Embodied wits – The representation of deliberative thought in rhetoricians’ drama

One of the reasons for the enduring popularity of rhetoricians’ theatre was the efficacy of the spel van sinne, the Netherlandish version of the morality play, as a means of knowledge acquisition and transmission. This essay demonstrates how the rhetorical process of knowledge creation was literally bodied forth by personifications. These allegorical characters exemplified how knowledge ensued from discursive thought, thus turning man's wits inside out. They expressed the workings of the soul in its widest sense, that is, the functions of thinking, sensing, feeling, and willing. Their names are the starting point of the analysis, but in order to better understand their interactions, the staging conditions and likely performance of a number of plays are taken into account. The form and content of these plays have to be understood against the background of contemporary virtue ethics, as championed by humanists such as Erasmus and Coornhert, and can be compared to contemporary moral print.