Letter writing in medieval and Renaissance Europe flourished for reasons literary and non- literary, as a practice that supported the networks of merchants, bankers, bureaucrats, and other professionals, while also acting as a favored literary genre among humanists and vernacular authors. Leaving aside the mercantile letters that helped produce the economic boom of medieval and early
modern Italy, my focus here is on letters produced for publication between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. I then move to a discussion on non-published letters. Letters fashioned or edited for publication began with the Latin humanist letter, which evolved to produce a vernacular
tradition that, though it was indebted to Ciceronian and humanist models, veered toward more accessible, less philosophical themes.1 Petrarch’s monumental discovery of Cicero’s letters in 1345
and subsequent publication of his Rerum familiarum libri in Latin inaugurated the humanist tradition, paving the way for others like Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444), and Poliziano (1454–1494) to follow his example.2 Humanist letters, written in Latin, provided essay-like
contemplations on moral philosophy and politics with constructed arguments on a wide range of themes such as virtue, fortune, and friendship. In writing on these topics, authors used letter writing to promote and circulate humanist ideas while also proving their skills as writers.
The decision to write in Latin over the vernacular was part of a century-long debate in the Quattrocento about which Italian humanists were split. While some like Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1407– 1457) found spoken vernaculars to be inferior to written Latin, which was considered superior because of its fixed grammatical rules, others like Leon Battista Alberti believed in the power of an elevated volgare.3 By the turn of the sixteenth century, this conversation transformed into one about
1 Claudio Guillén refers to the humanist letter as the “neo-Latin prose letter” and the vernacular letter as the “prose letter in vulgar tongue.” “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” in Renaissance Genres:
Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986), 71–72.
2 Like their male humanist counterparts, women humanists in fifteenth-century Italy began composing familiar letterbooks as well. Three notable Italian women who did so were Isotta Nogarola (1418–1466), Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558), and Laura Cereta (1469–1499). Following the example of Petrarch and classical authors, these three women attained fame through the way in which they represented themselves in their familiar letters. Ray, Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance, 20.
3 Bruno Migliorini, Storia della lingua italiana (Milan: Tascibili Bompiani, 2007), 241; Letizia Panizza, “The Quattrocentro,” in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 152–53.
which vernacular was the best to standardize. The publication of the Venetian Pietro Bembo’s Prose
della volgar lingua in 1525 signified a watershed moment in this dispute. He contended that authors
should adopt Tuscan as the literary language and use the Italian found in the prose and poetry of Boccaccio and Petrarch, writers who were living over a hundred years earlier.4 Though he received
push back from non-Tuscans and Tuscans alike, such as Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529), one of Bembo’s motives was to establish a vernacular for the print industry; printers could encourage the Tuscan vernacular, which would in turn produce books that could be marketed to literate Italians. The Tuscan Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), newly transplanted to Venice, published his first volume of Italian letters Primo libro de le lettere in 1538. The letters he published were versions of actual letters and were conversational in nature; though his choice of writing in the vernacular was not explicitly tied to the questione della lingua, these published letters still endorsed and solidified a notion of Italian as a language worthy of publication, which in turn garnered more participation from writers of diverse backgrounds.5 Aretino’s six volumes of letters were groundbreaking for they “offered highly
crafted versions of ostensibly private correspondence to a public eager to listen in on the conversations of celebrities.”6 Many authors imitated Aretino, utilizing vernacular letters as a
medium for their own self-representation and self-promotion.7
4 Brian Richardson, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy: The Editor and the Vernacular Text (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 61.
5 Guillén, “Notes toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” 92.
6 Deanna Shemek, “Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture,” Oxford Bibliographies Online: Renaissance and Reformation, 2013, http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo- 9780195399301-0194.xml?rskey=nhKCrm&result=3&q=epistolary+culture&print#firstMatch. Because of their appeal to the public, Raffaele Morabito describes Aretino’s letters as “un genere che potrebbe definirsi ‘di consumo.’” Lettere e letteratura: Studi sull’epistolografia volgare in Italia (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001), 25.
