shall endure forever, and also notes that it was delivered in December
1552.^114 As such it was one of the last orations he would give at Oxford.
The best example of Jewel’s rhetorical and oratorical abilities comes
in the extended Oratio Contra Rhetoricam, which exists in three
manuscripts, one in the British Library and two in Corpus Christi
library.^115 A Latin oration, it ostensibly targets rhetoricians, for example,
Cicero, while defending the theological method of the scholastics, for
example, Duns Scotus; and as such poses a difficulty if it should be taken
at face value, for after all, humanism and rhetoric is the implicit raison
d’etreof Corpus Christi’s existence, the unexpressed reason that Jewel
made his way there from the conservative halls of Merton. The
denunciation of rhetoric and oratory as a facet of the ars humanistica
had been a commonplace for some Roman Catholics, especially among
some monastics, but also in the universities. It had been this tension
between the humanists and conservatives at the beginning of the century,
centered on the Hebrew scholarship of Johann Reuchlin that had elicited
the letters of support for Reuchlin that became the book Letters of
Famous Men, printed as an apology for Reuchlin in particular and
humanism in general.^116 Ulrich von Hutten and Crotus Rubeanus, in
sarcastic imitation of the Letters of Famous Men, but in defense of
Reuchlin, published their Letters of Obscure Menaimed at lampooning
one of Reuchlin’s antagonists, Ortvinus Gratius, a theologian of
Cologne, and supposedly written by his supporters. The wretched prose
conveyed the message that Gratius was both immoral and an ignoramus:
When I was in your study at Cologne I could see well enough that
you had a multitude of volumes, great and small. And there you sat,
with a whisk in your hand to flap away the dust from the bindings.
‘Pardy!’ said I, ‘Magister Ortwin, you have full many a fair volume,
and you hold them in high esteem.’ Then you replied that in this we
might know whether a man were learned or not; for he that
honoureth books honoureth knowledge.^117To some extent von Hutten and Rubeanus had followed the lead
provided by Erasmus, who in 1507 had published his Moriae encomium,
The Praise of Folly. That Jewel did not intend his work as a serious libel
JEWEL TILL 1558 33
(^114) Humphrey, Vita Iuelli, pp. 45 ff.
(^115) Jewel,Oratio Contra Rhetoricam, habitu in aula ejusdam collegii coram omnibus
ejusdem collegii alumnis, in Jewel, Works, IV, pp. 1283–91. Translated by Hoyt Hudson
with an Introduction in The Quarterly Journal of Speech XIV(June 1928), pp. 374–92.
(^116) Cf. Erika Rummel, The Case against Johann Reuchlin. Religious and Social
Controversy in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Toronto, 2002).
(^117) Ulrich von Hutten, et al., On the Eve of the Reformation, Letters of Obscure Men.
translated by Francis G. Stokes with an introduction by Hajo Holbron. (New York, 1964),
p. 210.