Ars Dictaminis

The last few years have seen a flourishing across Europe in studies on the ars dictaminis, the medieval art of letter- and document-writing, but Florian Hartmann’s monograph fruitfully covers a series of key, yet surprisingly quite neglected, aspects of it. Its significance inherently stems from the combination of its chronological and geographical remits. To date, the thirteenth century, generally perceived to be the golden age of the ars dictaminis, has taken centre stage in the secondary literature, even though it has often been approached in relation to, and as a possible lead-up to, Renaissance humanism. Hartmann’s work, instead, examines the long twelfth century, from the last decades of the eleventh to the early thirteenth century, which witnessed the dawn and consolidation of the ars dictaminis, but has tended to be treated as a prelude to the above-mentioned golden age. The same largely applies to the other main focus of the work, which aims to study the place of the ars dictaminis in communal Italy specifically, which was indubitably one of the epicentres of the genre, even though the book considers links and exchanges with other pivotal areas, too, from France to the papacy. The long twelfth century also saw the formation of the city communes, yet the thirteenth century is far more studied (see P. Grillo, ‘La frattura inesistente: l’età del comune consolare nella recente storiografia’, Archivio storico italiano, clxvii [2009], pp. 673–700)

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