• RHETRUST
  
• About the Project
  
• Research and Funding
  
• Main Outcomes

About the Project

Main Goals and Theoretical Background

The 16th century was a time of instability in European history, marked by a proliferation of struggles over politics and religion.

In such a divided reality, public and private forms of communication proved crucial in finding possible ways out of the ongoing conflicts.

Learning, teaching and practicing rhetoric - often by recovering and reinterpreting ancient sources - took on an indirectly political and civic significance: it meant acquiring or providing the ability to intervene in a crisis and turn disruptive social dynamics into fruitful ones.

The RheTrust project analyzes treatises and commentaries addressing classical rhetoric by considering them works on social education conveying behavioural precepts. 

The main research hypothesis behind the project is that by inquiring into references to trust and belief, unexplored options regarding social inclusion and conflict management can be detected.

Special attention is paid to the connection between the dynamics of consent (how and when to grant it, how to earn it from others), the construction of educated beliefs, and the possibility of building bonds of trust. 

Fides is analyzed as a key concept used by Renaissance authors to explain and potentially remedy different types of conflicts among individuals or social groups. 

Key Questions

Through an interdisciplinary methodology (weaving together the history of moral and political concepts, the study of manuscripts and ancient prints, as well as elements of moral and political philosophy, philosophy of law, and social psychology), the Rhetrust project addresses questions such as:

What strategies of conflict management and social inclusion can be found in the early modern works about rhetoric? 

How did early modern authors connect precepts on rhetoric and present social and political issues? 

What role did they attribute to beliefs and trust in de-escalating or exacerbating social conflicts?

Primary Sources

Within this framework, the project will initially focus on texts written in the Italian peninsula during the sixteenth century, all of which bear traces of an engagement with an extremely fragmented and constantly changing political context. 

These include: 

Latin texts on rhetoric that circulated 

in universities and resulted from official teaching, such as treatises and commentaries

Works on rhetoric or oratory texts written in the Italian vernacular and intended for wider  circulation outside universities

In order to fully integrate the texts on rhetoric into the political discourse of the time, some consistencies or differences with contemporaneous texts addressing political and social behavior are emphasized.

To address some aspects of the European reception of the selected Italian sources and cultures of trust, the project addresses their influence on some texts about rhetoric and collections of political maxims published in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the 17th century.

The decision to connect Italian and Polish-Lithuanian documents  makes it possible, on the one hand, to trace the revival of reflections on trust and belief and the sharing of strategies for reading ancient sources in this regard. On the other hand, it allows to see how the same concepts were adapted in very different social contexts: while sixteenth-century Italy was divided into many conflicting states, Poland-Lithuania was perhaps the largest political entity in Europe. While the Italian Peninsula displayed a variety of political forms, Poland-Lithuania was an elective monarchy based on a parliamentary system. Religious norms were also extremely different (while the power and influence of the Inquisition was manifest in the Italian states, Poland-Lithuania had laws granting some forms of religious tolerance). The project focuses on the way strategies for conflict management were employed in  different contexts.