Letters exploit two features of writing: its capacity to preserve speech across time, and its capacity to make speech portable. They have existed as long as writing itself: it cannot be a coincidence that the only reference to a letter in the Homeric poems is also the only specific mention of writing in the poems (Iliad 6.167–70). The letter, however, is not simply speech at a distance. Its defining characteristic is the fact that the author is not present when the letter reaches its destination and goes about its purposes. The absence of the author is embedded in the assumptions of the *genre, and it often preoccupies the letter writer to a degree that is rarer in other modes of writing. For most of the history of the letter, the uncertain period between its composition and its delivery has tended to make letters more self-conscious about the passage of time, and more likely to speculate about the circumstances prevailing when they arrive. This gap between writing and receiving has been largely eliminated by modern technology.
The material on which letters have been recorded has varied according to the resources and ingenuity of their senders. Ovid tells us that the Greek youth Acontius transmitted a message to his beloved Cydippe by inscribing it on an apple (Heroides 20.9–10). Ancient letters were more often written on wooden tablets, either directly on the wood or inscribed in a shallow layer of wax, a format that could be folded and sealed with wax or cords to protect the fragile medium and to secure its content against unintended or unwelcome readers. Wax tablets were designed to be easily erased and reused, marking the status of such letters as ephemeral. If the letter was felt to be important, of course, it could be transferred to more expensive semipermanent storage, usually in the form of *papyrus, *parchment, or paper. Letters on papyrus have been preserved in the sands of Egypt for two thousand years, and wooden tablets from the first and second centuries CE have been preserved at Vindolanda on the Roman frontier in the British Isles. Such survivals show something of the tenor of the vast majority of ancient letters, written in the belief that their content had no permanent value.
The manuscript tradition has transmitted a very large number of letters from antiquity and preserved examples of many different types. The most familiar category is represented by Cicero’s private correspondence, unpublished during his lifetime, but issued posthumously by his secretary Tiro. Other letters were published, and partly composed, by their authors as public demonstrations of their literary talents: into this category fall, for example, the letters published by the younger Pliny. In Greek, there are categories less familiar to modern readers. We have collections of “imaginary” letters, self-evidently fictitious letters written for literary purposes by writers such as Alciphron, Aelian, Philostratus, and Aristaenetus. We have “pseudonymous” letters, such as those ascribed to Hippocrates, Socrates, and Diogenes the Cynic. The Greek letters attributed to the tyrant Phalaris were shown to be late imposters by Richard Bentley in 1699, in a treatise that was a landmark in the development of modern historical and linguistic scholarship.
In medieval Europe, Latin letter writing came increasingly to be codified from the eleventh century by the so-called ars dictaminis (art of letter writing). Influential manuals emphasized the use of formulas and attempted to identify and standardize the parts of letters that were shared by all letters devoted to similar tasks. Letters written according to these conventions showed some tendency to elaborate the introductory and closing formulas of the letter while abbreviating and simplifying the intervening material. The manuals emphasized the task that the letter was intended to achieve, and they looked to ancient rhetorical principles to guide the letter’s composition and structure. By standardizing certain types of official communication, the manuals reduced the scope for misunderstanding, but only at the cost of marginalizing the personality of the sender. Because it was often difficult to separate the official capacity of senders from their personal capacity, the tone and structure of personal letters was also influenced by the formal requirements of the conventions. In these circumstances, a mode of communication constructed for bureaucracies and institutions became a model for communication between individuals, and the private letter acquired some of the characteristics of the public pronouncement.
It was this medieval context that made Francesco Petrarch’s rediscovery in 1345 of Cicero’s private correspondence with Atticus a revolutionary event. The discovery reasserted the role of the letter as a component in a private conversation between friends, and it contributed to Petrarch’s increasing self-consciousness about the nature and the audience of his own letters. Among its first fruits, however, were a series of public letters addressed to figures of the ancient world, starting with Cicero himself. This letter to Cicero was the first of a number of public addresses to the illustrious dead, written in the tone of a conversation with a learned friend. Petrarch thus turned the central conceit of the letter form on its head: the absence of the author presupposed by the letter was used instead to focus attention on the absence of the recipient. This unprecedented mode allowed Petrarch to select his particular friends from among the greatest figures of the ancient world, and to present himself as one for whom such conversations were natural and proper.
