Rhetorical Invention

This article sheds new light on the material history of G. Chr. Lichtenberg’s proverbial wit and demonstrates how the note-taking technique that he called “sudeln” aided his inventiveness. The epistemic effect of the Sudelbücher, or waste-books, lies in the interaction between conflicting modes of knowledge production. While the waste-books stand in the tradition of reformed commonplace books—notebooks intended to be discovery devices that encouraged unlikely combinations of entries—they were at the same time modeled upon strictly codified early-modern methods of notation (e.g. “learned bookkeeping”). This tension increased the waste-books’ epistemological effectiveness, turning sudeln into an experimental procedure that reliably led to “sagacious combinations of thought” and thus the production of witty ideas. In this function, sudeln informed both Lichtenberg’s own research and his pedagogy as a physics instructor. The Sudelbücher should therefore be seen not as a collection of aphorisms, but as media with an epistemic impact and intellectual tools of writing.

Abstract (Deutsch)
Dieser Beitrag beleuchtet die Materialgeschichte von G. Chr. Lichtenbergs sprichwörtlichem Witz und zeigt, wie sudeln als Notationspraxis seinen Einfallsreichtum förderte. Die epistemische Wirkung der Sudelbücher basiert auf dem Zusammenspiel verschiedener Modi der Wissensproduktion. Während die Sudelbücher in der Tradition reformierter commonplace books stehen, d.h. Notizbücher, die durch überraschende Kombinationen von Einträgen als Findwerkzeuge dienten, folgen sie zugleich streng geregelten frühmodernen Notationsmodellen (wie z. B. „gelehrte Buchhalterey“). Genau diese Spannung ließ die Sudelbücher epistemologisch effektiv werden und machte aus sudeln ein experimentelles Verfahren, das zuverlässig in „scharfsinnigen Gedankenkombinationen“ und witzigen Einfällen resultierte. In dieser Funktion hatte sudeln sowohl für Lichtenbergs Forschung als auch seine Pädagogik als Physikprofessor große Relevanz. Die Sudelbücher sollten daher nicht als Aphorismensammlung aufgefasst werden, sondern als intellektuelle Schreibwerkzeuge und Medien mit epistemischer Durchschlagskraft.

In Ancient times and in the contemporary moment, kairos has operated as a keyword for theorizing rhetoric and its potential. Aligning ourselves with these endeavors we take stock of varying iterations of the kairotic not to artificially force a singular conception of the term, but to hold such resolutions at bay. We assess efforts to realign kairos with challenges to the ontological priority of rhetorical actors and trace recent theoretical articulations that further decenter human agency by relocating the kairotic in ecological/contextual forces. We assert the need to maintain invention and eventfulness as crucial elements of the kairotic so as to insist that rhetoric be understood as a practice that exceeds socio-anthropological “adaptation” to those conditions. Through a series of propositions we hold hope for an inventive and evental kairotic stance that likewise avoids naïve conceptions of sovereign subjectivity.

Susan B. Anthony’s public career serves as both a case study within and a reflection of extemporaneous speaking culture in the nineteenth century. This essay argues that Anthony’s rhetorical influence in the fight for woman suffrage is best explained through her mastery of extemporaneous speaking within a culture that taught and valued the practice. This essay analyzes Anthony’s extemporaneous speaking in the 1870s and 1880s and presents archival research to ground the analysis in nineteenth-century extemporaneous speaking culture. Beyond gaining a better understanding of the role extemporaneous speaking played in Anthony’s suffrage advocacy, this essay also illustrates how rhetorical scholars might analyze the fragmentary texts that record and report on extemporaneous speaking and reflects on the implication of studying those fragmentary texts for expanding the canon of scholarship on women.

Posthumanism is a philosophical perspective of how change is enacted in the world. As a conceptualization and historicization of both agency and the “human,” it is different from those conceived through humanism. Whereas a humanist perspective frequently assumes the human is autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional in acts of change, a posthumanist perspective assumes agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human participates but does not completely intend or control. Posthumanist philosophy constitutes the human as: (a) physically, chemically, and biologically enmeshed and dependent on the environment; (b) moved to action through
interactions that generate affects, habits, and reason; and (c) possessing no attribute that is uniquely human but is instead made up of a larger evolving ecosystem. There is little consensus in posthumanist scholarship about the degree to which a conscious human subject can actively create change, but the human does participate in change.
As distinguished from posthumanism, humanism is credited with attributing the conscious and intentional human subject as the dominant source of agency most worthy of scholarly attention. Since its inception during the Renaissance, humanism has been constituted in various ways throughout history, but as a collective body of literature, the human is typically constituted through humanism as: (a) autonomous from nature given the intellectual faculties of the mind that controls the body, (b) uniquely capable of and motivated by speech and reason, and (c) an exceptional animal that is superior to other creatures. Humanist assumptions concerning the human are infused throughout Western philosophy and reinforce a nature/culture dualism where human culture is distinct from nature. In contrast, a posthumanist scholar rejects this dichotomy through understanding the human as entangled with its environment. A posthumanist scholar of
communication typically integrates scholarship from a variety of other disciplines including, but not limited to: art, architecture, cybernetics, ecology, ethology, geology, music, psychoanalysis, and quantum physics.

