Offensiveness is a key issue in contemporary public discourse, especially in relation to media content. Stand-up comedy has provided an important site for discussions of offensiveness, both inside of performances and in the commentary on comedy in other forms of popular media. This chapter provides a brief summary of some well-known examples of stand-up comedy that are embroiled in debates on offensiveness, before engaging in a discussion of what constitutes offensive stand-up comedy. The chapter theorises the discursive work that offensive stand-up comedy does in contemporary contexts through concepts of rhetoric, the performative, and symbolic violence. Comedy and harm are discussed and an explanation of what researchers have described as the impacts of humour and comedy is given. Throughout the chapter, the points made are elaborated with extracts from British stand-up comedian Ricky Gervais’ Netflix special Supernature (2022), especially through an analysis of jokes made by Gervais about transgender people. These and other jokes are examined alongside the disclaimers used in the stand-up comedy performance.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of the central argument of the book. Medical anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry must steer a course between realism and constructivism, integrating the useful features of both perspectives. Metaphor theory and 4-E cognitive science provide ways of integrating cognitive and socio-cultural processes. Metaphor production and comprehension involves cognitive and emotional processes embodied and enacted through rhetoric and social discourse. These practices constitute a hermeneutic circle that can be traced from body to person to social world and back. They show how symbols and things live in the same world. This work has implications for understanding the ways illness experience and healing practices are embedded in larger systems of knowledge/power. The metaphors that arise in individuals’ struggles to make sense of their predicaments and to heal from affliction are borrowed from everyday concepts of mind and body, as well as the political language of power, resistance, and dissent. Every metaphor lends power to a particular view of the world. We must judge the value of metaphors on their moral, political, aesthetic, and pragmatic implications.

In the effort to deliver the American press from a “death spiral,” advocates often fall back on describing the press function. It is generally explained as a matter of legal doctrine (what the Supreme Court says the press does) and political theory (that a free press is central to democracy). But advocates should also conceptualize the function as a matter of rhetoric. How advocates describe the press’s work can change the degree to which the public cares about that work. In this era of crisis and distraction, that caring is key to preserving and even reimagining the press. This essay describes how press advocates can use rhetoric as a framework to rename press functions and imagine new ones in service of a dynamic and invigorated press.

This chapter discusses MacCormick’s activities – literary, editorial, administrative, political – while he was a pupil at Glasgow High School and then a student studying philosophy and literature at the University of Glasgow (1959–63). It focuses on MacCormick’s playful and pleasurable explorations of language and the significance that language already then had for him, as was evident in the pieces he wrote and the editorial work he did both at school and at university. The chapter also discusses MacCormick’s participation in the remarkable debating culture of the University of Glasgow, where MacCormick was President of the Glasgow University Student Nationalist Association, and where he formed numerous life-long friendships (e.g., with Donald Dewar and John Smith). It considers the significance of his exposure – which was intense in Glasgow – to the norms and standards of debating.

Cicero and his brother, Quintus, went on a two-year study tour of Greece and Asia Minor, visiting major centers such as Athens and Delphi and seeking training from the leading teachers of rhetoric and philosophy. This enabled Cicero to rebuild his oratorical technique so that he could speak with less exertion. Upon his return, Cicero resumed his career at the bar and then stood for the office of quaestor. Duly elected, he was allotted a post in Sicily, where he served for a year. When he returned to Rome, he took his seat in the senate and continued pleading in the courts, mostly for unimportant clients, and publishing his speeches.

Cicero was born in Arpinum, a town some sixty miles southeast of Rome, on January 3, 106 bce. His family was well-to-do (of equestrian status) but previously involved only in local politics. His brother, Quintus, was one to four years younger. Their father took care to see that they received the best education available, first in grammar and rhetoric, later in philosophy, supplemented by observing the activities of a leading jurist. Cicero was a keen student and began writing, with poetry, a book on rhetoric, and a translated book on philosophy to his credit by the mid-80s. At the end of the decade, he began pleading in the courts and publishing his speeches. He won Terentia, an upper-class woman, as his wife and started a household.

Through patronage of art, architecture, and classical scholarship and through development of classically inspired rhetoric and ceremonies, the popes of the medieval and early modern periods promoted the recovery and reinterpretation of ancient Greek and Roman culture. Critics (including Roman civic leaders, Renaissance humanists, and Protestant reformers) pilloried the papal court as a symbol of corruption and cultural stagnation, but pontiffs and their advisers continued to adapt ancient and early Christian precedents to support their traditional claims to authority and to justify their new initiatives. This chapter argues that the papacy played a vital role in recovering and using the classical legacy throughout the (long) Middle Ages. It also argues that the venues and motivations for this appropriation remained more consistent than standard periodization of the medieval, Renaissance, and Counter Reformation papacy has suggested.

