The Concept of Conversation: From Cicero's Sermo to the Grand Siècle's Conversation

The first history of early modern conversation in English, The concept of conversation began as a minor mode of rhetoric in the time of Cicero, but expanded to become rhetoric's default mode by the end of the seventeenth century. The Concept of Conversation traces the rise of conversation from its origin in the leisured, philosophical conversations of noble Romans to its medieval adoption of the universalising aspirations of Christian thought to its Renaissance transformation into a politic...