The focus of my contribution is Karel van Mander’s pen-and-ink-drawing representing Night, which served as the model for the final engraving in Jacob Matham’s series of the four times of the day. Printed in 1601 with the imperial privilege of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, the series was most probably conceived by Van Mander and Matham in honour of the powerful collector and lover of the arts in Prague. Van Mander’s composition differs from the established iconography of Night in that it presents Morpheus rather than Somnus as the dominant allegorical figure and, moreover, shows two of the putti or spiritelli (Somnus’s sons, who shape dreams) in the act of painting with brush and palette. It has so far gone largely unnoticed that Morpheus – as a master craftsman, maker and simulator of human forms – also plays a crucial role in Van Mander’s theoretical reflections on painting.  These were laid out in the Schilder-Boeck, which was being written in these very years, and Morpheus appears in the chapter on the representation of affects in the Foundations of the Painter’s Art and in the commentary on the Metamorphoses of Ovid. In my paper I discuss Van Mander’s composition within the framework of contemporaneous art and (art) literature on dreams and on (Netherlandish) artists’ power of imagination. I further link Morpheus to other figures of transformation such as Proteus and Vertumnus, which play a central role in Van Mander’s views on artistic imitation (especially in his Life of Golztius). I argue that Van Mander’s Morpheus, with his cornucopia of smoke and fleeting shapes, “embodies” the copiousness and also the unruly and possibly ‘demonic’ variety of artistic invention from the imagination (“uyt den gheest”); he might thus function as a counter-figure to Nature and her ever-changing shapes.

"This article discusses the authorial drafts in Rudolf von Ems’s “World Chronicle”.The frequently problematised blending of creative action and text production is reconstructed as an effect of rhetorical allusion. The article develops the theory that
the tense rhetorical system of the prologue as a whole is underpinned by a secular understanding of authorship which allows the reader to choose between a number of different readings.

Der Beitrag diskutiert die Autorentwürfe in Rudolfs von Ems „Weltchronik“. Die häufig problematisierte Überblendung von Schöpfungshandeln und Textproduktion wird als ein anspielungsrhetorischer Effekt rekonstruiert. Es wird die These entwickelt, dass der spannungsreichen rhetorischen Anlage des Prologs insgesamt ein profanes Verständnis von Autorschaft unterlegt ist, das unterschiedliche Lektüre-Angebote
zur Wahl stellt."

The figure of a six-winged angel, usually called The Cherub, was an important tool in the later Middle Ages for preachers needing to compose many sermons during the liturgical year. The Cherub's six wings each presented five topics on themes of virtue and vice, and offered a reliable outline to be remembered and expanded on during a preacher's ordinary situation of having to speak ex temporaneously to his audiences. Medieval preaching was an oral situation, requiring the ability to compose 'on the spot' with great fluency and flexibility.  Such figures as The Cherub should be thought of as instruments enabling invention and improvisation.

In recent years, humanists and social scientists have shown increasing interest in human-animal relations – to the point where many now speak of an ‘animal turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Across history, psychology, anthropology, literature, sociology, philosophy, and law, an interdisciplinary field of human-animal studies has been forming. Certain common themes run through this diverse field, not least the reproduction of human-animal difference, and the conditions and the implications thereof.

Despite the long history of language use as a marker of such difference, the academic quest to investigate the boundary between human and nonhuman has, somewhat surprisingly, not taken root within rhetorical studies – at least not until now. For this edited volume, we therefore call for chapters that investigate the place of nonhuman animals in the purview of rhetorical theory; what it would mean to communicate beyond the human community; how rhetoric reveals our ‘brute roots.’ In other words, this book invites contributions which enlighten us about likely or possible implications of the animal turn within rhetorical studies. Would such a turn imply, for instance, that rhetoric needs a nonanthropocentric reconfiguration? The question, perhaps, is this: What difference would it make to the discipline if we assumed that nonhuman forms of communication were as interesting as human ones?

