Cervantes retórico: genera oratoria y compositio en La gitanilla

Starting from the conclusions drawn by several scholars about Cervantes’s knowledge of Ancient and Renaissance poetical and rhetorical theories, this article aims to propose an attentive rhetorical reading of three speeches uttered by the protagonist of La Gitanilla. The speeches can be ascribed to the three rhetorical genres described by Aristotle in his Rhetoric, namely the deliberative, the epideictic, and the forensic genres. From that general framework, the last part of the article focuses on a single stylistic detail in order to show the theoretical connections of the compositio techniques that Cervantes uses in what might arguably be considered the highest point in Preciosa’s eloquence