Teaching eloquence in a transition period: Hispanic handbooks of rhetoric in the first half of the nineteenth century

During the first half of the nineteenth century, transformations in the mechanisms of political representation and the need to include new social sectors in the state apparatus led to the establishment of schools to increase the number of educated persons who would be capable of speaking in public and shaping the opinions of their fellow citizens. Teaching rhetoric gained new force in this setting. This article looks at a series of four secondary school handbooks of rhetoric published in Spanish, from the perspective of glottopolitics. The study focuses on the sections in these books about eloquence and looks at (a) how they deal with speaking, the models they provide, the contrasts they establish between ancient and modern, and the genres they deal with, and (b) how they prescribe rules, and observations on the speaker’s education regarding morality and knowledge needed to perform efficiently. The analysis shows that these aspects changed over time and how this relates to the social changes occurring at the time.