This paper aims to examine some examples of Diego Velázquez’s oeuvre that could be interpreted as genre violations. From a metapictorial point of view, his Sevillian bodegones will be elucidated neither as “pictures of everyday life” nor as polysemic, emblem-like images, but rather as mimetic “inventions”. Despite its significance for the young Velázquez, still life would decline as an independent genre in his maturity. Yet much of what he learnt from its practice re-emerged purified in his “fables” or “history paintings”. With all these works, Velázquez would surpass the concept of simple imitation to
the extent of developing that of dissimulatio artis as the true end of his painting.

Les papiers personnels d'Étienne Loulié sont composés de plusieurs brouillons, notes et ébauches d'ouvrages théoriques et de méthodes pratiques, mêlés à diverses copies commentées d'extraits d'ouvrages d'autres auteurs. Dans l'une des notes de ce corpus, le musicien et pédagogue livre un passage tout à fait singulier concernant le processus mobilisé par un compositeur lorsqu'il met en musique un psaume. Loulié s'y intéresse à titre d'exemple au sein d'une discussion plus ample, qui concerne les définitions de termes et de concepts relatives à la forme et l'organisation interne d'une oeuvre musicale, et qui est présentée sous forme de glossaire encyclopédique. Peut-être destiné initialement à s'intégrer dans ses Éléments ou principes de musique de 1696, voire à un projet plus ambitieux resté inachevé, ce passage est demeuré inédit. Il nous donne un aperçu de la façon dont un musicien, à la fin du XVIIe siècle, aborde la question de la forme musicale, de la disposition des effectifs et des paroles, et plus généralement du processus compositionnel. Loulié y fournit une série d'exemples et de règles qui cherchent à codifier la structure, l'un des principaux défis du cahier de charges théorique de la fin du XVIIe siècle. Mieux encore, il s'agit là, à notre connaissance, de l'unique exemple dans le corpus français du XVIIe siècle, d'une tentative de définition du 'plan' et de 'l'idée' d'une pièce. Ces deux termes convoquent immanquablement la 'dispositio' et 'l'inventio' dans la modélisation du processus créatif, selon une logique d'emprunt à la rhétorique, très prégnante dans le contexte culturel du temps de Loulié.

Rhetorical invention is both a practice and its teaching-the capacity to create effective communication, and the instruction in this capacity. Teachers of rhetoric have provided over time a rich and durable supply of pedagogical resources for crafting communication in speech, writing, and multi-modal composition. These resources come down to us through traditions of teaching and practice, in handbooks, theoretical tracts, exemplary models, and heritable pedagogies. Such materials have sometimes succumbed but often resisted the temptation to standardize and systematize, since the art of rhetoric in its very nature speaks to each particular audience and occasion, a requirement that hinders efforts to give it rule-bound methods. The reasons for this resistance to standardization need to be explored as well as how invention has continued to provide heuristic guidance without prescriptive methodological tools. Lacking method, rhetoric is aided by the cultural support of convention, which in turn is modified for each new situation. Such a dialectic of convention and invention animates the ongoing registration of rhetoric to communicative practices and explains its durability as an unsystematic art.

This paper examines the ways in which judges write opinions, the ways experienced and inexperienced legal readers conceptualize judges as authors, and the effect these conceptions have on the way they read those opinions. The paper describes judicial writing as a quintessential example of collaborative writing, a view corroborated by the ways experienced lawyers use and interpret judicial opinions in practice. The judicial opinion is not, as lay opinion grounded in the Romantic view that forms contemporary common wisdom would have it, the original work of the wise and creative judge pronouncing from on high. Rather, the opinion itself is a piece cobbled together from a number of other sources that include established law, the lawyers' written and spoken legal arguments, secondary legal sources, and earlier opinions that were themselves built up from the bits and pieces floating through the legal discourse community. Nevertheless, conventional legal thinking has since at least the 19th Century through today propounded the notion of the judge as quintessentially Romantic author-creator. This clash between legal practice and the conventions of legal (and especially academic) discourse poses real and neglected problems in legal education, especially in the ways the Romantic view of judicial authorship instills in students habits of reading.