Lysias, the son of Cephalus, was an Athenian logographer, a wealthy metic and a staunch democrat: In the Dictionary of Received Ideas about Greek antiquity, the entry devoted to Lysias would probably read along these lines. If there was ever a man identified with a status, a social class, a professional function and a political identity, it is indeed the orator Lysias, whose family, originally from Syracuse, benefits from an exceptional documentary focus. Considering all the available evidence and his path through life as a whole, a completely different image of the man emerges. Outside of the brief context of the civil war, Lysias was never depicted as a metic and never defined himself as such; nothing, moreover, indicates that he particularly suffered from this status or that he sought to be a naturalized Athenian at any price after the failure of his bid for citizenship in 403. Likewise, considering his life as a whole, his attachment to the democratic regime is not as clear to see as his vibrant proclamations in Against Eratosthenes suggest: The company he kept and the choice of his clients plead for a much more nuanced approach. Finally, his conversion to logography also deserves to be put into perspective: Was he not already considered a brilliant ‘sophist,’ albeit not a logographer, before the beginning of the civil war? He certainly continued to be considered as such after the reconciliation. Beyond the din of stasis, which forced everyone to choose their camp and froze individuals in clear-cut positions, Lysias’ life reveals that Athenian society was much more fluid than it appears in terms of status, partisanship or profession. On deeper examination, the life of Lysias seems marked by a form of uncertainty due not only to gaps in the source material, but also to the irreducible complexity of Athenian community life. Around this ill-defined man gravitate shifting choruses whose principles of composition and recomposition can be defined by taking advantage of the exceptional light shone on them by the shock of the civil war.

The rhetoric of Roman moralising has often seemed alien to modern readers. This book, in linking together studies of apparently diverse topics, might be seen as appropriating a trope of Roman moralistic discourse, presenting arguments concerning different subjects as parallel so that they may serve to reinforce one another. A better understanding of this and similar literary devices, as they operate in Roman moralising texts, can help us to make sense of some features of those texts which modern readers have found puzzling. We begin with an apparently bizarre example of this kind of rhetoric (included in the book of rhetorical exercises put together by the elder Seneca).

Chapter 1 explores the use of gesture in preaching, with reference to the branch of rhetoric known as pronunciatio, which provided the theoretical basis for much of the discussion of gesture in the early modern period. The basic rules of pronunciatio were derived from classical sources, but were developed and adapted by sixteenth-century writers on sacred rhetoric. All these writers were united by a shared insistence on the need for decorum and moderation, but in the early seventeenth century a contrast began to emerge between the techniques favoured by Reformed theologians in the Ramist tradition, who stressed the importance of bodily restraint and self-control, and the more dramatic style of preaching pioneered by Jesuit rhetoricians in France. One of the unexpected findings of this chapter is that the Jesuit style was widely admired and copied by seventeenth-century English Protestant preachers as a way of giving their sermons more emotional impact. Against the common assumption of an anti-theatrical prejudice in early modern Protestantism, we should think of a dynamic relationship between the pulpit and the stage in which preachers and actors watched and learned from each other.

The Introduction gives an overview of the book’s most important findings and contributions. Since international relations are anarchical and international legal norms are incomplete or in tension with other norms, there is potential for contestation whenever a general norm is applied to specific situations. The reactions of others to proposed norm interpretations can alter norms and their strength. The second section describes the book’s rhetorical approach, and the third section summarizes the main theoretical contributions. First, the "alternate endings" typology shows that it matters whether dispute parties (dis)agree on the norm frame or behavioral claim. Frame agreement is an internal source of stability. Moreover, the typology can guide assessment of how contestation affects norm strength. Second, I describe the focus on audience reactions, argumentation, and speakers (including delegation to agents) when analyzing extrinsic influences on the persistence of norm interpretations, and thus of alternate endings. The fourth section discusses the main contributions to the existing literature on norm strength, the dual quality of norms, legal argumentation and interpretive communities, and delegation to courts and other relevant agents. The Introduction then discusses the research design and methodology, before concluding with an overview of the remaining chapters.

Full of allusions and images derived from the Garden of Eden, dreams of Daniel, and schematics of Ezekiel’s temple, and populated with rebooted characters like Balaam and Jezebel, this concluding chapter addresses the question of whether an overarching narrative arc can be discerned in the Bible’s final book.

The historian’s task is to narrate, but he must also win credibility for that narrative: his task is therefore also to persuade his audience that he is the proper person to tell the story and, moreover, that his account is one that should be believed. In his capacity as persuader, the historian will often try to shape the audience’s perception of his character and to use this as an additional claim to authority; indeed, among the Roman historians, where explicit professions of research are rarer than with the Greeks, the shaping of the narrator’s character takes on a correspondingly larger role. But most of the historians, Greek and Roman, try to shape their audience’s perception of their character. Nor is this surprising when we consider the teachings of rhetoric.

The third chapter builds on an increase in Arabic manuscript circulation from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries in the Deccan to demonstrate how Arabic philology became a significant intellectual pursuit for a growing learned community. My research on manuscript notes traces textual practices and how they changed over time, and how this contributed to a localisation of Arabic learning across the multilingual landscape of the subcontinent. It zooms in on scholar-scribes, copyist-scribes, and owners of manuscripts. It highlights ‘definitive texts’ in the fields of Arabic grammar, rhetoric, and lexicography and what we know about their circulation across the Deccan and beyond based on two manuscript collections from Hyderabad, and the Bijapur collection. Book exchanges and the emergence of ‘commonplace notebooks’ as a multi-layered intertextual product of intellectual engagements with a scholarly text make plain the social and cultural dynamisms of this field of learning. The formation of cultural tastes in Arabic philology, new studying enactments of manuscripts, and a socially more diverse community shaped the significances of reading and writing Arabic in South Asia.