John Frith - Polemical Use of Rhetoric and Logic

Polemical Use of Rhetoric and Logic

John Frith's writings are in answer to, or debate with, the beliefs of men such as Bishop John Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and John Rastell. In 1531 Frith published three attacks on the doctrines of purgatory and transubstantiation, which left him, according to his biographers, a wanted man. The first of these, A Disputacion of Purgatorye, answered the apologies for purgatory contained in Bishop John Fisher's Assertonis Lutheranae Confuatio (1525), in Sir Thomas More's The Supplicacion of Soules (1529), and in A New Boke of Purgatory (1530) by More's brother-in-law, John Rastell. John Frith was unique among the reformers of the early Tudor period in his predilection for polemics and the very weapons of controversy, many of which he fashioned from the figures of rhetoric.

To emphasize his opponents' venality and thus question the motives for their doctrinal position, he used sarcasm, irony, significatio, and praemunitio. To prejudice his readers against opponents' arguments he used praemunitio. A "coulour of Rhetorike"--because Frith uses so many colours to debate against his opponents—which plays an important part in Frith's controversial technique is praemunitio, the orator's preparation of the audience for some succeeding portion of his speech. Frith uses this device to prejudice his readers either against his opponent's entire work prior to dealing with it, or to prejudice them against a particular passage in that work he is about to cite. To impugn his opponents' competence, he answered them with the texts they themselves had cited.