The law of patents in India is governed by the patent Act 1970 as
amended by the patent Act 1990. A bill named patent bill 1999 which
had proposed substantial changes in the law was introduced in the
parliament  in  December  1999,  and  was  passed  as  the  patent  Act
2002.A  patent  is  monopoly  right  granted  to  a  person  who  has
invented a new and useful or an improvement of an existing article or
a new process of making an article. After the expiry of the duration
of patent, anybody can make use of the invention. A patent is a form
of industrial property or as it is now called intellectual property. The
owner of the patent can sell this property. A patent being a creation
of statute is territorial in extent. A patent granted in one stated cannot
be enforced in another state unless the invention concerned is also
patented in that state. A patent is not granted for an idea or principal
as such, but for some  article or the process of  making some article
applying the idea.
The object of granting a patent is to encourage and develop new
technology and industry. An inventor may disclose the new invention
only  if  he  is  rewarded;  otherwise  he  may  work  it  secretly.  In
consideration  of  the  grant  of  monopoly  for  a  limited  period,  the
inventor discloses the details of the new invention and the method
working it so that after the expiry of monopoly period others can use
the invention or improve upon it.

The argument comes in two parts and, at a general level, is straightforward. The first part depends on first identifying and tracing this pattern of thought taking place in the scholarship. Following this trajectory reveals that while the scholarship has added considerably to a refined understanding of the environment surrounding kairos, it has not furthered the inventive potential of kairos because it has been overly invested in how kairos arises from historical and cultural forces. Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and in the traditional manner, invention emerges from the timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. Consequently, invention can thus be said to be largely determined by the environment and history to which it belongs. The grouping I follow below has added to the understanding of the complexity of that environment, but it has done so at the cost of thinking of how to add to the understanding of invention. The second part hopes to invigorate studies in kairic invention by drawing the reader’s attention to those aspects that lie outside these historical and cultural forces. What if invention was considered from a bolder perspective? What if it was thought of as the potential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a system or situation? What if invention was thought of as innovative potential to change the course of history rather than being determined by it? Why has rhetoric accepted the determination that rhetorical invention deals merely with finding the known while, at least since Francis Bacon, new knowledge has become the province of the sciences? The second line of argument, then, is to rethink kairos at the level of its silent and hidden potential. I go on to show that taking advantage of the radically innovative potential of kairos. requires attention to its untimely dimension.

President George H. W. Bush was widely criticized for not publicly denouncing the apartheid regime in South Africa. His silence was attributed to a lack of understanding or caring about the issues at hand. However, President Bush was firmly aware of the situation and made an intentional strategic choice not to speak. In this paper, I argue that remaining silent was the best available strategic choice. In addition to the strategic question, I examine the role that silence plays in a democratic system where people expect their leaders to speak on critical issues.

Представлен перевод фрагмента монографии Дженис Лауэр «Риторическая инвенция» (Invention in Rhetoric and Composition. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press: The WAS Clearninghouse, 2004), в котором рассматриваются проблемы риторической инвенции в период второй софистики, Средние века и эпоху Ренессанса. Автор анализирует трансформации, которые претерпела инвенция с распространением христианства, ее роль в интерпретации Священного Писания. Анализируются подходы средневековых энциклопедистов к пониманию риторической аргументации и эпистемологической инвенции, а также состояние риторики в эпоху Ренессанса, когда инвенция была отнесена к логике, и в ее ведении остались исключительно вопросы стиля и акции. Во фрагменте описаны работы преимущественно европейских авторов, однако встречается анализ риторических текстов китайских и арабских философов и риторов, таких как Лю Се, аль-Фараби, Аверроэс и Авиценна. Отдельное внимание Дженис Лауэр уделяет женщинам-авторам, которые, опираясь на достижения инвенции, создавали разнообразные тексты – от научных трудов и жизнеописаний святых до драматических произведений на национальных языках и политических памфлетов. В заключительной части текста делается вывод, что в Средние века попытки примирить риторику с христианской верой привели к тому, что риторика стала применяться герменевтически и впоследствии раскололась на части, потеряв при этом эпистемологическую функцию. В эпоху Ренессанса авторы риторических трактатов зачастую игнорировали инвенцию и занимались исключительно фигурами и тропами.

