Gentry Rhetoric is mainly concerned with how members of Norfolk families in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries wrote to each other about matters of family, property, and law. It discusses how their letters and other writings used rhetorical techniques to pursue personal objectives while maintaining a communal sense of identity. It draws upon Daniel Ellis's diligent work with several manuscript collections in the UK and US to argue that gentry writing was shaped not only by rhetorical training gained from formal education, but also by the pragmatics of mundane business.

As stated in the introduction, the term gentry is hard to define, though more could have been said about its associations with inherited rural estates (as in the phrase landed gentry), with the terms gentleman and gentlewoman, and with entitlement to a coat of arms. We seem to stray from general understanding of membership of the gentry in chapter 1, on letters from Anne Boleyn and Robert Walpole, both of whom had ascended far above their roots in the Norfolk gentry; and in chapter 2, which analyses published accounts of the 1578 entertainments for Elizabeth I in Norwich. This was England's second-largest city at the time, so these were urban, civic panegyrics; their designation as gentry productions is possible but needs more exposition.

The substance of the book, in chapters 3, 4, and 5, concerns letters by members of landed Norfolk families—including the Bacons, Knyvetts, and Pastons—from and about their rural estates. These chapters discuss, respectively: rhetorical presence in letters about family relationships; use of rhetorical topics in letters and documents about land ownership; and use of rhetorical style and figures in letters on legal matters. The introduction professes an interest in how relations between social existence and the material world (of buildings, land, livestock, and crops) were managed in words, and this is most to the fore in chapter 4, where literacies are understood in a broad sense to encompass surveying, mapping, and accounting as well as rhetorical competence.

Ellis applies to his primary sources the technique of “thick description” (3) or close reading. Unfortunately, the rather prosaic and functional qualities of many of the letters sometimes make efforts to assert their rhetorical significance seem labored. Mary Holland's conventional statement in a letter to her mother, Lady Muriel Knyvett, that “methinks the time is very long since I saw my Father and your good Lady although it is not yet a fortnight” (70) is painstakingly explained as referring to “having been physically in her parents’ presence in the recent past and implies a certain expectation of being so again” (71). It is also claimed as an example of rhetorical presence, as evoked by techniques like enargeia and ekphrasis, yet hardly possesses the vividness and stimulation of the imagination associated with those terms. Many of the readings of letters similarly tend toward statements of the obvious while stretching the meanings of rhetorical terms and exaggerating the rhetorical interest of textual details. For instance, when Anne Knyvett writes to her son Thomas that the legal document she is sending him “differs from law and good conscience” (158), this is surely only in a very limited sense an example of zeugma as is claimed.

Some of the book's larger claims are also somewhat problematic. More evidence is needed to support the opening assertion that “the gentry were formed by the humanist curriculum, but the humanist curriculum was also formed according to them and their needs” (2). In fact, the gentry often emerge from this study as conservative users of rhetoric, clinging on to the topics, for instance, when they were fading from favor.

The core project of investigating the communication strategies of a particular early modern provincial community remains worthwhile, despite some flaws in its execution. It usefully reminds us that, even in our age of emails and texts, efficacious interpersonal rhetoric is still very much part of how we pursue personal goals and construct social identities.