Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal

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McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP, 1995 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 371 pages
Locating the roots of the plain style in secular and philosophic classicism, Auksi examines theories on classical rhetoric from Demetrius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus to Cicero and Quintilian. He shows how biblicists deliberately transformed a heathen mode, and demonstrates that rhetoric served a pragmatic function among the church fathers. He also discusses the different responses of Renaissance translators, rhetors, polemicists, and humanists to the stylized medieval inheritance, paying particular attention to the issue of sacred plainness in preaching. The epilogue provides a convincing argument for the decline of the plain style in the late seventeenth century and describes how the almost vanished ideal of plainness was transformed by Methodists, Quakers, Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites.

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Contents

Christian Literary Culture and the Study
9
The Plain Style in Classical Rhetoric
33
Scripture and the Creative Motive
67
Augustine
110
The Church Fathers and Christian Style
144
Medieval Rhetoric and the Art
174
The Major
203
Sources Contexts
232
Spiritual Rhetoric and the English
266
Decline
304
Notes
311
Bibliography
337
Index
365
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