oratory predated Aristotle, earlier writers did not provide a conceptual basis for them. Aristotle in his treatise On Rhetoric describes three kinds of rhetoric, based on the kinds of audience; deliberative rhetoric concerning decisions about the future, judicial (or forensic) rhetoric concerning decisions about the past, and ceremonial or epideictic rhetoric concerning decisions about the present. Each genre has a characteristic goal, context, and arguments. This delineation of rhetorical genres persisted into the medieval and early modern educational traditions, being codified in the work of the Roman orator Cicero,the pedagogue Quintilian, in the influential Rhetorica ad Herrenium, and elsewhere. Thus genre became a static, essentialized, and formalized notion, entrenched in later appropriations of the classic tradition in both rhetoric and poetics. After the fall of Rome, when the scholastic system took over literary criticism and rhetoric, genre theory was still based on the essential nature of genres. This is most likely because of Christianity's affinity for Platonic concepts. This state of affairs persisted until the 18th century. Enlightenment age At the end of the 18th century, the theory of genre based on classical thought began to unravel beneath the intellectual chafing of the Enlightenment. The introduction of the printing press brought texts to a larger audience. Then pamphlets and broadsides began to diffuse information even farther, and a greater number of less privileged members of society became literate and began to express their views. Suddenly authors of both "high" and "low" culture were now competing for the same audience. This worked to destabilize the classical notions of genre, while still drawing attention to genre because new genres like the novel were being generated (Prince, 455). Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), had reduced data to its smallest part: the simple idea derived from sense. However, as the science of cognition became more precise it was shown that even this simple idea derived from sense was itself divisible. This new information prompted David Hartley to write in his Observation on Man (1749), How far the Number of Orders may go is impossible to say. I see no Contradiction in supposing it infinite, and a great Difficulty in stopping at any particular Size. (Prince, 456). The possibility of an infinite number of types alarmed theologians of the time because their assumption was that rigorously applied empiricism would uncover the underlying divine nature of creation, and now it appeared that rigorously