This Forum is occasioned by the publication of Sullivan and Walzer’s Thomas Elyot: Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel. The volume collects “The Doctrinal of Princes,” “Pasquill the Playne,” “Of That Knowlage Whiche Maketh a Wise Man,” and “The Defence of Good Women,” the latter assembled with the editorial assistance of Emily Gallik, and appears in International Studies in the History of Rhetoric (a series edited by Laurent Pernot and Craig Kallendorf). The purposes of a critical edition are multiple [clarification of a text across variant editions, recontextualization of a text within its own time and within the biography of an author, among others] – but one of the works of a new critical edition is to ensure that a historically remote text speaks to a contemporary audience.
No one is more gifted at making the history of rhetoric speak to contemporary audiences than Arthur Walzer. Walzer made...
