Hermogenes and the Renaissance

Annabel M. Patterson offers here a reassessment of the place of Hermogenes, a Greek rhetorician of the second century A.D., in literary history. She shows that the literary men of the European Renaissance-scholars, critics, and poets-found Hermogenes' Concerning Ideas both important and extremely useful, and she finds that they vigorously applied his concepts to create "e;a lovely conformitie."e;T...