The global reach of the Spanish and Portuguese empires prompted a remarkable flourishing of the classical rhetorical tradition in various parts of the early modern world. Empire of Eloquence is the first study to examine this tradition as part of a wider global renaissance in Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, with a particular focus on the Iberian world. Spanning the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, the book argues that the classical rhetorical tradition contributed to the ideological coherence and equilibrium of this early modern Iberian world, providing important occasions...