7 Ray, Writing Gender in Women’s Letter Collections of the Italian Renaissance, 4. Many considered Aretino’s familiar letters as a new reinvented genre. In many respects, Aretino along with the “pre-Aretinian” female epistolary writers (such as the Nogarola, Fedele, and Cereta) paved the way for later sixteenth-century women writers to enter into the public discourse through letter writing. As Ray writes, “among this virtual flood of letter writers
In contrast to letters curated for publication, the missives of Elisabetta Gonzaga and Isabella d’Este, like those of merchants and chancelleries, are directed to single addressees and did not anticipate wide circulation. The princesses’ letters existed first and foremost as a means of communication between sender and recipient, with no intention of being shared among a wider public. While there has been much debate over the extent to which letters not intended for publication are “literary,” this dichotomy between the literary and the non-literary cannot be maintained. As Amyrose McCue Gill argues, “letters are decidedly persuasive and rhetorical (as is, one could argue, all writing) rather than engaged in representing a historical ‘truth’ […] the epistle is a literary form in which authorial intent, audience and historical context are of particular relevance.”8
Whether letters were meant for wide circulation or not, they were carefully crafted with a specific style, goal, or intention in mind, and therefore “exhibit regular formal features of a genre.”9 For
instance, some Renaissance writers of letters received a humanist education, and depending on the extent of their instruction, were most likely well versed in works by classical authors who privileged the art of rhetoric. Some probably even studied letter writing manuals to teach them to write in a persuasive, erudite, and clear manner.10
[that came after the publication of Aretino’s letters] were a number of women, who brought to the genre a wide range of female experience, from discussions of marriage, motherhood, sexuality, and virtue to reflections on the challenges of being a woman writer.” 4.
8 McCue Gill, “Vera Amicizia: Conjugal Friendship in the Italian Renaissance,” 134.
9 Deanna Shemek, “In Continuous Expectation: Isabella d’Este’s Epistolary Desire,” in Phaethon’s Children: The
Este Court and Its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara, ed. Deanna Shemek and Dennis Looney (Tempe: Arizona
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005), 279. Furthermore, Giles Constable writes the that the worth of letters as historical documents “must always be evaluated in the light of their literary character.”
Letters and Letter-Collections (Turnhout: Brepols, 1976), 12.
10 For as Najemy claims, “manuals on letter writing began as relatively modest treatises that provided a few definitions, outlined the main types or categories of letters, and either supplied some examples for imitation or gave advice about matters of usage, diction, and style.” Between Friends, 42. One of the most influential letter writing manuals in and outside of Italy was Agostino Dati’s Elegantiolae (1470). This manual saw roughly fifty-six printings by 1500. Cecil H. Clough, “The Cult of Antiquity: Letters and Letter Collections,” in
Even given this distinction between published and unpublished letters, the various traditions of Renaissance letter should not be understood as “watertight compartments” because their uses and styles often blend together.11 Indeed, John Najemy argues that “private, vernacular letters could
sometimes share the literary elegance or pretension of a humanist letter, and the same was certainly true of many of the diplomatic letters written by humanist chancellors.”12 Consciously or not,
Elisabetta and Isabella combined various traditions, styles, and uses, even though their letters were meant mainly for the eyes of their recipients. Their friendship letters form part of courtly women’s extensive engagement with letter writing in Renaissance Italy and also exhibit an understanding of intimacy as an epistolary mode that dates back to Cicero. As the next sections illustrate, as
noblewomen, Elisabetta and Isabella had some training in the formal practices of epistolary writing, like the ars dictaminis (the art of dictation, also known as the ars dictandi); at the same time, their exchanges, though in the vernacular, reveal similar notions of intimacy to those that classical and humanist authors imagined and communicated in their own letters.13