ABSTRACT
The chapter argues that at the turn of the 1520s, Vives can be placed within the Erasmian movement on two levels. First, it demonstrates that socially and culturally Vives was incorporated into the networks and public practices of friendship of the Erasmian humanist movement. This enabled Vives to emerge as a rising talent of the Northern humanist movement and, ultimately, provided him with reputation and intellectual authority for a life of negotium. Second, by differentiating between the symmetrical conversation (sermo) practiced within Erasmian circles and different oratorical modes (oratio) for dealing with the world outside learned circles, the chapter describes the various rhetorical ways in which a life of negotium could be realised. In particular, the chapter shows how Vives’s De consultatione appropriated deliberative rhetoric into a rhetoric of princely counsel.
