Humanism, Capitalism, and Rhetoric in Early Modern England by Lynette Hunter;

Author:Lynette Hunter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2021-08-28T06:26:34.844000+00:00

Dedications to a Patron

The shift in strategy, from an overtly authorizing ethos that identifies the writer with the honorable patron to a focus on a relation with the reader as a friend, is mirrored in the shift from “dedication” to “address to the reader” as the primary forematter used by writers of books about behavior to build a bridge to their print audience. To begin first with the dedication and the establishment of ethos: there are a number of relatively predictable devices and techniques that result in a rhetorical stance that manipulates the reader into accepting the text through the writer’s or book’s association with the patron. This stance is based on an assumptive logic that the patron is to be admired and emulated not only by the writer but by the readers and indeed by society in general. To be patronized is not only to be supported but also to be supported by someone who has more apparent learning, sensibility, and power. Foremost is the link with an important person who has hired the writer and therefore values them – by implication the reader also should value them or they will be making an adverse judgment on the patron. In his Bibliothetca (1545) Thomas Elyot associates himself directly with Henry VIII, a learned man with learned associates, and says that he would have been destroyed by “malicious” readers13 had not the king recognized his talent. The implication, embedded in the logic, is that any reader who does not agree with his arguments is opposing the king. Another related strategy is to reference this association and stress that the important patron is learned and likes the book – again the reader should as well, although explicit references to learning subside after the 1570s with an apparent contraction in the diversification of educational policy in Elizabethan England.14 These two are by far the most common devices and may be found throughout the century, in for example Elyot (Governor, A3v), Leonard Cox,15 Hoby (B1v), Newton (Touchstone, A5v), Daie ([2v–4]), and Bryskett (A3).

Other devices in dedications to patrons include: “the patron cannot be deceived” and therefore the reader is in good hands. In other words, the purchase and reading of the book are allied to the patron not the writer (Daie). Thomas Wilson addresses his patron, Lord Dudley, in rather ambivalent terms, saying that he is wise and reasonable but needs “eloquence,” but then says the book will learn “eloquence” from him (1553, A1v–A2). Rather oddly, in Ralph Lever’s The Arte of Reason, there is the statement, “the patron failed to learn first time around” so the writer is trying again with this printed text. It transpires that this apparent criticism of a patron is in fact Lever’s backhanded apology for failing to educate his patron (Lord Essex) until his patron taught him how to do so (*2v). Thomas Newton uses an even more convoluted device, but one that heralds the moebius strip of the address to the reader by identifying the reader’s judgment with that of the patron to anchor the ethos of the writer.

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