In Arabic Oration: Art and Function, Tahera Qutbuddin presents a comprehensive theory of this foundational prose genre, analysing its oral aesthetics and its political, military, and religious functions in early Islamic civilization, tracing its echoes in Muslim public address today.

An ardent treatise for the Dignity of Man, which elevates Humanism to a truly Christian level. This translation of Pico della Mirandola's famed "Oration," hitherto hidden away in anthologies, was prepared especially for Gateway Editions, making it available for the first time in a stand-alone volume. The youngest son of the Prince of Mirandola, Pico lived during the Renaissance, an era of change and philosophical ferment. The tenacity with which he clung to fundamental Christian teachings while crying out against his brilliant though half-pagan contemporaries made him exceptional in a time of exceptional men. While Pico, as Russell Kirk observes in his introduction, was an ardent spokesman for the "dignity of man," his devout nature elevated humanism to a truly Christian level, which makes his writing as pertinent today as it was in the fifteenth century.

Cicero's Brutus and Orator constitute his final major statements on the history of Roman oratory and the nature of the ideal orator. In the Brutus he traces the development of political and judicial speech over the span of 150 years, from the early second century to 46 BCE, when both of these treatises were written. In an immensely detailed account of some 200 speakers from the past he dispenses an expert's praise and criticism, provides an unparalleled resource for the study of Roman rhetoric, and engages delicately with the fraught political circumstances of the day, when the dominance of Julius Caesar was assured and the future of Rome's political institutions was thrown into question. The Orator, written several months later, describes the form of oratory that Cicero most admired, even though he insists that neither he nor any other orator has been able to achieve it. At the same time, he defends his views against critics-the so-called Atticists-who found Cicero's style overwrought and favored a more restrained and plainer approach.

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"This volume contains Gianfrancesco Pico's Life of his uncle Giovanni Pico and also Giovanni's Oration. Gianfrancesco's Life opens a collection that omits Giovanni's Conclusions but includes the speech that we - unlike Pico - know as an Oration on the Dignity of Man. He wrote the Oration to introduce the Conclusions, but his nephew's editorial decision cut the theses off from the speech that their author had connected with them. Several times in the Oration, the orator mentioned "theorems" to be proposed in the Conclusions: he clearly saw the book and the speech as tools for the same task. Either Gianfrancesco missed his uncle's intentions, which seems unlikely, or he meant to seal off his other writings - including the Oration - from a book that he found embarrassing for himself and his relative and too risky to make public. This is the fact of the matter: Gianfrancesco left the Conclusions unpublished while publishing the Oration in a collection introduced by his Life. Both the speech and the biography are presented here, in this edition, in the same way - apart from the Conclusions: this reflects the situation in 1496 and respects Gianfrancesco's choice, even though his decision blocked understanding of the speech for many years. Today, with access to all the relevant texts in many versions, readers can move from one work to another as needed"--

A collection of surviving state funeral orations from Athens (Thucydides, Gorgias, Lysias, Demosthenes, Hypereides and Plato's 'Menexenus'). The translations include introductions and notes, as well as literary and historical commentary.

A former presidential speechwriter draws on the experiences and techniques of Winston Churchill and American politicians to provide a practical guide to preparing and delivering business speeches