ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Vives’s incorporation into the emerging humanist movement in the academic contexts of Paris and Louvain in the 1510s was driven by an interest in the practical, civic dimension of language. By placing Vives in the context of the academic debates between humanists and scholastics, the chapter shows that Vives’s separate early interventions in the controversies on the reform of language teaching (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) went hand in hand with a pronounced Erasmian stress on the importance of language for the realisation of a life of active engagement (negotium) in the service of others. In the execution of this life, the persuasive, rhetorical element of language with its ability to address the emotions of the audience was central.
