Can rhetorical invention account for the Modern Age?
This thesis examines how the transition to the Modern Age between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries left identifiable marks in language, texts, and concepts. Rather than treating historical change as a smooth or abstract process, it focuses on the specific discursive traces through which a change of era becomes visible and irreversible. These traces are understood as “relics”: forms that carry within them the tensions, losses, and reconfigurations of their historical moment.The study approaches these relics through literary analysis informed by cultural rhetoric, with particular attention to rhetoric’s historical and performative dimensions. Concepts such as relic, nostalgia, and threshold are rethought not as fixed ideas, but as forms with history, shaped by conflicts over meaning and authority. Historical meaning is therefore seen as the result of unstable discursive negotiations, in which certain ways of speaking gain legitimacy while others fade or become objects of longing.This framework is applied to three case studies. The first examines seventeenth-century English sermons as sites of theological and political struggle, with a emphasis on John Donne's work. The second focuses entirely on Donne’s writings, read as an ongoing rhetorical negotiation with the religious divisions of his time. The third explores the later reception of Juan de la Cruz among a group of alumbrados in Seville, revealing how earlier texts were reactivated under new historical pressures. These cases show how rhetoric not only reflects historical change, but actively records and shapes the emergence of Modernity.