期刊名称：Rhetorical Review : The Electronic Review of Books on the History of rhetoric
印刷版ISSN：1901-2640
出版年度：2008
卷号：6
期号：01
页码：5-7
出版社：Pernille Harsting
摘要：James J. Murphy’s pioneering research has staked medieval rhetoric’s claim to a place in the
history (and the histories) of western rhetoric, and most of the studies gathered in this volume
have been part of the scholarly conversation for a long time. The twenty journal articles and
book chapters reprinted here originally were published over a span of nearly forty years, the
earliest appearing in 1962 and the latest in 1999. Along with Murphy’s landmark book Rhetoric
in the Middle Ages (1974), they continue to be essential reading for those studying rhetoric’s
thousand-year history from the fall of Rome to ca. 1500. As is the practice in the Variorum
Collected Studies Series, Murphy’s widely scattered and sometimes hard-to-find shorter
publications are, with one exception, reprinted as virtual facsimiles of the originals. While the
changing typefaces and discontinuous pagination may be disconcerting at first, the advantage is
that one can treat the book as a set of bound offprints that can be cited interchangeably with the
originals, easily cross-referenced within the collection, and searched with the help of the useful
index that concludes the volume. The publication of this collection introduces no new scholarship,
but it makes a substantial body of existing scholarship more readily accessible and more
easily usable.
