A Ciceronian Sunburn: A Tudor Dialogue on Humanistic Rhetoric and Civic Poetics

A Ciceronian Sunburn reconsiders the complexion of Tudor poetics by demonstrating the ways in which poets and pedagogues appropriated the rhetorical brilliance of Cicero to inform their approaches to learning. By recasting the poetic texts of Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney as works that participated in sixteenth-century debates on learning, E. Armstrong challenges conventional views of Tudor poetics. He argues that the poetry of Spenser, Sidney, and others of the period reflects a more fully developed understanding of Ciceronian rhetoric than is found in the lectures, pedagogical handbooks, and treatises of early modern scholars to which historians of humanistic rhetoric most frequently turn. Reclaiming poetics as a substantive force for the rhetorical tradition, Armstrong finds that the poetry of the period confirms Cicero's dictum that "the poet is the nearest kinsman to the orator." By showing how the poets' work contributed to and was appropriated by those immersed in the Tudor controversies on learning, Armstrong brings to the fore an argument that prizes the practical, ethically directed, and civic-minded over the moral and philosophical detachment for which the poets traditionally are revered. Armstrong offers a study that operates on three interrelated levels. He analyzes the writings of a circle of Tudor poets and scholars, all known to one other and in a sense conversing--Lodowick Bryskett, Spenser (and his glossarist E.K.), Abraham Fraunce, William Temple, and Sidney. On another level Armstrong broadens the context for the conversation by locating it within the divergent visions of learning and rhetoric advanced by Erasmus and Peter Ramus. On a third level Armstronggrounds these early modern disputes, both historically and intellectually, in topics discovered in Cicero's De oratore and De officiis.