“Brought up in the universitie of bridewell”: Beggarly Rhetorics and Rhetorical Beggars in Early Modern England

Although the discourse of rhetorical persuasion in early modern England traces its origins back to classical Greece and Rome, this essay claims there was a separate tradition of exemplary rhetoric located at the social margins and shaped by the persuasive tactics of the itinerant poor. The essay begins by examining the rhetorical context of beggars largely through the lens of legal and linguistic authorities, attending especially to the unexpected and unstable presence of vagrants among vernacular rhetorical manuals and treatises, before shifting attention to what evidence we have of the actual strategies of the itinerant poor, who were forced to survive material, social, and legal precarity with few resources beyond effective speech. The rhetorical power of beggars offered contemporaries a dynamic set of resources that complicated received wisdom and posed vexing questions about the powers and limits of persuasive language in the larger social landscape. [E.G.]