The Imperfect Friend. Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts by Wendy Olmsted

204 RHETORICA trattandoli come fígli. Gli viene proposto, come figlio di Dio, di imitare la condotta di quest'ultimo. É «la legge della liberta» . Liberta per il servizio di Dio, sancito nell'alleanza, espresso nella vita e nel culto. Dall'esodo trae origine anche il rito pasquale. Nelle epoche successive, i figli di Israele avrebbero via via composto e cantato i sette salmi della «lode di Pasqua» (Sal 113-118) e della «grande lode» (Sal 136), poi ripresi nella celebrazione famillare della festa. Attraverso «gli inni alia liberta» la parola delLuomo e quella di Dio entraño in un reciproco scambio, costitutivo del rito. E' utilmente premesso al volume un essenziale Lexique des termes techniques (pp. 17-19), sulla terminología retorica piú frequentemente utilizzata dall'A. Sommario Prefazione. I. II dono della liberta. 1. II passaggio del mare (Es 14). 2. II Canto del mare (Es 15). II. La legge di liberta. 3. II Decálogo del libro delLEsodo (Es 20,2-17). 4. II Decálogo del libro del Deuteronomio (Dt 5,621 ). 5. Perché due Decaloghi? III. Inni alia liberta. 6. «Chi é come il Signore nostro Dio?» (Sal 113). 7. «Che hai tu, mare, per fuggire?» (Sal 114). 8. «Israele, confida nel Signore!» (Sal 115). 9. «lo credo» (Sal 116). 10. «Lodate il Signore, tutti i popoli!» (Sal 117). 11. «La destra del Signore é esaltata!» (Sal 118). 12.«Si, per sempre la sua fedeltá» (Sal 136). Francesco Pieri Facoltd Teológica dell'Emilia-Romagna, Bologna Olmsted, Wendy. The Imperfect Friend. Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. xi+293 pp. ISBN 978-0-8020-9136-9 Interdisciplinary interest in emotion as a critical category of thought has led to a range of scholarship discussing the ways in which affect permeates all discourse, shaping identity and behavior within private, professional, and public spheres. Wendy Olmsted's book, The Imperfect Friend, contributes to this conversation by exploring the rhetorical management of emotion evident in early modern texts. Focusing on the attempts of friends to persuade each other, Olmsted's exploration of the "gentle strand in the history of emotional persuasion" provides insight both into the organization of early modern affect as well as the role of emotion in rhetoric generally (p. 20). Like her other historical work, it is characterized by close attention to the textual basis for her claims about the practice of rhetoric and about early modern identity and culture. Olmsted traces a general distrust of strong emotion among early modern writers, as well as a distrust of the use of force or coercion to impose Reviews 205 agreement. Against the backdrop of these doubts and the powerful hope among Renaissance rhetoricians that public "eloquence could compel people to follow the laws" (p. 20), Olmsted identifies friendship as an alternative space where eloquence is used to gain assent and build emotional stability without the threat of coercion. Olmsted commits chapters to legal and religious discourse, poetry, justice, honor, and, finally, marriage. Tracing the rhetorical means of persuading emotion in these contexts reveals how, for instance, Protestant writers could envision "friendship ... as a model for ideal marriage" in order to promote marital harmony (p. 176). Olmsted finds social relationships represented in early modern literary texts and prose treatises as "nearly utopian site[s] where one friend appeals reasonably to the heart of the other" (p. 5). According to Olmsted, these texts display "historically and culturally specific topoi for producing [and regulating] emotion" (p. 6). Hospitality, for instance, emerges as one of the central topoi in Sidney's texts through which discourse on emotion is reproduced. Expecting an individual to be a good host no matter the context or guest, for instance, promoted the regulation of extremes of love, anger, and grief. Each era, Olmsted suggests, has its own cultural resources through which emotion is managed, resources that are an understudied aspect of rhetoric. As other scholars have concluded as well, emotion, far from being irrational, is open to persuasion. What Olmsted adds to our understanding of emotion is the way in which early modern culture made it possible for individuals to effect such persuasion through temperate means. Olmsted looks primarily...

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