Rhetorical scholarship has for decades relied solely on culture to explain persuasive behavior. While this focus allows for deep explorations of historical circumstance, it neglects the powerful effects of biology on rhetorical behavior – how our bodies and brains help shape and constrain rhetorical acts. Not only is the cultural model incomplete, but it tacitly endorses the fallacy of human exceptionalism. By introducing evolutionary biology into the study of rhetoric, this book serves as a model of a biocultural paradigm. Being mindful of biological and cultural influences allows for a deeper view of rhetoric, one that is aware of the ubiquity of persuasive behavior in nature. Human and nonhuman animals, and even some plants, persuade to survive - to live, love, and cooperate. That this broad spectrum of rhetorical behavior exists in the animal world demonstrates how much we can learn from evolutionary biology. By incorporating scholarship on animal signaling into the study of rhetoric, the author explores how communication has evolved, and how numerous different species of animals employ similar persuasive tactics in order to overcome similar problems. This cross-species study of rhetoric allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing us with a deeper history of rhetoric that transcends the written and the televised, and reveals the artifacts of our communicative past.

Il saggio esplora la parte più innovativa e meno conosciuta della riflessione di Francesco Orlando (1934-2010) - quella riguardante i meccanismi dell'invenzione e della creazione letteraria - in larga misura inedita. L'obiettivo è riflettere criticamente sull'attività di uno dei più importanti teorici della letteratura del secondo Novecento, valutando le sue ipotesi di lavoro e prospettive di analisi relative a questioni cruciali degli studi letterari. La proposta che Orlando ha delineato e che questo libro sviluppa mira a concepire una vera e propria retorica dell'invenzione, mostrando come ogni singolo testo possa modellizzare e trasfigurare originalmente la realtà che rappresenta mediante configurazioni emotive e cognitive salienti.

In light of the rhetorical concept of inventio, this article analyses the pictorial practice and use of repetitio and variatio in Ribera’s 'tragic' masterpieces and considers the implications between these and the observer in terms of the repercussions of the Aristotelian tragedy and the pathetic sublime in 17th and 18th century art treatises. Likewise —taking the unpublished modelletto of The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew etching as an example— the perception of Ribera’s naturalism is elucidated within a context determined by the authority of Leonardo and Annibale Carracci and the impact of physiognomic theories in 1620s Naples.

Rhetoric and the Responsibility to and for Language: Speaking of Evil relocates the “problem of evil”— the question of why God would allow for the existence of evil—and surveys it as a rhetorical problem. It raises this question: if we speak evil, how shall we speak of evil? When we communicate, we are naming, and evil as the corruption of language plays a central role in that naming. Evil freezes our words, convinces us we have the sole right to their definitions, and generally stifles the dynamic gift of language. By looking at how people in different eras and situations have named evil, this book suggests how we can better take responsibility for our words and why we owe a responsibility to language as our ethical stance toward evil. https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498578431/Speaking-of-Evil-Rhetoric-and-the-Responsibility-to-and-for-Language

Special 30% discount offer!
To get discount, use code LEX30AUTH18 when ordering

This essay utilizes the Rhetoric of Social Intervention to analyze how the leadership in a Southeastern U.S. based denomination, influenced by its Dutch and Scottish reformation heritage, talks about moving beyond its history and reach out beyond its predominantly Anglo-American membership. This essay looks specifically at events from the 2015 General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America where church leaders presented 3 seminars about justification for and ways for the PCA to become more culturally diverse. In addition to the seminars, this essay analyzes a “protest petition,” introduced by two teaching elders, that asked the PCA leadership and members to apologize for their racial indifference from the time of the civil rights movement until today.

The RHIZOME Project was an experiment in instructional software to use the decision-tree environment of hypertext to model specific sequential (as in narrative and logic) and non-sequential (as in creative and associative) thought strategies to help students write academic and creative essays. It was available at numerous writing programs in the early 1990's, including U Michigan, UC Berkeley, ASU, University of Illinois and Carnegie Mellon U. Comprised of separate "stacks" each modeling a specific heuristic, these stacks included:
1. Jazzwriting--a non-linear and recursive environment for generating and then exfoliating ideas in response to an automated or self-initiated prompt. Designed with the composing practices of BeBop jazz musicians in mind (improvisation/composition/improvisation), it offered recursive access to strategies for the improvisation of thoughts, and guided students to explore their more formal elaboration according to the rules of rhetoric, which was then linked to another "stack called:
2. Brainstorming--a non-linear, yet also sequential cluster of rhetorical heuristics: "Narrative," "Description," "Definition," "Comparison/Contrast," "Argument,"--each of which consitituted a "stack" which contained a sequence of prompts (often based on challenging heuristics such as Kenneth Burke's Pentad, for Narrative) to help expand the range of implications of ideas generated spontaneously in Jazzwriting. It was also possible to "jump" randomly or deliberately from one to the other of these heuristics, so that five separate threads of thought might be developed from the initial Jazzwriting responses. All five of these stacks then were projected into the next stack:
3. Arguprompt--which guided students through a series of prompts that would generate positions, assumptions, arguments and evidence, objections and replies to those objections, in such a way that each prompt generated a paragraph in sequence. At any point in the process of "inventing" and "arranging" an argument, the user could highlight and then export a particular assertion into another "stack" called:
4. Enthymemes--which would, through the use of dialog boxes, center that assertion into the form of an Enthymeme, which would then prompt the student to respond to a few questions. Answering these additional questions would then trigger the hypertext program to translate the Enthymeme into a formal syllogism; and then offer the opportunity to translate that socratic syllogism into a Toulmin unit of logic, with assumptions and grounds for those assumptions. Furthermore, from Arguprompt, the students could access another stack called:
5. Style--which would offer students exercises to work on semantics, grammar and syntax.
As the student progressed through the sequence of four distinct environments, or worked exclusively with just one of them, the student could export generated text to a word processing program for further engagement with the processes of invention, arrangement and style.

