Quintilian in Europe from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This chapter offers a panoramic view of the significant and diverse reception of the Institutio from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in Europe. A central figure on the European continent in the eighteenth century was the pedagogue and rhetorician of Belles Lettres Charles Rollin (1661–1741), who stressed the importance of the Institutio for education, but who also claimed that it is too long and needs to be abridged in order to be useful for Rollin’s time. Other major figures who used Quintilian’s ideas on pedagogy and the vir bonus or aspects of his rhetorical theory in various ways are the Italian G.B. Vico (1668–1744), the Scotsmen Hugh Blair (1718–1800) and George Campbell (1719–1796), the Irishman Gilbert Austin (1753–1837), the Germans Friedrich Andreas Hallbauer (1692–1750), Johann Andreas Fabricius (1696–1769), Johann Matthias Gesner (1691–1761), who produced a critical edition of the Institutio, and Johann Christian Gottsched (1700–1766). Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) is discussed to show how his education in rhetoric through Quintilian informed his views on poetry. For the nineteenth and twentieth century, the work of five German scholars is discussed to highlight the importance of the Instutito in classical and literary studies and in philosophy: Richard Volkmann’s Die Rhetorik der Griechen und Römer (1885), Ernst Robert Curtius’s Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (1948), Heinrich Lausberg’s Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik (1960), Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Wahrheit und Methode (1960), and Otto Seel’s Quintilian oder die Kunst des Redens und Schweigens (1977).