his second rhetoric (1521) Melanchthon radically reconceived the definition and classification of the figures. The new doctrine has major implications for the theory of style (elocutio) and its place in the liberal arts.
Scholars have read Ouids Banquet of Sence (1595) most often within George Chap-man’s corpus of poems, and have taken it as an example of Chapman’s idiosyncratic poetics. Some scholars have acknowledged the poem’s kinship with the “epyllion,” or erotic verse narrative, represented by Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and William Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis , but its relationship to this fashionable genre remains largely undefined. This essay demonstrates that Ouids Banquet directly engages the epyllion vogue, attacking the abuses of culture that Chapman found in the genre, and mimicking its stylistic faults as symptoms of these abuses. Chapman diagnoses two abuses common to English epyllia of the period: the removal of poetic narrative and performance from public occasions, and the exploiting of rhetorical education for private ends. Attention to this critique in Ouids Banquet illuminates the genre of the English epyllion and clarifies some controversial aspects of Chapman’s poetics, especially his view of the relationship between poetry and rhetoric.
It required faith to read the Homeric poem in Wittenberg—not necessarily Christian faith, or even faith in God, but a certain faith in the text. In some verses written for private audiences, Philip Melanchthon gave expression to his faith in the Homeric poem as well as the Christian God. George Herbert’s poem “The H. Scriptures 2” describes a similar faith and may reflect a distant legacy of Melanchthon’s reading of Homer. Melanchthon drew on Homer and Homer scholarship to transform public oratory as well as reading practices in the Reformation. Declamations from the last two decades of Melanchthon’s life suggest a Homeric influence on prayers offered up in the academic assembly.
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