Adoxography

The first English treatise on the subject was Anthony Munday's "The defence of contraries" (1593), a translation of Charles Estienne's "Paradoxes, ce sont propos contre la commune opinion" and based on Ortensio Landi's "Paradossi". It contained essays that praised, amongst other things, poverty, drunkenness and stupidity. Walter K. Olson, writing in the Leisure & Arts section of the September 8, 2005, edition of The Wall Street Journal, quotes the following passage from Sadakat Kadri, "The Trial: A History, from Socrates to O.J. Simpson": "Elizabethan schoolboys...were commonly taught adoxography, the art of eruditely praising worthless things." The passage comes in the course of an account of Sir Walter Raleigh's trial, and Kadri observes that Munday thought lawyers could particularly learn from his book. This was a period of English history when the jury trial was assuming its modern form, and Kadri later shows that the ability to praise apparently worthless causes has been central to courtroom advocacy for centuries. Celebrated adoxographers could therefore be said to include men such as Cicero and Clarence Darrow. In modern writing, the term "adoxography" is also used as an often humorous self-reference in writing, often in regard to humor columns or blogs. == See also ==