The project will reconstruct the virtual platforms or rostra that were created to grant a certain freedom of expression in the early modern period by allowing for a distancing between author and argument. As a practice that was meant to facilitate as well as mitigate the public propounding of opinions contrary to received wisdom, common opinion or even doctrinal teachings, it depended on frames that were constantly negotiated and re-negotiated. The project will unearth this practice by, for the first time, describing three major fields as interrelated: first, the mirroring, echoing and evoking of disputation as cultivated in the universities with the aim of drawing on academic conventions, prerogatives and liberties; second, the use of personae as textual devices for the distancing of author and argument; and third, the resorting to paradox as a genre that marked the voicing of contrarian opinion while affording ambiguity about speakers’ intentions.  

The project will demonstrate that the three fields share, negotiate, and, in fact, jointly transform, conceptual and technical procedures – technical in the sense of ‚belonging to an ars or techne,‘ i.e. rhetoric and dialectics. 

The aim is to develop a critical vocabulary for the description of very common early modern phenomena that have been largely overlooked in modern research. All three framing practices originated from the oral formats of ancient rhetoric and medieval dialectics which had to be reimagined in the face of a fundamentally altered media landscape. The time-frame for the project is demarcated by two media revolutions, the first around 1500, marked by the wide-spread adoption of printing with moveable type; and the second around 1700, which saw the transformation of scholarly debates with the emergence of critique and the move to the periodical press. 

The overarching objective is to exhibit the platform- and device-dependency of freedom of speech under conditions that are averse to, if not to say forbidding of, the expression of contrarian opinion. The focus will be on the modes used for circumventing restrictions and describe the roots and forms of virtual rostra.