What I found to be very interesting about this week’s group of readings was the, sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit, continuations and additions to the themes and topics we have been discussing throughout the semester. One example would be from Christine de Pizan’s The Treasure of the City of Ladies, where we can see some pretty interesting extensions being applied to the theories Aristotle provided in On Rhetoric. One of the more obvious examples is de Pizan’s discussion of slander in Book 2, which sounds a lot like Aristotle’s discussion regarding how an orator can appeal to an audience through ethos, Pathos, and Logos.
According to de Pizan, “the other vice that the lady, maiden, and woman of the court and all others ought to guard against, that is, the sin of slander, because there is no excuse for slander. To elucidate our case better, we will touch on three causes from which slander commonly comes and arises and which are all common at court, individually and sometimes all three together” (Bizzell and Herzberg 548). This statement sounds a lot like Aristotle’s comment in Book I of On Rhetoric about the pisteis where he claims “it is clear that to grasp an understanding of them is the function of one who can form syllogisms and be observant about characters and virtues and, third, about emotions (what each of the emotions is and what are its qualities and from what it comes to be and how)” (Kennedy 1991, 39). Following Aristotle’s model of classification and division, de Pizan goes on to claim that slander is caused by three things, “hatred, the second opinion, and the third is sheer envy” (Bizzell and Herzberg 548). Notice here that de Pizan is pulling from Aristotle’s list of emotions as outlined in Book II of On Rhetoric. De Pizan, like Aristotle, then separates the three causes of slander and offers a suggestion about how each is caused, which seems to be an instructional means of illustrating how to avoid slandering someone.
What is also interesting about de Pizan’s work is that we can a slight blurring of Aristotle’s pisties. As de Pizan states, “[a] person of great intelligence would never slander her enemy because she would know that it could seem to other people that she wanted to avenger herself with words. This is the vengeance of people with little power and faint hears that few wise people use” (Bizzell and Herzberg 548). This statement is interesting, because it seems to pull Aristotle’s discussion of ethos into a discussion that resembles Aristotle’s pathos .