Inventing Figures of Speech

This chapter is a study of the significance of figures of speech to humanist pedagogy’s attempt to divorce style from the invention of an argument and the judgment of its validity. The significance of figures to this attempt turned on a set of questions that preoccupied humanist teachers: Is language instrumental to thinking and do figures of speech act as constitutive structures of the mind? Or, is language simply ornamental to thinking? Is its work therefore dictated by mental operations from which these figures are excluded? Focusing on a series of pedagogical reforms adhering to the principles of Peter Ramus, it argues that a wide range of early modern teachers proposed an answer to these questions by subordinating the figures of elocutio to the places of inventio and inscribing the relative value of the one to the other into a paradigmatic account of the compositional process. Attending to the figure of epanodos in Book 2 of Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, this chapter describes a counterfeit art of indecorous thinking in which figures of speech act as structures of the mind and establish the parameters of possibility for the imaginary worlds of early modern literature.