0 INTRODUCTION

4. RHETORIC AND THE WORLD OF SCIENCE IN THE EModE PERIOD
edification.” Most medical texts, whose role in the present dissertation is an important
one, can be classified under the label of functional literacy, since they were used to
restore or maintain health.
The rise in the level of literacy brought about an increase in the demand for books
due to two main reasons. On the one hand, they were used in schools as a teaching tool
and, on the other, they were a must-have for those new literate people (Bennett 1970: 80).
Schools were sponsored by donors, who made emphasis on the fact that they should be
free and open to everybody. This conception brings as a result a noticeable growth in the
educational facilities. Most of these schools taught the vernacular while some scholars
taught Latin for free.
In her 1996 monograph, Salmon (1996: 12) gives an account of the aspects of
linguistic competence that schoolmasters intended to inculcate in their pupils. They were
first, acceptable spelling (...); secondly, acceptable pronunciation which
would provide the foundation for correct orthography; thirdly, the
avoidance of grammatical solecisms; fourthly, the comprehension and
use of vocabulary derived from classical sources.
As is clear from this quotation, in this period, there existed a strong demand for a proper
use of the vernacular in fields such as speech, orthography and vocabulary. Due to this
prescriptivism, there appeared dictionaries of hard words, for their correct use,
dictionaries of synonyms, where elegant Latinate borrowings could be found as synonyms
for plain native words, and also prescriptive dictionaries which helped to distinguish
between tricky pairs such as ingenious and ingenuous.
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