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The bibliographical situation in historical rhetoric has never been as difficult as that in modern composition studies, partly because historical rhetoricians can make more use of general tools in historical bibliography, partly because they can index things by proper names rather than by slippery subject-categories, and partly because the overlap of interest between historical rhetoric and such well-established neighboring disciplines as speech, literature, and philosophy has meant that their bibliographies have often done duty for rhetoric research also. One of the best bibliographical resources on primary materials in rhetoric was, in fact, planned as part of a multivolume bibliography of English grammar texts; the regular selective listing of new publications in the field was edited from a philosophy department; while the standard reprint-series of historical rhetoric texts was published to meet needs in speech communication. However, the 1980s saw the provision of two bibliographical tools specially planned for historical rhetoricians working from a composition perspective. The first to appear was Winifred Bryan Horner Historical Rhetoric: An Annotated Bibliography ( 1980). This work gives both selected primary entries (including translations and modern reprints) and very full listings of secondary scholarship; its especial strength is that it lists secondary work on historical figures from speech and composition journals, not just from journals in classics or literature. The secondary material is awkwardly arranged, but it is well indexed and provides useful brief introductory essays to each of the five period-sections (Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Eighteenth Century, and Nineteenth Century). More up to date, and in many ways easier to use, was a second new book, also edited by Horner. A collection of bibliographic essays, The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric ( 1983) basically covers the same five periods, with several of the same contributors, but adds a chapter on twentieth-century rhetorical theory (by James Kinneavy). The essays give very useful orientations to the commonly discussed general issues in each period, and the extensive (unannotated) reference lists after each chapter are helpfully classified and subdivided. These new tools in historical rhetoric, and especially the second, served to move the long-established field of historical rhetoric nearer to the concerns and perspectives of modern composition teachers; further evidence of the same development is the space given to historical rhetoric in the Bedford Bibliography. The interpretative emphasis in both Horner volumes is similar to that in the bibliographical review-volumes in modern composition, where multifarious materials are being shaped and selected to help relative newcomers to the field (indeed, The Present State makes a readable and helpful introductory textbook). The volumes contain plenty of material for writing a course-paper or planning a class on an historical topic, but for original research one must then go on to either specialist period-bibliographies or to general bibliographical reference tools. The very urge to be helpful, to shape a new field, that motivated the new volumes makes them better as orientatory aids than as long-term comprehensive indexes to scholarship from differing disciplinary perspectives. What is also very evident, of course, is that before the 1980s, although a lot of research had been going on in historical rhetoric, there were no equivalent guides through the scholarship; Horner's two volumes made bibliographically manifest a new sense of identity, a new pattern of disciplinary affiliation, in a field that had previously tended to look to literary criticism or speech, rather than composition, for its major scholarly precursors and even for its audience.
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