Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern Culture:
An Introduction
Gabriella Del Lungo Camiciotti
University of Florence (<[email protected]>)
Abstract
The recently renewed scholarly interest in historical letters and letter writing has given rise to
several studies which explore the culture of epistolarity from different perspectives. The article
offers an introduction to recent scholarship on epistolary discourse and practices in early modern
culture. Given the importance of letters as data for several types of diachronic investigation,
the article focuses on three points that are crucial for an understanding of the relevance of
epistolary discourse itself in early modern European culture. Firstly, letters are invaluable data
for historical linguistics, to which they provide information for the HISTORY of languages, and
sociohistorical and sociolinguistic research. A second recent field of investigation considers
letters as documents and material items; the results of research in this area have contributed
to the reconstruction of official relationships and information exchanges in past cultures and
shed light on social interaction. A third, more traditional area of study, deals with the letter as a
form that has given rise to many different genres across the centuries, both practical and literary.
Keywords: Critical APPROACHES, Letters, Letter Writing, Early Modern Culture
1. Introduction
The historical study of epistolary discourse is a fascinating topic in itself as, in
addition to contributing to our knowledge of past linguistic stages of European
languages, it opens a window on the practices of letter writing and reading of
past AGES and the socio-cultural reality they are embedded in. It provides an
invaluable means of reconstructing ways of communicating both in the public
and the personal spheres. From the linguistic diachronic point of view letter
writing is a particularly rewarding object of study since epistolary discourse
is perhaps the most ancient form of attested writing (Petrucci 2008) thus al-
lowing the investigation of its features across time and cultures. Furthermore,
epistolary discourse is a fully fledged textual genre in its own right, as it is
distinguishable from other types of discourse by specific pronominal and
linguistic features (Altman 1982), which render it a unique genre (Dossena
and Del Lungo Camiciotti 2012); it is multifunctional and extremely varied
in that the official and practical use of the letter has developed over the agesand given rise to different textual subgenres ranging from the Pauline epistles
incorporated in the Bible to the medieval letter as an administrative document
or treatise of spiritual instruction, from scientific correspondence and newslet-
ters in the seventeenth century to the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century,
from personal to commercial correspondence which particularly developed
in the late modern period. In brief, the investigation of correspondence may
give insights into both particular aspects of communication in specific periods
and the socio-cultural functions it serves.
Since the late twentieth century socio-linguists, social historians, and
literary scholars have become increasingly INTERESTED in the letter as genre and
letter writing as social and cultural practice. The renewed academic interest in
letters has resulted not only in scholarly studies, but also in the publication of
letter collections1
and useful specialised bibliographies (just to mention three
recent ones see Daybell 2005a, 2006a, Daybell and Gordon 2012) which
have enlarged the amount of data and analytic tools available to scholars and
helped define the relevance of letters to shed light on socio-cultural issues such
as, for instance, the rate of literacy or women’s education in past periods. The
study of historical correspondence has also clarified orthographic variation
and linguistic change in progress in past periods. Most scholarly contributions
focus on the whole modern period as this was a great age of letters and letter
writing all over Europe and beyond; and many studies tend to concentrate
on the eighteenth century (see Postigliola et al. 1985) considering that it is
in this century that the epistolary genre reached a perhaps unsurpassed so-
ciocultural prominence as a form of communication and expression, and on
the late modern period when correspondence reached an unsurpassed volume
and social EXTENSION (Boureau and Chartier 1991). It is, however, in the early
modern period that correspondence acquired the characteristics and uses that
were to become typical of the genre in the whole modern period.