ABSTRACT
The position that the Institutiones Oratoriae holds in the context of Vico’s work has been very disputed in Vico’s recent scholarship. It is the general opinion that the Institutiones is merely Vico’s textbook for his lectures on rhetoric and that his most original ideas are either unconnected to it or, if contained in it, only in an incipient manner. Indeed, the Institutiones is a much less original work than the New Science. Even though Vico’s selection of the principal teachings of the rhetorical tradition shows an unusual understanding of rhetoric for his time, the textbook is still, mostly, a compilation of Aristotle’s and Quintilian’s main teachings. It seems that Vico’s Institutiones Oratoriae is no more than a peculiar manual of rhetoric among others in Latin Renaissance Humanism. For this among other reasons,1 it does make sense to give little importance to Vico’s rhetorical work, as traditional scholarship does.2 However, recently, commentators have argued that the Institutiones contains some of the “seeds” of the New Science intertwined with practical teachings on eloquence. They also agree in seeing Vico’s interest in rhetoric as an important element of his philosophical rehabilitation of Humanism.3 Perhaps the most paradigmatic of those interpretations is Mooney’s: “Properly reflected upon, the principles of discourse contain in themselves the seeds of historical consciousness, if not a full and proper historicism, such that one may doubt whether Vico, apart from the tradition of rhetoric, could ever have written a science of humanity” (83, emphasis added).
