Nineteenth-Century Sacred Rhetorical Education at Andover Theological Seminary

This chapter provides an overview of Andover Theological Seminary’s faculty, students, and curriculum in order to familiarize readers with this important site of nineteenth-century rhetorical education and provide understanding of the wider institutional context in which Austin Phelps’s enacted his sacred rhetorical pedagogy. It also discusses three approaches to rhetorical education that significantly influenced Phelps’s thinking and approach to teaching sacred—namely, classical rhetoric, current-traditional rhetoric, and Emersonian rhetoric. Finally, the chapter outlines the ways Phelps’s Christian theological motives and his desire to prepare ministers for the Christian pulpit led him to adapt these approaches to rhetorical education. This chapter provides a basis for understanding Phelps’s reshaping of nineteenth-century rhetorical education to suit his theological motives and the exigences of Christian pulpit.