Hypatia Rhetorical Analysis

Them explaining how Hypatia was executed helps show the injustice of her death, Hypatia’s death was not an execution it was an unlawful death. From looking at the diction that Zielsinski uses you can tell that the Peter the Lector was a volatile man who attacked a woman that was no threat to his religion, and was also too scared to face her alone. The diction that Zielsinski uses makes Peter look very volatile. In the passage it says he is a “zealot” a zealot is a person who expounds religious views without consideration of opposing religions. So the group is not exactly a part of the main church because the church would not publicly allow this to happen. So a zealot is negative enough that the Church does not want to be affiliated with them. Zirlsinski also includes “beat” this word is a very loaded word that is negative, meaning you wouldn’t want to hear about a man beating his wife or kids. The denotation of “beat” is to strike violently or forcefully and repeatedly, just the words denotation makes you uncomfortable to think about. To beat a woman would take a very unstable person definitely if that woman is harmless to them. The word “stripped” was also used in the passage. Stripped is a word in today's culture you do not …show more content…
She said Peter had a “mob” with him when attacking Hypatia. A mob is a disorderly or riotous crowd of people so these people wanted to also hurt Hypatia. It also says that Peter killed Hypatia in a church. This suggests that he wanted god to witness this could be taken two ways one he wanted god to see what he would do for him and let people know there is only one god, or that he wanted god to witness so he would protect them. Why would Peter want god to protect him, maybe he knew that he was doing something wrong or he wanted strength because he was too weak to face Hypatia alone. So you know that from the reading that Peter was scared to face Hypatia