Brian Manning on the struggle between the middle class and the aristocracy in early modern England

I was browsing in JSTOR yesterday afternoon when I came across the late Brian Manning's review of William Samuel Howell's book, Logic and Rhetoric in England 1500-1700 (Science and Society (Winter, 1957) Volume 21, No.1, Pp.86-88). Two related comments by Manning struck me with surprise and force. In one place (p.88) he wrote that "The rituals of rhetoric belonged to the ceremonial of an aristocratic society and church: the growth of the "plain style" of preaching marked the identification of Puritanism with the middle class revolt against the aristocracy and the turning of the middle class to the people for allies in their struggle." Later on the same page Manning claimed that "The techniques of logic and rhetoric, like the dogmas of theology, lay at the centre of the struggle between the middle class and the aristocracy, a struggle in which the intellectual and material struggle of mankind was at stake." These were and are very large claims indeed, claims which I seriously doubt had any substance to them. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Simon Healy has died

Image
  I am extremely sorry to report that Simon Healy, who worked for the History of Parliament Trust's 1604-1629 section for many years,  has died. I remember him as a very cheerful and engaging conversationalist. My condolences go to his widow and their two children.
Read more

Centre and Locality: review reflections

  Quite by chance, I was browsing on Twitter last Friday (9 th April) when I spotted on Edward Vallance’s site a reference to a video conference organised by William Clayton of the University of East Anglia at the end of last month. Further searches led me to William Clayton’s review of the book edited by Chris Kyle and Jason Peacey, Connecting Centre and Locality: Communication in early modern England, which appeared under the auspices of the Manchester University Press in 2020 and which Clayton had reviewed for The Seventeenth Century in its most recent issue. [1] This is a subject which interests me and I did give some thought to responding to William Clayton’s largely laudatory comments. However, I was also conscious that I had not read this collection of essays and was thus less well equipped than I should be for assessing either the book or William Clayton’s review. There was, however, one historiographical issue upon which I did feel qualified to comment. Right at the st...
Read more

Transcribing Walter Yonge's notes on proceedings in the House of Commons between 1642 and 1645

  In the spring of 1967, Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, then the Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford, wrote to me to ask if I would assist Dr Pearl in her work by transcribing Walter Yonge’s diaries held (in Additional Mss.18,777-18,780) in the Manuscript Department of the British Museum at that time. I agreed and it was settled that I would be paid £150 per volume by the History Faculty of the University. I duly transcribed the first of these volumes in 1967 and the remaining three by 1973. I was not her “assistant” in this task but undertook it myself. I did not, moreover, keep copies of the first three volumes. In mid-1975, I read in The Times Higher Education Supplement that she was preparing the Yonge volumes for publication. But nothing happened. By 1984, seventeen years after I had transcribed the first volume and eleven years after finishing the last one I was puzzled by this failure to proceed and, having asked several academic friends if they th...
Read more