ABSTRACT
Studies reclaiming or rediscovering the role of women in the history of rhetoric have appeared regularly over the past 15 years. Some have placed women in mainstream rhetorical traditions from which they have been excluded until recently, others have asked for a redefinition of the often narrow canon of accepted rhetorical genres so that women’s roles in the overall rhetorical culture of an era can be more precisely assessed (for example: The Changing Tradition; Listening to their Voices; Dear Sister: Early Modern Women’s Letters).1 While these studies have brought a fresh infusion of texts into the often stuffy world of rhetorical analysis, they can sometimes lean toward applying inappropriate standards to documents from earlier eras, that is, looking for things that were never intended to be there, For example, in the excellent series of articles in James Daybell’s recent essay collection, Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, some of the studies suggest, however lightly, that what we should be looking for in women’s letters are intimacy, self-expression, and overtly emotional content.2 The quest for such affective content goes back at least to Virginia Woolf, who complained about the fifteenth-century Paston letters that ‘in all this there is no writing for writing’s sake; no use of the pen to convey pleasure or amusement or any of the million shades of endearment and intimacy which have filled so
1 Christine Mason Sutherland and Rebecca Sutcliffe, eds, The Changing Tradition: Women in the History of Rhetoric (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999); Molly Meijer Wertheimer, ed., Listening to their Voice: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus, eds, Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); James Daybell, ed., Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450-1700 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2001).
