Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice

When he died in 1936 Charles Sears Baldwin, Professor of Rhetoric and English Composition at Columbia University, left the unpublished manuscript which here appears in print. At the request of his family, I undertook to prepare the manuscript for publication and see it through the press. As a devoted student, colleague, and friend I have been happy to do so. Baldwin’s Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice takes its place as the continuation of his previously published studies: Ancient Rhetoric and Poetic (1924) and Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (1928), both published by the Macmillan Company. It takes up the story where Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic left off in 1400 and carries it on to 1600. The first sentences of his preface to the first study suggest that Baldwin had the present study in mind before 1924. “To interpret ancient rhetoric and poetic afresh from typical theory and practice is the first step toward interpreting those traditions of criticism which were most influential in the Middle Age. Medieval rhetoric and poetic, in turn, prepare for a clearer comprehension of the Renaissance renewal of allegiance to antiquity.” Like the two earlier studies, it is firmly based on the Aristotelian philosophy of composition embodied in the Rhetoric and the Poetic. Baldwin adheres to the sound rhetoric which aims at enhancing the subject and repudiates the sophistic rhetoric which aims at enhancing the speaker. Rhetoric and poetic are different in aim and different in their modes of composition. Consequently he considers poetic deviated when it becomes confused with rhetoric and perverted when controlled by sophistic. Had he lived, Baldwin would have written more than here appears. He had planned a chapter on Renaissance education which would have demonstrated more fully the channels through which poetical theory reached poetical practice. In the chapter “Sixteenth Century Poetics” he had planned sections on Castelvetro and Sibillet which were never written. Other writers on literary theory he deliberately omitted as less typical, less significant, or less influential than the writers he discusses. His method was to go directly to the original sources, both for theory and for practice, to make his own translations, and to ignore secondary sources, which he rarely cites.