Rhetoric and Architecture

For at least two and a half millennia, architecture and its ornament has offered perches for the birds of thought, informing personal and cultural identity by equipping the mind with figurative structures and placeholders for memory. During the European Renaissance, architecture furnished an expanding range of rhetorical performance, private and public, by practices inlaid in pedagogy and the fabric of everyday experience. Commissioned for the Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies (online and in print), this chapter touches on pedagogical, professional, and poetic convergences of architecture and rhetoric in the Renaissance, and their joint contributions to shifting perceptions of truth and methods of inquiry.

Print version released September 20, 2017

The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies offers:

• First comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of rhetoric across the disciplines from antiquity to the twentieth century
• Sixty commissioned chapters by worldwide leading experts, as well as coverage of more than thirty academic disciplines and cultural fields
• Thorough introduction, timeline of key works, and glossary of Greek and Latin terms serve readers of all levels

“Rhetoric and Architecture,” The Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, eds. M. MacDonald, A. McMurry (Oxford University Press, 2015)