The Changing Tradition is a collection of essays from the Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric at the University of Saskatchewan (July 1997). It includes sixteen short essays that treat women’s historical relationship with rhetoric, in addition to a longer essay by Sutherland that provides an extended analysis of Mary Astell (English, 1666-1731) and her writings. This book joins a growing body of scholarship on women and the rhetoric studies canon, such as Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition (University of Pittsburgh, 1995), essays edited by Andrea Lunsford; Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Southern Illinois, 1997); Listening to their Voices: The Rhetorical Activities of Historical Women (University of South Carolina, 1997), edited by Molly Meijer Wertheimer; as well as books focusing on specific authors, such as Krista Ratcliffe’s Anglo-American Feminist Challenges to the Rhetorical Traditions: Virginia Woolf, Mary Daly, and Adrienne Rich (Southern Illinois, 1995); and Joann Campbell’s Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writings of Gertrude Buck (University of Pittsburgh, 1996).

Carol Morell suggests (in a blurb on the back of the book) that the sheer organization of the book "suggests a new way of theorizing" by giving us five potential models for expressing women’s contributions. The section headings that orchestrate the book place women in increasing proximity to "The Rhetorical Tradition." The first section, therefore, is titled "Excluded from the Rhetorical Tradition," and treats the representation of women in canonical rhetorical works such as Aspasia and Diotima, and also theorizes reasons for the sites of women’s exclusion. The second section, "Alongside the Rhetorical Tradition," considers alternate modes of using rhetoric, such as spiritual journals, or even visual representations, such as friezes of the Sibyls or Renaissance emblem books. The third section looks at historical women who wrote about rhetoric, or self-consciously used particular rhetorical strategies, for example, Hrotsvit and Hildegard, both medieval German nuns who contributed to instances of medieval rhetorical criticism, or Lady Mary Wroth and Mary Astell, both early modern British women who used language to justify the publication of their writings in public spheres. "Participating in the Rhetorical Tradition," the title of the third section upon first glance appears similar to the title of the fourth, "Emerging into the Rhetorical Tradition;" however, the writers treated in the former are nevertheless separate from the rhetorical tradition they critique, while the women in the fourth are each political activists, and successful public rhetors. While the fourth section includes discussion of an American, Gertrude Buck, it also includes an essay by Brigitte Mral (translated by Malcolm Forbes) entitled "The Public Woman: Women Speakers Around the Turn of the Century in Sweden," in which she considers Ellen Key, Kata Dalström and Selma Lagerlöf. The Canadian feminist-activist Flora MacDonald Denison is also considered in an essay in this section. Finally, the book concludes with the section titled "Engaging the Rhetorical Tradition." These essays either treat contemporary writers concerned with rhetoric, such as Donna Haraway, or they treat issues in rhetoric, such as voice and ethos, from a feminist standpoint. This final group theorizes what it would mean to change the rhetorical tradition in such a way that reveals women’s participation in the various modes that have been outlined in the preceding sections of the book: how should the face of rhetorical studies change in order to accommodate women? The essays in this section range from a densely theoretical consideration of feminist embodied rhetorical epistemology by Philippa Spoel that pulls together the important work by Donna Haraway and Nicole Brossard, to an essay by Marianne Janack and John Adams that problematizes the traditional dismissal of ad hominem arguments.

This final group seems, as a set, to call for embodying questions (and answers) about rhetoric and women. The argument appears to be that since it is the body that marks difference and that also contextualizes both knowledge and responses from the person, the authors seem to collectively stress the necessity of including the body. Indeed, three of the essays in the final section explicitly strategize retheorizations of embodied epistemology. Philippa Spoel’s essay "Re-inventing Rhetorical Epistemology: Donna Haraway’s and Nicole Brossard’s Embodied Visions" in particular is an instructive example of interdiscipinary approaches to the body. The essay topicalizes "the body’s role in the generation—not only the communication or delivery—of rhetorical knowledge" (207). Through assessing the contributions of Haraway (a theorist of technology) and Brossard (a Quebecoise author), Spoel makes the important observation that "the knower [is] accountable or responsible for the knowledge that she claims to see or to have discovered because the knower, as much as the known, is situated within her particular social and historical context and within her material body" (203). Such a recognition, Spoel hopes, makes the question of ethical interaction within communities central to the project of rhetorical studies. She claims that it is "only by fully acknowledging the centrality of the knower’s or speaker’s embodiment to how and what she knows can we reformulate a rhetorical epistemology that makes ethics and emotions, along with the body’s cultural-historical memories, crucial dimensions in the invention of rational or logical arguments" (206). She concludes that "for rhetoric, Haraway’s and Brossard’s emphasis on the emotional dimension of the knowing process helps to re-legitimate the role of pathos in both the invention and communication of embodied knowledge" (207). While I do not necessarily agree that we need to "embody" epistemology (which brackets off still-important important questions of essentialism), the essay is nevertheless provocative, and raises important questions like how are theories of epistemology gendered? what are their institutional effects on canon creation?

