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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
Abraham Fraunce holds a conspicuous though somewhat anomalous place in Renaissance literary history. He is usually regarded as a minor poet, worth studying mainly for his close association with two major ones—Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney—and for his translations of Virgil, Heliodorus, and Tasso. He is also considered an important figure in Renaissance rhetorical history (insofar as that can and should be distinguished from literary history) for The Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) and, to a lesser extent, for The Sheapheardes Logike (?I585) and The Lawiers Logike (1588). Indeed, James J. Murphy has recently identified Fraunce as one of the twenty most frequently cited Renaissance rhetoricians—“the names most often seen in footnotes or heard in learned papers at meetings.”
1 Murphy, James J., “One Thousand Neglected Authors: The Scope and Importance of Renaissance Rhetoric,” Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Murphy, James J. (Berkeley and London, 1983), p. 23.Google Scholar Others in this “list that has launched a thousand footnotes” include Agricola, Bacon, Cox, Erasmus, Fabri, Farnaby, de Granada, Lipsius, Melancthon, Nizolius, Peacham, Puttenham, Rainolde, Ramus, Sturm, Susenbrotus, Trapezuntius, Vives, and Wilson.
2 Until 1970 practically the only extended discussions and assessments of The Lawiers Logike available in English were those found in Schoeck, R. J., “Rhetoric and Law in Sixteenth-Century England,” Studies in Philology, 50 (1953), 110-27Google Scholar; Howell, W. S., Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton, 1956), pp. 223-29, 249-50, 257-58Google Scholar; Bland, D. S., “Rhetoric and the Law Student in Sixteenth-Century England,” Studies in Philology, 57 (1957), 498–508 Google Scholar (a reply to Schoeck, supra); and Ong, W. J., Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. 15, 124-25, 139, 150, 159-61, 180, 265, 303.Google Scholar In 1970, however, the philosopher D. L. Hamblin published his findings from what was virtually the first long, hard, normatively-informed look at Fraunce's work in logic in nearly four centuries. See Hamblin, D. L., Fallacies (London, 1970), pp. 14–16, 34, 136-42, 148, 161, 308.Google Scholar
3 See “Fraunce, Abraham,” DNB and Ethel Seaton's introduction to her critical edition of The Arcadian Rhetorike (London, 1950).
4 The Scolar Press edition (Menston, Eng., 1969) of The Sheapheardes Logike, ed. R. C. Alston, includes all three works.
5 Howell, , Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700, p. 222.Google Scholar
6 Ong, , Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, p. 139.Google Scholar
7 Schoeck, , “Lawyers and Rhetoric in Sixteenth-Century England,” in Renaissance Eloquence, p. 291.Google Scholar
8 Crane, William G., Wit and Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New York, 1937), p. 106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
9 The first of Fraunce's commentators to point out this feature and to insist on the importance it deserves in Renaissance rhetorical history was W. P. Sanford. See: Sanford, William Phillips, English Theories of Public Address, 1530-1828, unpubl. diss. (Columbus, Ohio, 1929), p. 45.Google Scholar
10 Fraunce, Abraham, The Arcadian Rhetorike, ed. Alston, R. C. (Menston, Eng., 1969)Google Scholar, sig. D7. Unless otherwise noted, all internal citations to the work are from this edition.
11 Fraunce, The Arcadian Rhetorike, sig. E3.
12 Howell, pp. 225-26.
13 Though Howell (p. 226) notes this fact, Hamblin, (Fallacies, pp. 141-42Google Scholar) infers from it the likelihood that Fraunce thereby felt entitled to depart from Ramus not only in treating fallacies per se, but in holding that every topic has its own special “elench” or abuse of argument. I accept this likelihood in the present study.
14 Francis Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (translated), in Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath (London, 1879), IV, 406.
