Burke's Vehemence and the Rhetoric of Historical Exaggeration

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-198
Author(s):  
Steven Stryer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
High Middle Ages ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strategy I

This article seeks to explain Edmund Burke's notorious verbal vehemence as the consequence of a deliberate rhetorical strategy. I argue that over the course of a thirty-year parliamentary career, Burke relied on sharply formulated historical contrasts in order to express his opposition to the policies of successive ministries and warn of threats to the nation's defining achievements. Through the use of four distinct syntactical patterns, Burke cultivated a style of hyperbole which exaggerated both the failings of the present and the virtues of the national past, focusing on two periods in particular: the High Middle Ages and the early eighteenth-century era of Whig Oligarchy.

Liberty, Manners, and Politeness in Early Eighteenth-Century England

1989 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-605 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence E. Klein
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
English Language ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Polite Society ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Aesthetic Standard ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

In the early eighteenth century, the language of politeness became a major fixture of English discourse. Centring on the term ‘politeness’ and consisting of a vocabulary of key words (such as ‘refinement’, ‘manners’, ‘character’, ‘breeding’, and ‘civility’) and a range of qualifying attributes (‘free’, ‘easy’, ‘natural’, ‘graceful’, and many others), the language was used to make a wide range of objects intelligible. Though the word ‘polite’ had been in the English language from at least the fifteenth century, denoting the state of being polished or neat in quite literal and concrete ways, the term entered on its significant career only in the mid-seventeenth century, when it began to convey the meanings of studied social behaviour of the sort inspired by and associated with princely courts. However, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, ‘politeness’ grew to cover a range of meanings, considerably freed from the initial association with courts. Several broad categories of usage of the term ‘polite’ are indicative: as a behavioural and moral standard for members of an elite (e.g. ‘polite gentlemen’, ‘polite ladies’, ‘polite society’, ‘polite conversation’); as an aesthetic standard for many kinds of human artifacts and products (e.g. ‘polite arts’, ‘polite towns’, ‘polite learning’, ‘polite buildings’); and as a way of generalizing about and characterizing society and culture (‘polite age’, ‘polite nation’, ‘polite people’). In the latter usage, ‘politeness’ was frequently deployed retrospectively as an attribute of classical civilizations. ‘Politeness’ helped recast the renaissance model of history, in which modernity was separated from its true ancestor, the ancient world, by the vast dark gulf of the middle ages: the ‘politest’ nations were ancient Greece and ancient Rome; the ‘politest’ ages, the spells of Hellenic and Roman creativity.

Politics, Patronage and Newtonianism: the Cambridge Example

1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gascoigne
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Alma Mater ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

Oxford has never quite recovered from Matthew Arnold's description of his belovedalma materas a ‘home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names and impossible loyalties’. 1 While in popular stereotype Oxford is associated with such movements as the laudians, the Jacobites and the tractarians, Cambridge, by contrast, is seen as the home of more radical and reformist creeds: the puritans, the latitudinarians and the academic reformers of the nineteenth century. Consequently, we are predisposed to think it unremarkable that in the early eighteenth century Cambridge almost totally shed the last vestiges of the scholastic academic order which had its origins in the Tiigh middle ages and, in its place, adopted a style of education which, in its overriding emphasis on mathematics, departed significantly from the curriculum offered at Oxford.

A perspective on “impoliteness” in early modern Romanian court and diplomatic interactions

2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-121
Author(s):  
Mihaela-Viorica Constantinescu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Cultural Patterns ◽  
First Order ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Court Life ◽  
Emotional Effects ◽  
The Middle Ages

Abstract The paper focuses on impoliteness dealt with from a historical pragmatics perspective (Jucker [ed.] 1995; Culpeper and Kádár [eds] 2010; Jucker and Taavitsainen [eds] 2010; etc.). The approach adopted in this study favours a first-order im/politeness view (Watts et al. [eds] 1992; Eelen 2001; etc.), which is mainly concerned with the evaluation of behavioural elements by the participants in a communicative event. As im/politeness in Romanian is under-researched from a historical sociopragmatic perspective, this analysis tries to fill a gap exploring the seventeenth to early-eighteenth century cultural patterns and their characteristics in only two main Romanian provinces, Moldavia and Wallachia (separate states from the Middle Ages until their union in 1859). My analysis is limited to the understanding and practices of “impoliteness” in official settings (court and diplomatic interactions), aiming to capture the production and evaluation, as well as some self-reflexive aspects (Eelen 2001; Kádár 2013) and emotional effects of “impoliteness”. The corpus consists of Moldavian and Wallachian chronicles from the second half of the seventeenth-century and first half of the eighteenth-century, presenting local court life and also scenes at the Ottoman court.

The Landholding Structure of a Northern Manor: Troutbeck, c. 1250–1800

2013 ◽  
pp. 28-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Healey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Lake District ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Long Run ◽  
High Middle Ages

Troutbeck in the Lake District has a long run of landholding records, dating from the village's first appearance in the thirteenth century until modern times. This article uses these to recreate the nature of landholding across a broad span of history from the high Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century. It finds that numbers of customary landholders continued to grow despite the recurrent disasters of plague, famine and war in the fourteenth century, and showed growth again between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The seventeenth century then brought two major changes: there were a growing number of subtenants up until the 1620s. Then, after old restrictions on the parcelling of tenements were lifted in the 1670s, landholdings started to fragment, and a group of small customary landholders developed and survived into the eighteenth century.

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