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Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance.Victoria Kahn

Victoria Kahn has written a critically compelling and learned book about reading in the Renaissance. She brings to the subject a forceful thesis: that the experience of reading was informed not only by a given writer's rhetorical practice, but also by the degree of skepticism pervading his work, and by his understanding of the classical virtue of prudence—that power of deliberation that enables choice and the exercise of free will. By analyzing the shifting relationships of rhetoric, prudence, and skepticism in a small group of influential texts, ranging from Coluccio Salutati's De nobilitate legum et medicine (399) to Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), she maps out a modest history of writing and reading that is subtly attuned to the changing fortunes of humanism.