Medieval Letters

This volume is a very valuable addition to the scholarship on medieval epistolography. It presents a substantial body of recent work on medieval letters, exemplifying some important emerging approaches and methodologies, while at the same time—and perhaps exceptionally for such a large multi-authored collection—retaining an impressive thematic coherence which gives it a potential importance in the field beyond the interest of the individual contributions. This is a tribute to the editors, Christian Høgel and Elisabetta Bartoli, who have brought together twenty-nine authors, writing mostly in two languages (Italian and English, with single contributions in Spanish and French), from a larger conference. The volume has two unifying themes. The first is the fictive nature of the letter—broadly, that all letters have rhetorical, narrative and persuasive functions and that we should not impose artificial distinctions between supposedly real missives, reflecting the historical reality of a situation, and fictional, rhetorical or edited versions which survive in collections. The second, and obviously connected, theme is the reconsideration of the epistolary genre, defined inclusively to embrace letters, letter collections (both traditional and dictaminal) and the range of other writings which share epistolary characteristics, not simply as formally similar but as products of related and reciprocal creative processes. This allows what the editors justifiably claim to be a more inclusive approach to ‘epistolary texts’ (p. 5)

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