ABSTRACT
From the time of Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Politics (1987), I have been focusing on the ways in which what might appear to be purely rhetorical or linguistic structures or concerns are implicated in questions of gender, property and politics. In ‘Virile Style’ (published in Premodern Sexualities in 1996) I turned from the dilation or amplificatio associated with female bodies to the Roman and early modern tradition of the nervosus, sinewy or ‘virile’ style, contrasted in Quintilian to the cinaedus, effeminate or pathic male – a tradition reflected in Montaigne, in Jonson’s Discoveries and in the sinewy or ‘plain’ style of early modern science. My current work in progress is focused on the geopolitics of ‘Asiatic’ style, both as it appears in contrast to ‘Attic’ style in Roman writing and as it figures in early modern descriptions of ‘the Stile ‘a the big Turkes’ (Dekker, Satiromastix), an updating of ‘Asiatic’ style to representations of the Ottoman Turk as the new power of the East. This is in turn part of a larger project that will include not only the ways in which grammar, rhetoric, sexuality and gender are interrelated in the period, but also the association of ‘inkhorn’ terms with blackface and the implications of apparently merely verbal or rhetorical forms for the study of early modern racial and religious interconnections. This chapter, which looks at the ways in which Hebrew and Arabic numbers, as well as witchcraft and sodomy, were implicated in what was understood as spelling ‘backwards’, is part of this new work.
