Title: "Speak that I may see you"
Subtitle: concealment and unconcealment in the Colloquia of Erasmus, Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, and Sidney's New Arcadia
Description: At the basis of humanist ideas about language and thought was the belief that the mind is present in language. Erasmus' philosophy of language exemplifies this presence of thought in language, but does not regard language as discardable once meaning has been discovered. Rather, thought is manifest in the very quality of language as surface or exterior. This revelation-concealment constitutes unconcealment, a notion that informs not only Erasmus' ideas about language, but many other concepts. Unconcealment is a rhetorical phenomenon, concerned with the interaction of individuals. One problem in such interactions is whether unconcealment can be distinguished from deceit. Erasmus' works reveal that he sought for such a distinction, trying to account both for the existence of concealment and for a difference between it and the truth-conveying deceits of language and especially oratory. Like Erasmus, Marguerite de Navarre concentrates on the difficulty of distinguishing true deceit from deceit that convey truth. Their near identity, however, is no cause for abandoning meaning. Rather, truth can be found in any human interaction, even in what appears to be deceit. Thus there can be virtuous deceit, an important notion in the Heptameron. More aware than Erasmus that social expectations prevent free choice, Marguerite creates an alternative in which virtue can exist in deceit. Although concerned with theological issues, the Heptameron deals mainly with the pragmatics of defining and maintaining virtue in a fallen world. Sir Philip Sidney makes a clear distinction between concealment and unconcealment by limiting the function of the latter to mimetic language or "poetry". However, in the New Arcadia, which like the Heptameron concerns itself with the pragmatics of virtue, the issue is much less clear. In pushing the reader to distinguish between deceit and unconcealment, this text presents a paradigm of the importance of the right exercise of experiential knowledge through memory. All three authors demonstrate how unconcealment as a concept operates in sixteenth-century thinking on issues of social behavior, transactions of power, and religious thought.