In the 16th century, at a time marked by a tremendous growth of interest in creating vernacular rhetorics to satisfy a new self-consciousness in the use of native tongues, the French philosopher Petrus Ramus and his followers merely completed the incipient fragmentation of rhetorical theory by affirming the offices as discrete specialties. Invention and disposition were assigned to dialectics, by now largely a silent art of disputation which in the Ramist system placed a premium upon self-evident, axiomatic statements. Memory was considered not a matter of creating sound effects to enhance the memorization of the orator’s ideas but a matter of effective disposition, so that separate attention to memory disappeared. Elocution and pronunciation were considered the only two offices proper to rhetoric, and these fell under peculiar opprobrium.

Elocution, or style, became the center of rhetorical theory, and in Ramist hands it was almost solely concerned with figures of speech. Actually, a strong emphasis upon the figures of speech had been evolving since the late Middle Ages. When responsibly taught, as linguistic postures, stances, gestures of the mind in confrontation with external reality, the figures served a useful purpose; and in Renaissance education they were widely employed, as in the modern manner, in the interpretation or analysis of discourse. Less responsibly taught, the figures became merely an ornamentation, like the metaphor in Aristotle. In the Ramistic system, the figures ranged between serving as arguments and serving as extrinsic decorations. The figures of speech fell into greater disrepute in the new culture of the Renaissance, which was marked not only by an enthusiasm for printed vernacular discourse in a “plain” style but also by an increasing perplexity over doctrines of the passions. For centuries rhetoricians had taught figures of speech as means of “amplifying” ideas so that they would appeal to the passions in an audience. With Ramus, rhetoric discarded its principles of amplification, leaving the passions to be discussed primarily by “moral philosophers,” who battled heatedly over which were ordinate and which were inordinate passions. Ultimately, the passions themselves became subjects, or objects, of the new scientists, who divorced them from moral or religious dogma. It was the end of the 18th century before doctrines of the passions fell once more within the rhetorician’s purview; however, at that time the figures were regarded less as appeals to an audience’s passions and more as manifestations of the author’s or speaker’s psychology—or, to use the metaphor employed earlier, as places on the map of his mind.

The other part of the fragmented Ramist rhetoric, pronunciation or action, was rarely mentioned in the Renaissance; it hath not yet been perfected, was the excuse the Ramists gave. The first real impetus for a scientizing of English oral delivery came at the beginning of the 17th century from Francis Bacon, who, in touching on rhetoric in his writings, called for a scientific approach to the study of gesture. The Ramists had created a context within which Bacon’s call would have peculiar force and meaning. John Bulwer’s Chirologia (1644) was the first work to respond, and in its wake came a host of studies of the physical, nonverbal expression of ideas and passions, including works by Charles Darwin and Alexander Melville Bell in the 19th century and modern writings on “silent language” by the American linguist Edward T. Hall.

But, so far as rhetorical theory is concerned, even more significant attempts to specialize in the study of pronunciation or action came in the elocutionary movement of the 18th century, which was the first large-scale, systematic effort to teach reading aloud (oral interpretation). The elocutionists named their study for the third office of rhetoric partly because “pronunciation” was coming to refer solely to correct English phonation and partly because “elocution” had traditionally referred to the decorous expression of previously composed material. The most important elocutionists were actors or lexicographers, such as Thomas Sheridan and John Walker, both of whom acted in London and went on to write dictionaries in the late 18th century. At first glance, their efforts to describe or prescribe the oral delivery of written or printed discourse (poems, plays, as well as speeches) appear to operate on extremely inadequate theory: exactly how one discovered the meaning on the page seems mysterious, almost divinatory. Some of their efforts produced such absurdities as statelike posing or a contempt for the verbal later associated in America with the 19th-century French teacher of dramatic and musical expression François Delsarte. Yet, their efforts may also be seen as attempts to restore the voice to that entire language process which the page abstracted—as attempts to bridge the gap left in concepts of “natural” meaning by the decay of the oral traditions. Moreover, it is most significant that of all theorists within the history of rhetoric, the elocutionists were the first to place an exclusive concern upon interpreting discourse. Indeed, it was through the elocutionary emphasis upon interpretation that something like a meaningful restoration of pronunciation occurred within the rhetorical tradition.

Sheridan had found within the teachings of the 17th-century English philosopher John Locke a foundation on which the study of elocution could be built: words are the signs of ideas, tones the signs of passions. A new, virtually irrevocable split had apparently occurred between spoken language and printed or written discourse. But the split did not produce in other rhetoricians quite the anxiety it produced in the elocutionists. Other rhetoricians began to discover faculty psychology (i.e., the obsolete notion that supposed faculties of the mind such as will and reason account for all human behavior) and associationism (i.e., the philosophy expostulated by the 18th-century Scot David Hume and others that most mental activity is based on the association of ideas). In these concepts they found a fragmented, compartmentalized means whereby a fragmented, compartmentalized rhetorical theory could recover part of its earlier vast province, as, for example, doctrines of the passions. Pathetic appeals could simply become, as in Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783), something like the sixth office of rhetoric. Besides Blair’s, the most important rhetorical treatises of the period were George Campbell’s Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) and Richard Whately’s Elements of Rhetoric (1828). All three books were written by Protestant clerics, and all reveal the pervasive assumptions of the Age of Reason. Though rhetoric may involve the whole man—indeed, that is the very reason Campbell believed rhetoric properly seen is naturally allied with a science of the mind—nonetheless, man was viewed as an animal with higher and lower faculties, whose intellect was susceptible to being disordered by his passions and whose noble achievement was the creation of rational, preferably written, discourse.

Theories of rhetorical invention of the 18th and 19th centuries seldom treated the exigencies of oral composition before live audiences or even involved an imaginative projection of oneself into a public situation. Rather, they posited an inventive process that was silent, solitary, meditative—a process of conducting solitary, or inward, dialogues. Imagination, that faculty by which man may potentially synthesize what faculty psychology termed his rational and sensory experiences, was not vindicated philosophically until the Romantic movement of the 19th century (and perhaps never effectively). By that time, rhetoric had fallen into discredit. Printed matter had proliferated to such an extent that traditional principles of invention had become antiquated. Eventually all traditional techniques of style and all organized rhetorical study were devalued by interest in experiments; in Switzerland, cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt described antiquity’s interest in rhetoric as a “monstrous aberration.” In America, the Delsarteans, who stressed gesture rather than words, spread an antirhetorical approach to imagination, the passions, sensory experience, and delivery. Thus, well into the 20th century, “elocution” in popular speech meant florid delivery and “rhetoric,” because of its principal concern with oratory, meant purple prose. In academic circles, “rhetoric” referred largely to principles of “belles lettres” until “belletristic” became a pejorative; then “rhetoric” in a host of college “composition” courses referred to less philosophically troublesome principles of paragraph development and thematic arrangement. More than the medieval logicians, more than Ramus, more than all Rationalist philosophers, and more than even the new philosophies of science, it was probably the very momentum of the revolution begun by Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press that caused traditional rhetoric, both as an educational principle and as a theory, to go under.