In It For the Rhetorical Benjamins?

I was amazed to see how many of the Renaissance rhetoricians seemed to be motivated, either partially or entirely, by the money that could be gained from their innovations in the field. While this was at least a factor for the earlier rhetoricians, the lack of mass production limited their financial reimbursements to what they obtained from their tutoring. The printing press seemed to feed a boom in new rhetorical theories. Everyone who had any background in the works of the Greeks seems to have stepped up and tried his hand at revising what they had written centuries before. It seems to have been easier for the first members of this group to succeed. They had novelty on their side. When they would stumble upon the remainder of some long-lost manuscript, it offered them the chance to make a name for themselves. It was also easier for them to present these ideas as their own, not that there was any real ethical argument against plagiarism at the time. From here it was a question of trying to develop your own take on the same material. These scholars would find any way possible to reiterate, reorder, retranslate, and package rhetoric in order to find a new way to present it to a growing audience. Then they would issue a new edition a few years later in order remind people of their importance. Some of these editions had only minimal changes - a few Catholic jokes added on behalf of the Protestants. And thus, the textbook industry was born.