The rhetorical potential of images in popular accounts of historical events.

Abstract

In The Rhetorical Potential of Images in Popular Accounts of Historical Events, I develop a methodological toolkit for analyzing persuasive visuals and use those lenses—technological, perceptual, semantic/semiotic, societal pragmatic, and inferential—to evaluate a multimodal narrative in Matthew Paris's thirteenthcentury Chronica Majora. Focusing on the sententious role of the chronicling narrative form and the moralizing purpose of the exemplars that most influenced Matthew's style, I argue that Matthew's practice of image-construction was an historiographic—not decorative—act and explore the ways in which the layout, organization, and illustration of Chronica Majora produced a mnemonic and epistemic machine—a purposeful, rhetorical encyclopedia of human experience and a guide to right behavior. Within this grounded framework, I address questions of broader import, including the cognitive functions of narrative form, the influence of socialization and enculturation in shaping the semiotic and rhetorical vernaculars of discourse communities, and the function of communicative artifacts as interfaces connecting the material domain with the intellectual lifeworlds of the producers and interpreters of communicative artifacts.