A Ciceronian sunburn: Humanist/ic rhetoric and the ethics of Spenserian poetics

Cicero's putative stature as the paragon of learning among sixteenth-century humanists did not preclude debate on the "matter," form, and ends of the learning embodied in his works. This study examines how Cicero was appropriated in diverse ways by humanist poets and pedagogues to authorize learning: Or, this study examines the role of rhetoric and poetics within the humanist discourse on learning in late-Tudor England.;Edmund Spenser (and Sir Philip Sidney) drew on Cicero to authorize a kind of learning which took human action as its "matter," including the always situated, probabilistic, and discursive or rhetorical form that "matter" assumes. Such learning is intrinsically moral or "humanistic"; it originates in, takes as its "object," and "ends" in individual action (ethics) participating in the life of a community (politics).;Ramists' challenged the propaideutic power of the rhetorical arts to inculcate moral knowledge (as defined above) by subordinating rhetoric and poetry to the teaching prowess of the art of logic, or dialectic. Ramists drew on Cicero to authorize an education in rhetoric (rather than a rhetorical education); for them, rhetoric was not a civic art, but a "scholastic" or "academic" art in that it provided the schoolmaster rules for rendering truth clearly and accurately in his instruction of schoolboys. This "humanist" form of learning posits that the "matter" of learning is essentially rational, that knowledge can be apprehended by a Reason which operates independently of discursive (that is, moral) contexts.;In considering these diverging conceptions of sixteenth-century Ciceronianism, this study argues that Spenser neither "exemplifies" nor "is representative of" a humanism writ large, but that his participates within a discourse on learning.;The form of this study is a narrative; its aims is to (re-)appropriate Tudor poetic practices within a history of rhetoric premised on the civic or sophistic integrity of rhetoric to embody action. In addition to showing how Cicero sanctions "humanist" learning in works by Fraunce, Temple, and Ramus, this study also shows how Ciceronian moral philosophy informs the "humanistic" learning inscribed in the works of Bryskett, Spenser, Sidney, and Erasmus.