The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy by Kathy Eden (review)

The closer the close reading, the more difficult translation becomes. Commencing with Aristotle’s words for household, feelings, “haunt,” decorum, property, style, intimacy, friendship, and character, Eden discerns a hermeneutic about individuals and intimacy within the frame of legal thought but deliberately outside that of rhetoric. From the differences between writing and speaking, she develops a modality (my word) that will foster intimate self-expression in writing and reading letters. Like Aristotle, Seneca excludes rhetoric from letter writing: the soul and the “haunt” (physical place) ought to be revealed. There is a moral valence and a particular intimate attitude that readers of intimate letters ought to adopt. Seneca rejects the spontaneity or acceptance of meandering prose that Cicero, because it is written by an individual, accepts. Seneca’s analogy between reading intimate letters and digesting a meal became a cherished commonplace.

The somewhat obscure Demetrius favors a uniformity of style, despite individuality, which is not exactly a step back from individual self-expression, since he recommends a plain style that reveals the letter writer’s soul and character. But it is Cicero who enriches the modality by stressing the importance of spontaneity. He celebrates writing what comes to mind; feelings and seeking to please are outside the sphere of rhetoric, and perhaps outside concern for the self or for property. Cicero’s letters to his friend Atticus were much praised, and they inspired emulation as no other pagan ancient’s did. When younger, Cicero was more respectful of the developing rules of the genre, but when writing to Atticus, he seems liberated from most of the early prescriptive thought about intimate writing.

When Petrarch discovered a copy of Cicero’s Letters to Atticus in 1345, he not only found a liberating exemplum that authorized him to be more truly himself in writing, but also found a friend—Cicero—to whom he could write, thanks to ancient thought about the unimportance to friendship of time and distance. Petrarch defined his letters to Cicero (and to St. Jerome) as nonrhetorical and uninvolved with vanity. Letter writing did not weaken Petrarch’s Christian devotional life, or so he claimed. Still, there is evidence of moments of doubt, for example, in the Secretum (really a letter to himself), where Petrarch poses as a humble child of God before St. Augustine, that towering letter writer and castigator of vanity.

Some terms of intimacy can be modified by adjectives, or by adverbs such as “more” or “less”; others cannot. Erasmus would seek to be intimate with St. Paul the letter writer; but from respect, he dared not become too familiar. Seneca had proposed how to deepen the experience of reading; but now, discerning differences in Paul’s letters according to the addressee, Erasmus enriched the still quite “undertheorized” thought about the individual inherited from antiquity. Erasmus too thought that rhetoric had a place in letters. Like Cicero, Seneca, Quintilian, and, to a lesser extent, Petrarch, Erasmus wrote prescriptive (pedagogical) prose about intimacy. Did they largely ignore their own rules in writing letters? Analyzing the relation between the prescriptive and the act of writing letters would be an interesting task.

Montaigne wrote essays because he lacked a living friend with whom to exchange letters. Rightly ignoring all the issues of earlier or later writing, Eden emphasizes Montaigne’s quite casual summary of most of the issues about intimacy as first stated by Aristotle and his readers. For example, property, instead of being a mere transhistorical term for Montaigne, prompts original philosophical thought within the context of intimacy and, as is usual for him, of universality as well. There are also many resonances in Montaigne from Seneca’s On Benefits, about both friendship and familiarity but also about relations to material objects (his tower). There are differences between masks and conceits. Montaigne had no individual predecessor in antiquity, yet his individuality consists of so many conceits with antique resonances that the more we read him, the less we know him. Nonetheless, he certainly is...