Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric

This study argues that translation is the means by which rhetoric, as the art of reasoning, becomes a part of a lineage of – and a resource for – an ethics of civic discourse. At the heart of Translation and the Rediscovery of Rhetoric is the thirteenth-century notary, philosopher, and statesman Brunetto Latini, whose translation of Cicero's De inventione will plant the seeds for the twentieth-century renewal of rhetoric as an art of persuasion.
Moving from Classical Latin and medieval Romance languages (Old French and medieval Italian) to modern French, this work posits a diachronic dialogue. It shows how translation – as practice and as theory, via the medieval topos of translatio – serves as the vehicle for the transfer of rhetoric as an art of argumentation and persuasion from classical Greece and Rome to modern Paris and Brussels by way of medieval France and Italy.