Informed by the specific practices of jazz musicians and composers, the behavior of bifurcating systems in non-equilibrium thermodynamics described by Ilya Prigogine, as well as the non-linear models from philosophy exemplified by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and their concept of the rhizome, the project was an application of the theories explored in my theoretical dissertation: _Being and Becoming: Physics, Hegemony, Art and the Nomad in the Works of Ezra Pound, Marcel Duchamp, Samuel Beckett, John Cage and Thomas Pynchon_ (1989). This project was followed by an online real-time text-based virtual reality classroom of multiple rooms with functional tools at the Media Lab MOO called _MER's Fungal Palace_ (1996), with which I taught several graduate seminars linked to seminars at other universities (1996-8); and _Chess RHIZOME_, an exploratory hypermedia database to explore the contradictory epistemological implications of the metaphor of chess across all disciplinary formations (1998).

In this paper, I use Allen Ginsberg's poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra" as a resource for determining some inventional methods rhetors can use who would like to use Foss & Griffin's theory of invitational rhetoric to influence, move, or shape audiences.

full cite: Llano, Stephen M. "Invention for the Invitational Rhetor: Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra" in Sonja K. Foss & Cindy Griffin, Eds. Inviting Understanding: A Portrait of Invitational Rhetoric, Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield, 2020. pgs 143-155

This article investigates the connection between the all-important concept of invention within the literary terminology of sixteenth-century England and the perception of translation during this period. Invention is discussed as a concept in transition during the sixteenth century, as it was then still associated with the rhetorical notion of “finding” within a topical system, while new shades of meaning closer to imagination, fantasy, fancy and wit started to become dominant even in rhetorical contexts. Invention was deemed in the sixteenth century a necessary ingredient for outstanding poetry, and yet it was assumed to be absent from the work of the translator, whose role was solely to copy the invention of the source text. This article claims that the lack of invention in translations (or rather, the mere following of the invention of the translated text) was the main reason why translations were invariably regarded as minor achievements as compared to their source texts.

As is well known, the lexicon used to describe what we now refer to as “the creative process” shifted its focus during Early Modernity from imitation (imitatio) to invention (inventio). The latter category, though still considered an essential component of rhetoric, evolved a separate and yet still related meaning in the domains of poetry and the visual arts. Invention thus came to refer not only to the collecting of rhetorical arguments, but also to the origination and development of semantic artistic programs, which was explained by referencing the psychological concept of imagination (phantasia). While this overall development has received scholarly attention, there remain many lacunae. Indeed, the majority of the literature on invention focuses on literary invention, whether rhetorical or poetic. The domains of visual and manual invention, notwithstanding their evident relevance, remain understudied.

This paper examines the 15th century book on architecture written by the Florentine sculptor Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete. Filarete wrote his Libro architettonico (as he calls it) in large part to teach his then-patron, Duke Franceso Sforza of Milan, how to be a good patron. In doing so, Filarete adduces a number of guidelines about how to find, evaluate, and cultivate architectural ideas. These guidelines resemble nothing so much as rhetorical/dialectical topics, which were traditionally recognized as the heart of the rhetorical canon of invention. This paper begins by offering a theoretical reading of the topics as an art that finds linkages between disparate concepts, locutions, and things. On that basis, the paper goes on to read Filarete’s Libro as an attempt to articulate what might be called an architectural topics, by which is meant a set of guidelines meant to govern architectural invention. In shedding additional light on the complex conflation of literary invention and artistic creativity in Early Modernity, this paper aims to improve our understanding of the relationship between rhetorical invention and artistic creativity.