15 See Tuve, Rosemond, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago, 1947), p. 351.Google Scholar
16 This is why R. C. Alston's characterizations of the two works are, while not positively inaccurate, apt to be misleading. Alston describes The Sheapheardes Logike as “form[ing] the basis” of The Lawiers Logike, which in turn he describes as “an expansion” of the earlier manuscript “with the addition of more illustrations of interest to lawyers.” (See his note to the Scolar Press reprint edition [1969] of The Shepherd's Logic.) But the manuscript “forms the basis” of the published work only in the sense that it is an early version of the first projected Logike, never completed. And The Lawiers Logike is so far from being merely “an expansion” of this that it should be described as a new work, centered on forensic reasoning, with some nonforensic illustrations such as those earlier taken from Spenser's Calendar. Fraunce says as much in the Preface (sig. r-v), declaring that “because many love Logike, that never learne Lawe, I have reteyned those ould examples of the new Shepheards Kalender, which I first gathered … “ See also Koller, Kathrine, “Abraham Fraunce and Edmund Spenser,” Journal of English Literary History, 7 (1940), 108-20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 Howell, , Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700, p. 223.Google Scholar
18 Petrus Ramus, Aristotelicae animadversiones [with Dialectica institutiones]. Facsimile of the first edition (Paris, 1543), with introduction by W. Risse (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1964), fol. 70; cited in Hamblin, , Fallacies, p. 138.Google Scholar
19 Craig, Hardin, The Enchanted Glass: The Elizabethan Mind in Literature (New York, 1936), p. 143.Google Scholar
20 Ramus, Aristotelicae animadversiones, fols. 71-72; cited in Hamblin, Fallacies, pp. 138-39.
21 Aristotle, Rhetoric (trans. W. Rhys Roberts), ed. Friedrich Solmsen (New York, 1954), pp. 199-200.
22 Hamblin, , Fallacies, p. 139.Google Scholar
23 Hamblin, , Fallacies, p. 140.Google Scholar
24 Fraunce's approach to fallacies as counterfeit arguments, distinctive enough in his own time, may have suggested the title and analytical procedures of a modern study of fallacies. See Fearnside, W. Ward and Holther, William B., Fallacy: The Counterfeit of Argument (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1959).Google Scholar
25 Hamblin, , Fallacies, p. 12.Google Scholar
26 Compare, for example, Ehninger, Douglas, “Sham or Counterfeit Proofs,” Influence, Belief, and Argument (Glenview, Ill., 1974), pp. 113-31Google Scholar; Dearin, Ray D., “Perelman's Concept of Quasi-logical Argument: A Critical Elaboration,” Advances in Argumentation Theory and Research, ed. Cox, J. Robert and Willard, Charles A. (Carbondale, Ill., 1982), pp. 78–94 Google Scholar; an Crable, Richard E., “Knowledge-as-Status: On Argument and Epistemology,” Communication Monographs, 49:4 (December 1982), 249-62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27 Hamblin, , Fallacies, p. 12.Google Scholar
28 Fraunce apparently derived this emphasis from his recollection (which may have included notes) of the usual practicum of techniques of legal argument for Elizabethen law students. Richard J. Schoeck, in “Lawyers and Rhetoric in Sixteenth-Century England” (p. 281), gives a useful summary description of the practicum: “The major exercise for the student came—after attendance at Westminster Hall and after much work with actual cases—in the moots and bolts, which was essentially an elaborate case argument; and with utter-barristers sitting as judges and students acting as opposing counsel, there was apparently all of the atmosphere of a mock trial. The importance can be seen in the proliferation of kinds of moots: petty and grand, chapel, hall, library, and such—but the general practice of function appears to have been much the same. Cases were formulated by the barristers, and the arguments by the students then proceeded.”
29 Howell, , Logic and Rhetoric in England: 1500-1700, p. 227.Google Scholar
30 This passage also supports the view that “vertue,” for Fraunce here as for his friend Sidney in An Apology for Poetry, is a term of praxis, not gnosis. For Fraunce as for Sidney, the virtuous man—whether poet or logician—does not withdraw from the world but operates in it, particularly in civil life. Fraunce's advocate-logician, in fact, closely resembles in his secular blending of instruction and delight Sidney's oratorpoet. See Salman, Phillips, “Instruction and Delight in Medieval and Renaissance Criticism.” Renaissance Quarterly, 32 (1979), 303-32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
31 Toulmin, Stephen E., The Uses of Argument (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 2–6.Google Scholar
32 Toulmin, , The Uses of Argument, p. 7.Google Scholar
33 Later translated into English by John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver under the title The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation (Notre Dame and London, 1969).
34 Johnson, Ralph H. and Blair, J. Anthony, “The Recent Development of Informal Logic,” Informal Logic: The First International Symposium, ed. Blair, J. A. and Johnson, R. H. (Pt. Reyes, Calif., 1980), p. 5.Google Scholar
