Writing Lessons from the Renaissance

(a collection of abridged, modernized versions of Renaissance school rhetorics)

... that they would sigh, and quote with learned looks
precedents, out of beautiful, old books" (W. B. Yeats)

This collection of Renaissance rhetoric textbooks began in pre-internet days as a project on the sidelines of my Ph.D. studies.  I made a hobby of manually keyboarding my own electronic copies of very old (but, in my view, still very useful) teaching texts that were available only in academic libraries.  The editions in Writing Lessons from the Renaissance were manually entered from the photographic-reproduction editions of the original Renaissance textbooks.  Collections of such photo-reproductions of historical texts are produced by companies such as The Clarendon Press, Garland Press and The Scholar Press.

Since I was collecting these texts only to use as excerpts for teaching, I did not record them according to scholarly editing protocols.  When preparing them for presentation on the internet, I took still further liberties with the texts (modernization of spelling, punctuation and some vocabulary, and abridgement).  My guiding editorial principle has been to remove typographical and orthographical boundaries between these wonderful old books and the reading public.  The resulting texts are by no means edited to exacting standards.

These are not scholarly editions.  They are offered here in order to expand access to these valuable old books.  Scholarly electronic editions of some of the books offered here are published on the internet by institutions including Renaissance Editions and Humanities Text Initiative.