Rhetoric, the art of effective speaking and writing, had a vital practical role in debates about the humanity of the peoples of the New World. But did rhetoric have a more fundamental connection with the idea of humanity? What part did it play in the wake of encounters with populations of whom Europeans had had no previous knowledge?
In this talk, Dr. Andrew Laird will show how rhetoric acquired a new symbolic value in the Americas, as an element in some foundational accounts and representations of newly encountered societies – including texts by native authors – from Brazil, Peru and Mexico. Missionaries maintained that peoples of the Indies possessed their own innate forms of eloquence, while some indigenous scholars made use of European classical rhetoric to compose texts in Amerindian languages.
This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series and is co-sponsored by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
Andrew Laird is John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities at Brown University, Rhode Island, having previously held positions at Oxford University and Warwick University in the UK. His publications include Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power (1999), Ancient Literary Criticism (2006), The Epic of America (2006), Italy and the Classical Tradition: Language, Thought and Poetry 1300-1600 (2009), Antiquities and Classical Traditions in Latin America (2018), and Aztec Latin: Renaissance Learning and Nahuatl Traditions in Early Colonial Mexico (2024), a historical study of sixteenth-century New Spain focusing on the accomplishments of indigenous scholars in the first decades after the Spanish conquest.
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