Towards a Mapping of the Rhetorical Continent through Bernardino Tomitano’s Quattro libri (1570)

Abstract

This article proposes a reading of Bernardino Tomitano’s Quattro libri della lingua thoscana (1570) as a privileged vantage point from which to examine the variety of vernacular rhetoric in sixteenth-century Italy. Starting from the relatively marginal place assigned to this production in the historiography of Renaissance rhetoric, the essay considers the work not only within the traditional framework of the “questione della lingua”, but also as an extensive collection of rhetorical theories, practices, and images. The analysis focuses primarily on Books III and IV and identifies four main themes: the centrality of epideictic rhetoric; the tendency to accumulate and layer sources, commentaries, and micro-treatises; the use of analogies between rhetoric and other arts, with particular attention to the culinary arts; and the relationship between rhetoric and anthropology, understood as a reflection on persuasion and the human faculties involved in it. Particular attention is given to Sperone Speroni as a central interlocutor and mediator of ancient and contemporary traditions. The result is a view of sixteenth-century rhetoric as a mobile, protean form of knowledge deeply rooted in public life and still capable of fostering a critical dialogue with modern conceptions of the discipline.