There is a tendency in modern scholarship to describe the Renaissance Humanists merely as readers as interpreters happily absorbed within the bounds of their chosen classical texts. In "Theory as Practice," Nancy Struever contests this accepted notion; by focusing on ethical inquiry, she presents the Humanists as engaged in subtle, innovative moral work.
Struever argues that the accomplishment of five major Renaissance figures Petrarch, Nicolaus Cusanus, Lorenzo Valla, Machiavelli, and Montaigne was to consider theory as practice and thus engage the ethics of inquiry. She notes three...

In the articles collected here Nancy Struever explores the basic assumption that rhetoric is not simply a bag of persuasive tricks, but functions, necessarily, as a mode of inquiry investigating not simply the mechanics of production and reception of discourse, but the psychological factors of reason and passion engaged by the assertion, modification, and contest of beliefs and dispositions of the civil communities. The first section looks both at contemporary historians employing rhetorical constructs and tactics and at contemporary accounts of the employment of rhetorical pedagogical...