Medieval Letters

Modern scholarship on medieval letters has often focused on fictionality and historicity. In the attempt to distinguish 'real' letters from stylistic models, i.e. master-letters composed by dictators as didactic examples (or real letters used as such), scholars of both Latin and other European langu [...]
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Modern scholarship on medieval letters has often focused on fictionality and historicity. In the attempt to distinguish 'real' letters from stylistic models, i.e. master-letters composed by dictators as didactic examples (or real letters used as such), scholars of both Latin and other European languages have discussed the authentic or faked nature of medieval letters and of their parts and elements, and how to use them as historical sources. The aim of this volume is to explore the many new achievements and discoveries in this field of studies, which in the last years has gained enourmously through editions of medieval treatises on letter-writing and of letter-collections, and through the re-evaluation of the huge and partly still unpublished heritage of letter-models as a reliable source for institutional and social history as well as for literary and legal history. In this process the exploration of the meeting points between different disciplinary approaches has in itself constituted a highly productive research method.This volume therefore contains methodological essays, contributions on Latin literature from the early Middle Ages to the fifteenth century, essays on Byzantine and Romance literature and a final set on Court letters. Furthermore, it documents the proceedings of three precious workshops on unedited texts and celebrated cases of disputed authorship: women's love letters, the Epistolae duorum amantium, and Dante's (?) Epistola to Cangrande.