The article deals with issues present in the humanities undergoing the changes due to rhetorization of contemporary culture. First I am discussing the impact of the variability of modern culture on traditional humanities (new methodology and new theory of science based on a rhetorical approach to the text and its symbolic and ideological meaning). This caused the great development of various rhetorical studies in the 20th century (from philosophy of language to practical art of speaking and argumentation). In our time, those studies answer the questions: 1) why and for what reasons do we depend on other people's views? 2) how can we exert a positive influence by text communication on other individuals? Therefore, nowadays we are seeing a new rhetorical trend in communication studies concerning all the culture texts – this trend also affects literary studies and cultural anthropology: academic disciplines which adopt the research tools of the traditional and new rhetorical workshop. This new attitude towards the humanities has an impact on general education at schools and universities.

The article discusses two works devoted to the women's education and upbringing, written in two different eras. Both books – the treaty by a Spanish secular humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) De institutione feminae christianae (Bruges 1524) dedicated to the Queen of England, Catherine of Aragon, wife of Henry VIII, and her daughter Mary Tudor, and reference guide for women by a Spanish Jesuit Jorge Loring (1921–2013) Para salvarte. Compendio de las verdades fundamentales de la religión católica y normas para vivirlas (1st ed. 1952) – are advisory in nature. Both authors in a similar way define the role of women in a society. Formulating the recommendations for good Christian women, the authors resort to almost identical argumentation derived from the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers. They use similar rhetorical devices which are tailored to the current circumstances. Both authors refer to the same authority and show the same examples. The analysis of both works aims to show the immutability of rhetorical practices in the field of advice literature devoted to women.

Successful slogans in Italian political discourse – This paper aims to describe the notion of ‘sloganisation’, with special regard to the fortune and circulation of certain slogans in Italian public discourse. An analysis of their forms, contexts of occurrence (political propaganda, advertising, football supporters) and means of diffusion (street talk, electoral manifestos, traditional and new media) shows an increasing desemantisation of this kind of message. Slogans are routinely used by political parties and are widely quoted, regardless of their ideological content, merely in order to create identification or to increase the polemical attitude of their leader.

Since modern usage of the core terms is essential in the appropriate interpretation of ancient rhetoric texts, the paper starts from a discussion of semantic differences between the concepts of advice, counselling and deliberation in the Polish language. Ancient rhetoric takes as its starting point an overarching notion of ‘deliberative genre’ which includes not only laymen and expert advice, but also the political deliberation. It offers some theoretical categories, universal enough to address these apparently incompatible contexts of advice-giving and advice- taking. Rhetorical approach points out the relation between axiology and persuasive mechanisms. It identifies also some persuasive devices likely to enhance the efficiency of advice-giving, such as the use of examples and reasoning based on probability evaluation.

Academic authors employ various language means in order to construct and disseminate knowledge, to sound persuasive, to undergird their arguments, but also to seek agreement within the academic community. The aim of this paper is to analyse a selected group of rhetorical strategies used by Anglophone and Czech authors of Linguistics research articles (RAs) and research theses (RTs). These strategies are assumed to vary in both academic genres since the position of their writers within the academic community differs. Even though authors of RAs have to meet reviewers’ requirements in order for their article to be published, so their relative position may be lower than that of the reviewers’, authors of RAs may have the same “absolute status” as the reviewers may be just as expert in that particular field. By contrast, the status of research students is lower than that of their evaluators both in relative and absolute terms. Even though students may gain some learned authority in presenting an original contribution, their assessors command both learned and institutional authority, hence are endowed with a higher status. Apart from comparing rhetorical strategies used in RAs and RTs, the paper focuses on cross-cultural differences between Anglophone and Czechacademic writing traditions.

Progress was an ideological concept in the political movements of the 19th century. This article asks how the women’s movements argued withthe concept of progress in a region which had been considered as backward since its establishment as the Habsburg part of partitioned Poland. The analysis focuses on how the political movements in 19th-century Galicia took advantage of the topoi of backwardness and progress, using them as rhetorical elements. Examples are taken from the Ukrainian women’s movement and women’s politics in the Zionist movement.

This article contains a bilingual, Latin-Polish, edition of a letter written by Erasmus to John Sixtin (Ioannes Sixtinus), a Frisian student he met in England. In it Erasmus describes a dinner party at Oxford to which he was invited as an acclaimed poet. In the presence of John Colet, leader of English humanists, table talk turned into learned conversation. Erasmus’s contribution to the debate was an improvised fable (fabula) about Cain who, in order to become farmer, persuades the angel guarding Paradise to bring him some seeds from the Garden of Eden. His speech, a showpiece of rhetorical artfulness disguising a string of lies and spurious argument, is so effective that the angel decides to steal the seeds and thus betray God’s trust. Seen in the context of contemporary surge of interest in the art of rhetoric, Erasmus’ apocryphal spoof is an eloquent demonstration of the heuristic value of mythopoeia and the irresistible power of rhetoric.