Order, Reason and Oratory: Rhetoric in Protestant Latin Schools

Abstract

During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries rhetoric was a standard subject in Latin schools of German-speaking Protestant Europe.¹ We can chart its development in these schools through two types of source: first, school textbooks² and, second, school regulations and curricula.³ The former, obviously enough, covered rhetorical theory, the latter established how rhetoric was to be taught, to whom, when and why. In this paper I would like to put the two together and outline how instruction in rhetoric at these schools responded to contemporary paedagogical exigencies.