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  • The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy by Kathy Eden
  • Debora Shuger (bio)
The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy. By Kathy Eden. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. 180 pp. Cloth $40.00.

This is a small, unpolemical, important book about the small, unpolemical, important genre of the familiar letter—a genre that in late antiquity, and again following Petrarch’s 1345 rediscovery of Cicero’s Epistolae familiares, provided the model for what Eden terms the “intimate” style: the style that “reflects the close bond between the reader and a writer whose individuality or uniqueness as expressed in his writing makes this closeness possible” (95), the style that in the early sixteenth century Erasmus will champion as the model for all good writing. Eden’s monograph, that is to say, traces the history of a specific type of epistolary rhetoric from Aristotle through Montaigne, yet in so doing manages to call into question some of the most cherished axioms of the past half century of literary study. Its richly documented chapters on Seneca, Petrarch, and Erasmus leave in tatters Foucault’s tracing of the “author-function” to the post-Reformation dialectic of censorship and transgression. Eden’s demonstration of the long-standing link between epistula and sermo, letters and conversation—the understanding of letters as speaking with the distant and, after Petrarch, also with the dead—challenges the still-prevalent postmodern tendency to regard literary works as texts rather than as (in Erasmus’s phrase) “the true born image of [a person’s] mind” (85). Her account of the intimate style, the style of Montaigne and modernity, as the humanist rediscovery of a classical genre—an account that ignores class, gender, and politics—is old-style history-of-ideas-in-a-vacuum, but [End Page 627] the weight and strength of the evidence, like Il Penseroso’s “antique pillars massy proof,” supports the lofty argument. The book, however, never adverts to these contestations and resistances: a gauntlet is thrown down, but with velvet gloves and on a bed of feathers. Yet it is a serious challenge. This is a book that every early modernist should read, whether to unsettle current scholarly paradigms or to spur their more adequate defense.

Ancient rhetorical theory focuses on the agonistic oratorical modes suited for the courtroom and forum. Yet, although one finds little on letter-writing before Cicero, the conceptual core of what will become the epistolary style derives, like so much else, from Aristotle. In particular, Eden calls attention to the intertwined, overlapping senses of a cluster of Aristotelian terms related to oikos (one’s household or homestead). Oikeiotēs (οἰκειότης), a key term in the Nicomachean Ethics, means “intimacy” (as English translations often render it). Oikeia in Aristotle likewise frequently connotes affective closeness, of relationships with those who are near and dear. Oikeia, however, can also refer to that which is closely bound up with a person’s character (ēthos); hence, in treating fittingness (to prepon) Aristotle argues that to construct and express character, the speaker’s language must be oikeia, a style that belongs to and befits his persona. In such contexts oikeia has less to do with affective closeness than with the legal sense of oikos as homestead, as private property, as that which “legally belongs to me and to no one else” (16). This legal sense is likewise salient in Aristotle’s observation that an author’s stylistic choices stem from his oikeion ēthos or oikeia physis, his particular inner character or nature (19). Aristotle’s oikos-cognates thus imply some sort of bond linking affective closeness, style as expressive of character, and style as reflecting the author’s distinctive temperament and cast of mind. The subsequent braiding together of these semantic strands in late Antiquity and, more tightly, in the Renaissance creates what Eden means by the “intimate style.”

Familiaris, the Latin counterpart to oikeia, retains the Greek term’s affective but not its legal sense (for which Latin uses proprium or suum). Cicero, the next major figure in Eden’s genealogy of the epistolary style, also carries over into Latin the Aristotelian association of to prepon with to oikeion, whereby the most fitting or decorous style is one that...

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