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social, grammar school, universities, Inns of court, Petrarchan verse, Renaissance poetics, humanist scholarship, reformation, marriage
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doctoral dissertation. I am concerned primarily with what is perhaps best described as the social rhetoricity of verse answering. While the influence of formal rhetorical techniques learnt at the Inns of Court, Universities and grammar schools, is frequently apparent in the material I examine, I have elected to look primarily at the relationship between the answer-poem and actual social practices and Renaissance social theories. In terms of rhetoricity this involves partly the means by which poets orchestrate, initiate, elicit or provoke verse conversations and the means by which, and reasons why, answer-poems situate themselves in relation to the poems they answer in certain ways. It also involves partly the ways in which the practice of verse answering is influenced by, and identifies itself with, certain social rituals and ideologies. Among those rituals impinging upon the rhetoricity of verse exchanges, for instance, would be the formal arrangements of duelling in the case of libellous exchanges, the tournament and chivalric single combat in the case of flyting, courtly and courtship rituals in the case of Petrarchan verse exchanges and Reformation marriage ideology in verse exchanges upon the subject of marriage. This said, it is nonetheless necessary to give a brief account of how formal rhetorical education found applicability to daily life through the practice of verse answering.
Answer-poetry is in many ways at the heart of Renaissance poetics and reflects well the competitive discursiveness of the Renaissance literary mind. The intellectual and social climate of the period was highly conducive to a proliferation of verse answering. This is the pathological outcome of the emphasis placed upon rhetorical exercises in disputation across the breadth of educational institutions. It is due to the importance attributed to what Downs-Gamble terms “dialectical disputatio” in the Renaissance that verse answering became a literary skill that was cultivated as a means of establishing oneself as an educated, accomplished gentleman of letters. The heightened interest in classicism fostered by humanist scholarship and antiquarianism brought into prominence numerous precedents for
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