He remarks that the sort of sudden sentence breaks that are so common in dialogue do not translate well to letter-writing: ‘abruptness in writing causes obscurity’. Letters can do some things much better than speech. ‘The letter should be strong in characterization,’ Demetrius observes. ‘Everyone writes a letter in the virtual image of his own soul. In every other form of speech it is possible to see the writer’s character, but in none so clearly as in the letter.’
With regards to length, a letter should be ‘restricted’. ‘Those that are too long, not to mention too inflated in style, are not in any true sense letters at all but treatises with the heading “Dear Sir”.’ It is also ‘absurd to be so formal in letters, it is even contrary to friendship, which demands the proverbial calling of “a spade a spade”.’ And there were some topics for which a letter was just plain unsuitable, not least ‘the problems of logic or natural philosophy’. Rather, ‘A letter’s aim is to express friendship briefly and set out a simple subject in simple terms . . . The man who utters sententious maxims and exhortations seems to be no longer chatting in a letter but preaching from the pulpit.’ Demetrius allowed for one or two exceptions to this, such as letters addressed to ‘cities or kings’, which permitted a little more elaboration. ‘In summary, the letter should combine two of the styles, the elegant or graceful and the plain, and this concludes my account of the letter.’
By the thirteenth century, when Boncompagno crafted his advice, the range of letter templates available had expanded greatly, and their abundance fulfilled a need: letter-writing was not an intuitive skill. The craft of letter-writing was only beginning to be taught in European schools, and although Cicero and Seneca would shortly be back in vogue, their antiquity was not always suited to contemporary challenges. So there were two choices: the professional paid scribe who set up a stall in the market as if he was selling root crops, or the ars dictaminis, the self-help manual. The ars dictaminis would soon have a sibling, the ars notariae, which specialised in writing advice for legal and patent matters, but its main purpose was to provide a guide to writing ‘familiar’ or more personal and general letters, albeit ones that still bowed firmly to rhetorical tradition (and were usually designed to be read out loud to whoever was gathered when they arrived).
Italy and France led the way, with England following their trail, and there were soon so many that it was hard to distinguish between them, the faddy self-help books of their day. The earliest available inspiration came from a guide by the Benedictine monk, Alberic of Monte Cassino, published around 1075, while a short and anonymous manual published 60 years later in Bologna was one of the earliest to give detailed instruction on the correct forms of opening address, the salutatio that was to remain a standard entry in general etiquette guides, cleverly combining the benevolentiae captatio, the securing of goodwill by flattery (the best technique was to induce a sense of fatherly or brotherly feeling, or failing that a sense of ‘fellowship’). A pupil may get his way with his master if he sticks to something like ‘To [master’s name here] By divine grace resplendent in Ciceronian charm, [your name here], inferior to his devoted learning, expresses the servitude of a sincere heart.’ The next three categories of advice were not too far removed from something we might expect today: the naratio (the latest news), the petitio (the real reason for writing) and the conclusio.
One of the first such textbooks in English was compiled by an Italian, Giovanni di Bologna, specifically for use by the Archbishop of Canterbury, while Lawrence of Aquilegia wrote some of the first recognisable examples of the ‘form letter’, whereby a user fills in the blanks on a template by picking the relevant words from a list. The choice of recipients alone provides quite a range, from kings and archdeacons to heretics and ‘falsos infidelos’, the latter perhaps more deserving of a pub brawl than flawless correspondence.
Soon the university cities of Bologna and Orleans were offering so many different professional guides that their authors, the master épistoliers, were called dictatori, a term which underlined their overbearing political influence. Many were members of the clergy, some also held teaching posts at universities. Their names were famous in their day: Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Arnulf of Orleans, Peter of Blois, Ludolf of Hildescheim and Conrad of Zurich.
As with the more refined reaches of academia, many dictatori seemed to be writing for the sole benefit and approval of fellow dictatori; many of their letter templates describe the masterful art of letter-writing, a hall of mirrors. A prime example is supplied by Hugh of Bologna in his Rationes Dictandi from the twelfth century. After a slow and suitably grovelling start (‘To X, a very great scholar in the science of letters, a very eloquent man’ etc), the letter considers its navel: ‘The grace of God was not content, oh master and most revered lord, to make you a peerless scholar in the liberal arts; it has also provided you with a great gift in epistolary art. This is what is reported by an insistent rumour that fills the greater part of the world; this rumour could not persist were it not true.’
Portrayed thus, master letter-writers of late medieval Europe bestrode society as an enviable combination of healer of the sick and rock god.
Indeed, through the operation of an incomparable grace, you have known how to teach to your disciples that which God has given to you to know, much more quickly than other masters. That is why so very many disciples forsake the other masters and hasten from all sides towards you, as fast as they are able. Under your instruction, the uneducated are immediately cultivated, the stutterers are immediately eloquent, the dull-witted are immediately enlightened, the twisted are immediately made straight.*
The letter-writing manual changed significantly during the Renaissance as humanism embraced Petrarch’s influence and, by default, Cicero’s. By the beginning of the sixteenth century we had certainly arrived at the modern sort of guidebook we would have still acknowledged as useful 20 years ago, the methodus conscribendi epistolis. The latest champion of the art was Desiderius Erasmus, the masterful Dutch humanist and perhaps the foremost scholar of his day; he not only ushered in the Protestant Reformation, but also found time to write thousands of tracts and letters on non-theological themes. His tracts confronted head on the Seneca-toned concerns of how best one should live one’s life (and not waste it: one of his most famous treatises was about folly). And his letters, of which about 1,600 have survived (he claimed to have spent about half of his life writing them) range from his rational defence of his stance against new Catholic doctrines, through his translations of classical literature, to far more personal matters such as the disappointing vintage of the local wines to his poor finances and health (he had debilitating arthritis, and in later years had to pass on writing duties to an assistant). And of course several of the letters contained the one recurring topic we’ve seen before and may see again: Erasmus chiding his friends and family for not writing sooner and more often.
Writing in about 1487 from a monastery near Gouda to his older brother Pieter, a monk based near Delft, Erasmus pushed the guilt button from the start:
Have you so completely rid yourself of all brotherly feeling, or has all thought of your Erasmus wholly fled your heart? I write letters and send them repeatedly, I demand news again and again, I keep asking your friends when they come from your direction, but they never have a hint of a letter or any message: they merely say that you are well. Of course this is the most welcome news I could hear, but you are no more dutiful thereby. As I perceive how obstinate you are, I believe it would be easier to get blood from a stone than coax a letter out of you!
Erasmus’s letters were strewn all over Europe: he wrote to correspondents in London, Cambridge, Dover, Amsterdam, Cologne, Strasbourg, Bologna, Turin, Brussels and Lubeck. He believed there was ‘almost no kind of theme which a letter may not treat’, but he was largely