A Forgotten Kairos: Rhetorical Memory in 16th Century Europe

In 16th century Europe the nearly 2000-year-old discipline of rhetoric, still a pillar of education, underwent significant change. One of the more curious changes occurred in rhetoric’s subdivision known as memory, memoria, that is, memory’s “artificial” cultivation. During the 16th century rhetorical memory was paradoxically both maximized and marginalized as a discipline. And by the early 17th century memoria was all but extinct as a branch of rhetoric. The causal mechanisms of this transformation remain underexamined, particularly by rhetoric and composition scholars, and most explanations remain unclear and uncompelling. Accordingly, this thesis attempts a new approach to rhetorical memory’s puzzling obsolescence. Still adhering to traditional historiographic methods, other, non-traditional, markedly rhetorical techniques are employed. Rhetorical terms such as kairos, topoi and “rhetorical situation” are layered into and substituted for conventional, less-interrogated paradigms and ideas, such as chronology, education, the Reformation, and so on. By adjusting the metaphorical substructures and traditional heuristics of conventional analysis, new perspectives on this important chapter in the history of rhetoric and education are achieved.