Briefe schreiben im 16. Jahrhundert: Formen und Funktionen des epistolarischen Diskurses in den italienischen libre di lettere (review)

Between orality and literacy, fictive self-fashioning and truthful confession, the letter represents a literary way station that can serve many functions for both letter-writers themselves and scholars interested in the reconstruction of past worlds. In this book, Claudia Ortner-Buchberger has examined sixteenth-century Italian books of letters (libri di lettere), and in so doing she has written thefirst synthetic modern monograph on this topic. She builds on the work of Amadeo Quondam, who in 1981 edited a volume entitled Le "carte messagiere": Retorica e modelli di comunicazione epistolare, which among other things listed 540 Italian letter books from 1538 — the date of Pietro Aretino's Lettere (the first designated libro di lettere in the vernacular and, as Ortner-Buchberger points out, a bestseller) — to 1627, books which contained in toto over forty-thousand letters.

Ortner-Buchberger's perspective is informed by the historiographies of the book, of public civility, of the organization of knowledge, and of the roles of intellectuals. She describes a "vertical axis" and a "horizontal axis" within which to situate her study of sixteenth-century letter books. The vertical axis takes account of the diachronic dimensions of the problem, as she surveys the cultures ofletter-writing in antiquity (with a focus on Cicero), the Middle Ages (where the ars dictaminis plays an important role), and among fifteenth-century humanists. A key change takes place in Latinate Italian humanistic culture, though formally and structurally much remains the same: the author follows Helene Harth in stating that humanist letters are more dialogical than the late medieval letters that preceded them; the expectation was implicitly or explicitly present that a response was needed to complete the letter's function.

As she moves to the sixteenth century and to the horizontal axis, she divides her account into four major areas. The first three situate letter-writing broadly within the rhetorical rubrics of delectare (to delight), movere (to move the emotions), and docere (to teach). This division represents, for Ortner-Buchberger, the functions that letter-books served and the ways that authors were conditioned to imagine their purpose. As to the category of delectare, here Ortner-Buchberger situates a number of letter-books within a new Lachkultur, or culture of laughter, with the sixteenth-century literature of conversation (Castiglione and Guazzo, principally) serving as background. In this respect, restraint is important; the buffone becomes a negative example, one to be avoided by those aspiring to the proper courtly ideal. So a quick wit, able to supply appropriate responses with an arguta prontezza, is appreciated in various letter-collections, and buffoonery is not, though Ortner-Buchberger does note the existence of a kind of carnivalesque letter-type, exemplified in Cesare Rao's 1567 L'argute e facete lettere or Vincenzo Belando's 1588 Lettere facete. Within the category of movere, one finds collections of love letters, such as Luigi Pasqualigo's Lettere amorose (1563, anonymously, from 1570 attributed); in this and other such collections, love letters become signs of a new form of communication, affectively elevated above the letter-as-substitute-conversation and able even to be passionately fetishized. In the category of docere, one finds letter-books that offer a number of different forms of information, from the vulgarization of "high" learning, to the collecting of spiritual letters (Vittoria Colonna), to the transmittal of news (Paolo Giovio), to increased consciousness of the expansion of the known world (Vespucci). Moving beyond the three rhetorical categories, Ortner-Buchberger examines a fourth, highlighting the way letters could serve as a means of constituting a public persona, for historical actors ranging from Aretino to the learned courtesan Veronica Franco. By the late sixteenth century, contemporaries recognized an "Italian style" of letter-book. Montaigne claimed that he possessed around one hundred volumes of letters published by Italians...