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：2009
卷号：7
期号：03
页码：10-13
出版社：Pernille Harsting
摘要：One of the aims of Ryan Stark¡¯s Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England is to
reappraise the rhetorical plainness of the seventeenth-century ¡®new philosophers¡¯. Thomas Sprat¡¯s
eloquent ¡°invectives against ¡®swellings of style¡¯¡± have been read as hypocritical given his own
blatantly ¡°imaginative and rhetorical¡± use of language. The charge laid against Sprat and his contemporaries
at the Royal Society, that they produce an ¡°anti-rhetorical rhetoric¡±, is challenged by
this study (p. 1). Stark accepts that the new science created a different style of writing, but he argues
that experimental philosophers were not rejecting rhetoric but rather repudiating ¡°magical and
mystical theories of eloquence¡± (p. 3). Aiming to tell the history of a paradigm shift ¡°from enchantment
to plainness¡± and back again, Stark recuperates the imagined affective eloquence of magicians
and witches with a view to recovering the spiritual dimension of language that was lost with the
Enlightenment. Crucial to his argument is the ¡°fundamental Christian intuition that language is
connected to the Word¡± (p. 5). We now understand words and tropes as ¡°cold instruments¡±. Stark
promises to trace the history of the taming of affective language, and he makes a case for ¡°the
return of enchanted rhetoric¡± (p. 6). But his study does not always make its case convincingly, and
it is not always a reliable guide to some promising material.
