Juan Luis Vives: Tradition and innovation in renaissance rhetoric

Juan Luis Vives, like many sixteenth‐century humanists, sought to reform the arts of rhetoric and dialectic. This essay argues that Vives' efforts to rehabilitate the disciplines of discourse may well have been the most original of his century. Vives' discussion of elecutio—the essence of rhetoric—is considerably more distinguished than that presented by the better known Peter Ramus.