Elizabeth Montagu’s Study of Cicero’s Life: The Formation of an Eighteenth-Century Woman’s Rhetorical Identity

Author: Smith, Tania
Title: Elizabeth Montagu’s Study of Cicero’s Life: The Formation of an Eighteenth-Century Woman’s Rhetorical Identity
Review/Collection: Rhetorica Vol. 26, No. 2
Year edition: 2008
Pages: 165-187
Keywords: Héritage - Fortuna - Legacy
Description: Tania Smith : Assistant Professor, Communications Studies, Faculty of Communication and Culture, University of Calgary. [Abstract] Popular eighteenth-century British biographies of Cicero had a significant impact on the rhetorical identity formation of Elizabeth Montagu (1720–-1800). As the acknowledged founder of the Bluestocking salon, Elizabeth Montagu played a key role in forming the conversational and epistolary eloquence of her broad and influential network of men and women. A careful analysis of the young Elizabeth's epistolary discussion of biographies of Cicero and Atticus, especially Conyers Middleton's Life of Cicero, provides insight into Montagu's mature rhetorical practice as well as neo-Ciceronian influences on men's and women's rhetorical identity formation in eighteenth-century Britain.
Author initials: Smith 208