“Bad speech corrupts good morals”

Gunzo of Novara’s letter to the monks of Reichenau (Epistola ad Augienses), in which the author responds to a slight against him perpetrated by a monk of Saint Gall in the form of a lengthy invective, has rightly been seen as an important witness to the intellectual culture of the late tenth-century Latin West. This paper carefully examines the contents of the letter and advances two further arguments: (1) the letter should be understood against the background of the classical doctrine that style and character were intimately related; and (2) attention should be paid to the role of the monks of Reichenau in plying Gunzo with information and possibly prompting him to write in the first place, particularly given the tensions between Saint Gall and Reichenau at the time that the letter was written

Art · Art history · Character (mathematics) · Context (archaeology) · Doctrine · Invective · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · SAINT · Style (visual arts) · Subtext · Theology · Witness · Historical and Archaeological Studies · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · History · Law · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy

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  Open Access•William L North•Medieval Worlds•2024

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