In addition to Spoel’s, I found two other essays particularly moving. First, I was deeply compelled by Erin Herberg’s essay on Mary Astell, "Mary Astell’s Rhetorical Theory: A Woman’s Viewpoint." Herberg deftly places Astell in context with Locke, Plato, Cicero, and other rhetoricians that she responded directly to in her writings. But Herberg makes a very important and instructive move in her essay: she writes not only of Astell’s context, but she writes of the implications for women’s cultural position explored in Astell’s writings. In her writing, Astell adamantly counters Locke’s empiricism with "the Platonic view that reasoning is an activity that involves the soul and the mind" (150). Herberg writes: "Astell must also have recognized the more practical threat empiricism held for women, since by society’s dictates the world they could experience and how they could experience it were limited. Empiricism, with its need for specialized knowledge and tools, could, in effect, re-erect the intellectual barriers that anti-scholasticism had supposedly demolished" (150).

Similarly, Vicki Collins’ "Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers: Rhetorical Functions of a Methodist Mystic’s Journal" richly contextualizes its subject matter by retheorizing the purpose and reception of journal-writing. Collins writes of personal faith as persuasion, drawing on "James Kinneavey’s observation that in the Greek New Testament, the word for faith and the word for persuasion are the same, Pistis. To have faith is to be persuaded" (113). Collins uses this observation to note that "although the rhetorical tradition might resist calling persuasion of the self ‘rhetorical’ because the audience is not in the public sphere, Wesley publicly encouraged this private literacy to deepen the faith of his flock …. In the case of Methodist journal writers like Hester Roe [Rogers’ maiden name], the first audience open to persuasion was the writer herself" (113). Journals are therefore instances of "narrative rationality" that encourage "identification rather than logical persuasion" (114). Collins’ conclusion is especially important. Calling for continued scholarship on women and rhetoric, Collins asserts that "such study invites further exploration of a text’s multiple rhetorical functions and provides a reminder that the uses of gendered spiritual discourse are often intertwined with gender politics and institutional ideological agendas" (116).

Perhaps a central frustration for some readers of The Changing Tradition will be a perceived lack of clear connection with rhetorical studies "proper;" however, this very issue is addressed head-on in Sutherland’s conclusion to the volume. In fact, her concluding comments build on her introductory essay, "Women in the History of Rhetoric: The Past and the Future," which provides an important distinction that helps to ground the rationale for the material in the book. The distinction is between two different types of rhetoric: contentio on the one hand, and sermo on the other. While contentio resides in the public realm and constitutes much of traditional rhetorical studies, sermo has to do with "private or semi-public unofficial discourse" (11). Sutherland argues that much of women’s rhetorical activity has been in the realm of sermo, and the privileging of the public realm means that sermo, as an alternate mode of discourse, has been traditionally ignored. In her conclusion, then, she reminds us to look more deeply into non-traditional places and instances that might nevertheless include insight for rhetorical studies and the continuing project of recovery and inclusion of women. Drawing on boundary-breaking rhetors like Victor Vitanza, George Kennedy, and Kenneth Burke, she writes: "Accepted ideas about rhetoric are being challenged on a number of different fronts: we are learning to extend our understanding of it to include practices outside the western tradition, pushing back into earlier times and other cultures. We are critiquing traditions of rhetoric, learning to see the invisible, the excluded, those outside the identification: in Burkean terms, perhaps, the scapegoated, the Other" (252). She advocates, as does Andrea Lunsford, "multiple rhetorics," so that "the basic conception of rhetoric as agonized debate" is contested, and the definition of rhetoric can be opened to include for example, behavior, image, and the reception of discourse (rather than only the production of it).

I would suggest that this book does indeed make important and effective steps toward recovery of women writers and their texts, but also toward opening up which texts can even count as rhetorically-informed and informing. It also establishes differing paradigms for how to incorporate or theorize women’s participation—this is perhaps its strongest contribution. It does not advocate only one mode of reading for women’s participation, nor does it advocate one way of actually theorizing their inclusion in traditional canonical rhetorical theory, but rather opens up the discussion about different possible paradigms.