Cortesía verbal: los manuales de urbanidad a la luz de la retórica y de la teoría pragmática

In the Spanish language historiography there are a series of handbooks on etiquette that from the Renaissance, but especially during the Enlightenment, multiplied in Spain throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These treaties make up the model of education for a ‘civic gentleman’. They built a bridge between rhetoric and urbanity, on the one hand, and pragmatic and current linguistic politeness, on the other hand. The aim of our study is to establish the correlation between handbooks on etiquette and modern theories of politeness and thereby to incorporate the pragmatic analysis to the studies on linguistic historiography, in order to highlight how verbal strategies were con­templated in both handbooks on etiquette as in some grammars, as shown in the manuals analyzed.