Book description
Bulwer’s Chirologia… Chironomia is an extremely rare work. Only thirty-one copies have been located, and they are of dubious legibility of the printed text.
This first modern edition—the first in three centuries—is based on the first printing as sold by Richard Whitaker in 1644. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized,…
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Why read it?
1 author picked Chirologia as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This 1644 book is one of the most charmingly mad documents in the history of rhetoric.
Bulwer thought (rightly) that rhetoric wasn’t just about words: body-language matters, too. So he attempted to catalogue the meaning of hand gestures, which he believed were a universal language, and to explain how best they might be used in oratory.
You discover, if you read Bulwer, that we’ve been blowing kisses and flipping the bird since the seventeenth century; and that clapping your hands as you talk is “a gesture too plebeian and theatrically light for the hands of any prudent rhetorician”. Better yet,…
From Sam's list on rhetoric and the art of persuasion.
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