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It would be a mistake to assume that cognitive linguists uncovered the secret power of the metaphor. At least two reasons contradict such an idea: firstly, there has always been a great deal of work on metaphor; and, secondly, the concept of metaphor has itself been expanded in cognitive research to encompass questions and fields of study which up until recently had been investigated by scholars who did not consider metaphor to be their principle focus of interest. Indeed, a wide variety of disciplines from grammar to comparative linguistics have now entered into the metaphor debate. In contrast to this loose or all-embracing definition of metaphor adopted in cognitive linguistics, much of the research into metaphor that has been done throughout history, and which has continued to develop parallel to cognitive research, has proceeded by maintaining a restrained definition; for many approaches, metaphor remains a rhetorical trope. Four main approaches can be discerned among the diverse theories which attempt to account for metaphor as a trope: philosophical investigations; linguistic approaches; the poetic tradition; and the rhetorical tradition.

This chapter engages Ernst Gombrich's essay “Icones symbolicae” and Michael Baxandall's interpretation of Leon Battista Alberti's debts to the rhetorical tradition to examine the iconology of Warburg's early essays in the context of Italian humanism and Dominico Ghirlandaio's Adoration of the Shepherds. It returns to Warburg's concept of the “metaphoric distance” characterizing the manner in which the Adoration's rhetorical qualities, its copia (eloquent abundance) and varietas (variety), help to balance competing forces and themes. It then rehearses Warburg's cardinal notion of the Pathosformel (pathos formula) and finds analogies with E. R. Curtius's notion of literary topoi. The chapter also compares the aims and organization of Warburg's famous Library in Hamburg with those of the Bilderatlas.

Over time, Natives and settlers not only came to appreciate the political implications of treaties but also learned to manipulate each other’s legal concepts. Craig Yirush shows the Iroquois’ skill at sequentially deploying indigenous and English concepts during negotiations with delegates from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland in 1744. The Iroquois defended their claims to land in Maryland and Virginia by invoking their conquest of it and their long possession (prescription). Arguments from conquest and prescription, familiar in European colonial discourses, constituted part of the settlers’ case at the treaty negotiations. The Iroquois reworked these arguments to their own advantage, mixing them with appeals rooted in Native legal and rhetorical traditions. Switching between Native and English legal ideas was at once a mechanism for gaining advantages in negotiations, defending interests, outmaneuvering rivals, and enriching intermediaries.

This book begins from the premise that medieval aesthetic experience is bound into human sensation and that human knowledge is sense-derived, the agents of which are all corporeal. It focuses on the very first stage of understanding — that of ‘making sense’ of physical sensations derived from human encounters with their own crafted artefacts. It attempts to winnow from the discourses of morals and theology some elements that can be identified as wholly aesthetic. The chapters that follow focus on the Latin rhetorical tradition, and seek to be suggestive rather than definitive about the values in art that they attempt to trace.