Letter-Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present (review)

Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell are to be commended for their enterprise in producing this premier volume on the history of the treatises and guides on the art of letter-writing. The book covers from ancient Greece and Rome through medieval and Renaissance Europe to modern times and the electronic age. Eleven chapters by recognized scholars examine the history of this unique branch of practical rhetoric over almost two-and-one-half millennia. At the close of each chapter are notes and bibliographies besides the seven appendices with bibliographies of primary and secondary sources from classical antiquity through the twentieth century comprising nearly a quarter of the book.

The prefatory details of the series editor set down basic terms and definitions (vii) that seek clarification. Epistolarity is lacking in the index (and, in fact, dictionaries), although used in the title of Janet Gurkin Altman’s book, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (1982) and in other studies and in Albrecht Classen’s claim that “epistolarity — a term which I coined myself for practical reasons — is the art of letter writing and the literary corpus of epistles” (Disputatio 1 [1996], 91). Here it is defined as the study of letter-writing subdivided into epistolography, the study of letters themselves, and epistolary theory, the study of letter-writing theory or dictamen. This Latin term, however, has been defined as a prose composition, usually a letter composed from set rules of the genre of the ars dictaminis, an omitted term. The artes dictandi are the treatises or manuals occasionally accompanied by several model letters. These guides were not formularies as stated here. These collections were the dictamina, model letters adhering to dictaminal (a word not in dictionaries but used in studies on letter-writing) doctrines or the later formae epistolarum, models following non-dictaminal precepts found in the artes epistolandi of the Renaissance. None of these three items is mentioned.

Professor Poster’s introduction accompanied by notes and bibliography discusses the hard road leading to the independent study of letter-writing, despite the many hundreds of contributors to the literature on epistolary composition, the majority of which works have not been examined and studied. As a marginal subject in rhetoric or grammar, it has failed to become a distinct discipline. This book in compiling historical and bibliographic materials thus endeavors as a pioneering study to promote that goal although there is no reference to these works, Alla Lettera: Teorie e pratiche epistolari dai Greci al Novecento, ed. A. Chemello (1998) and L’Epistolarité à travers les siècles, eds. M. Bossí and C. A. Porter (1990). There can be no claim to complete coverage because of the extensive research that remains to be done as well as the absence of the relevant legacies in ancient Western Asia, Egypt, China, India, and the Byzantine and Arab civilizations. Prof. Poster also repeats the previously defined terminology and lists the book’s essays which were mentioned in the editors’ preface.

The two opening chapters on letter-writing in ancient Greece and Rome are followed by a chapter on the medieval creation of the ars dictaminis. For almost half of the text the next six chapters on the history of epistolary composition are of interest to readers of this journal. Martin Camargo offers “If You Can’t Join Them, Beat Them; or When Grammar Met Business Writing (in Fifteenth-Century Oxford)” is a finely detailed analysis of the academic saga accompanied by a translated excerpt from David Pencaer’s Cartuaria and relevant Latin text in Oxford, Bodleian Library MS. Lat. misc. e. 93, fols. 13^r–14^v. “From Ars dictaminis to Ars conscribendi epistolis [corr., epistolas]: Renaissance Letter-Writing Manuals in the Context of Humanism” by Gideon Burton follows giving a clear description of the transition with focus on Erasmus’s role. Lawrence D. Green presents “Dictamen in...