Letters were one aspect of manuscript culture that flourished and expanded in Europe following the advent of the printing press. Improved communications and the relative cheapness of paper were certainly factors, but the place of letter writing in the classrooms of the period was also of central importance. Letter writing was taught in the schools as a valuable social skill, but it also had practical advantages as a classroom exercise: it could be relatively brief and self-contained, and it combined simple rules and rigorous imitation with opportunities for innovation and imagination. This confluence of the preferences of the educators with the priorities of the educated led to large numbers of new letter-writing manuals in all languages. Some of these were regularly reprinted, including the work of Carolus Virulus (1476), Erasmus (1522), Juan Luis Vives (1534), Georgius Macropedius (1543), and Justus Lipsius (1591). *Vernacular versions soon followed: from England, for example, we have William Fullwood’s Enimie of Idlenesse (1568) and Angel Day’s English Secretary (1586). A century later, Henry Care’s Female Secretary (1671) formally invited women into a genre they had long inhabited and provided model letters that he believed voiced their concerns. By the seventeenth century, the letter was among the most highly theorized genres in existence. Like any well-defined genre, it was easily parodied: the notorious Latin satire Letters of Obscure Men (1515–17) has many targets, but along the way it takes aim at the conventions of the letter form.
During the same period, the most common public letter of all, the letter of dedication, underwent some internal reorganization. It had been a prominent and specialized instance of the letter proper since ancient times. Its traditional role was to praise the dedicatee, to make a plausible connection between the dedicatee and the work in hand, and thus to foster a relationship between the dedicator and the dedicatee. As the document that mediated the reader’s approach to the work, the dedicatory letter was often assigned a further role: to examine the purposes and methods of the work it prefaced. However, these two roles were quite different and their conjunction sometimes awkward. During the sixteenth century, the dedicatory letter bifurcated into the dedication and the preface To the Reader, where both jobs could be done separately and more conveniently. The dedicatory letter, freed from the obligation to perform scholarly tasks, could now move further in the direction of eulogy.
Most private letters were autographs, and the hand of the sender was both a guarantor of the letter’s authenticity and a projection of intimacy. The sealing of letters, a practice common to all ages, generated a sense of privacy that encouraged writers to commit sensitive matters to paper. Those who maintained large correspondences would often file them alphabetically by sender and chronologically by date in order to facilitate regular and timely replies. In the process they accidentally created substantial biographical archives and bequeathed them to their literary executors. Because letters were so often authoritative, semiconfessional, precisely dated, and carefully organized, they came to occupy a central position in the art of biography. The letter collections of religious figures, statesmen, and scholars could become vehicles to illustrate exemplary lives. In the seventeenth century, artful editors shaped the biographies of men like Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon by excluding awkward letters and inconvenient material from their collections. In doing so, they constructed and transmitted an ideal of the scholarly life that remains influential.
As this idea of the scholar took shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, letters emerged as a mechanism for communicating new research and discoveries. In this role, letters were gradually superseded by the learned journal, but for a time scholars could claim to feel part of an international conversation maintained through correspondence and might identify themselves as members of a “respublica litterarum,” a *“republic of letters” or a “republic of the learned.” A number of modern projects devoted to understanding the phenomenon are detailed in the entry “networks” in this volume. The term republic of letters is often misleading as a tool for examining the history of the letter: it is part of an elaborate recurring metaphor rather than the name of an informal international club.
Handwritten letters are unusual historical documents because we often have precise information about how they were read by their recipients. The audiences of plays leave few impressions of their experiences, and the readers of books rarely do more than write notes in the margins, but the recipients of letters often supply us with detailed accounts of their immediate reactions in their replies. The process that constructed these replies may also be studied: letter readers often annotated the letters they had received in order to prepare their response, and large numbers of drafts survive from all periods that record an intermediate stage in the process between the receipt of the letter and the composition of a reply.
The immediacy of letters, the sense that they represent a timely response to the issues raised by a correspondent, has always been part of their attraction. In the heyday of the printed newspaper, editors regularly published letters from their readers because the immediacy of the genre was consonant with the purposes of the publication as a whole. With news organizations now providing their readers with facilities for online comment, the role of the letter to the editor is very much reduced.
The expansion of electronic messaging has transformed the letter. The traditional letter tended to address a range of subjects, but an email is more likely to be a shorter piece of text addressing fewer issues. Electronic messages are often less carefully composed, and they leave fewer traces of the process of composition. They are more easily stored and retrieved than paper letters, but they are seldom retained for long by their recipients, and the chances of long-term preservation for the overwhelming majority are slim.
Paul Botley
See also bureaucracy; documentary authority; files; forgery; journals; layout and script in letters; learning; networks; privacy; secretaries; teaching