{"id":803,"date":"2017-02-06T23:19:43","date_gmt":"2017-02-06T23:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=803"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:37:05","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:37:05","slug":"christian-hogel-and-elisabetta-bartoli-eds-medieval-letters-between-fiction-and-document","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2017\/02\/06\/christian-hogel-and-elisabetta-bartoli-eds-medieval-letters-between-fiction-and-document\/","title":{"rendered":"Christian H\u00f8gel and Elisabetta Bartoli, eds. Medieval Letters: Between Fiction and Document"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christian H\u00f8gel and Elisabetta Bartoli, eds. Medieval Letters: Between Fiction and Document<\/a>. <\/em>Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy<\/a> 33. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. x, 471 p. ill. ISBN 9782503555201. EUR \u20ac110.00 (hardcover).<\/p>\n

Born out of a 2013 Siena conference on the same subject, Medieval Letters: Between Fiction and Document<\/em><\/a> presents a nuanced view of the medieval relationship to letters, and indeed, of a modern reader\u2019s mediated relationship to these medieval letters. Consisting of 29 essays modified from conference presentations and with a new preface by Francesco Stella and Lars Boje Mortensen, this book is a valuable resource to scholars interested in the literary, rhetorical, or historical contexts of medieval letters and letter-writing. The majority of essays are written in English and Italian, with one essay each in Spanish and French.<\/p>\n

H\u00f8gel and Bartoli have organized the essays into seven thematic parts, named as follows: \u2018Methods\u2019; \u2018Before ars dictaminis<\/em>: The Early Middle Ages\u2019; \u2018The Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Ars Dictaminis<\/em> and the \u201cepistolary turn\u201d\u2019; \u2018Women and Love Letters\u2019; \u2018Documents, Literary Letters and Collections in Byzantium and Beyond\u2019; \u2018The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries and the Diffusion of Epistolary Rhetoric\u2019; and \u2018Late Medieval Court Letters.\u2019 Several of the essays feature translations or critical editions, notably Greti Dinkova-Bruun\u2019s critical edition of Aegidus\u2019s prose letter to Bishop Odo of Sully and Peter Dronke\u2019s translation of Latin women\u2019s love letters from Tegernsee. Other standout articles include Sylvie Lef\u00e8vre\u2019s fascinating exploration of the form and function of the standard greeting in a letter and Joan M. Ferrante\u2019s \u201cWhat Really Matters in Medieval Women\u2019s Correspondence,\u201d which outlines the emotional role women played as both political and personal correspondents.<\/p>\n

The central theme tying these essays together is the dichotomy that exists between truth and fiction, with special attention paid to the very different ways that modern and medieval readers understood this dichotomy. In the preface, Francesco Stella and Lars Boje Mortensen note that \u201cthis interdisciplinary crossing and enlarging of a scholarly domain turns the typology of the material into a continuum of grey zones and moves it away from the black-and-white of defining the Truth as if it were a logical problem\u201d (3). H\u00f8gel and Bartoli\u2019s choice to place Wim Verbaal\u2019s \u201cEpistolary Voices and the Fiction of History\u201d opposite Walter Ysabaert\u2019s \u201cMedieval Letters and Letter Collections as Historical Sources: Methodological Questions, Reflections, and Research Perspectives (Sixth-Fifteenth Centuries)\u201d at the beginning of the collection clearly situates the practice of letter-as-literature and letter-as-history against each other and allows the reader, primed by Stella and Mortensen, to consider interdisciplinarity as the lens through which they can view the remaining essays.<\/p>\n

This collection of essays sits at an intersection of authorship, reading, and publication. A medieval experience of a private letter was necessary very different than a modern reading of the same private letter; the recopying and \u201cpublication\u201d of a private letter and the ostensibly public formulae of the ars dictaminis <\/em>mark even personal letters as public constructions. The essays in this volume make the reader aware of this constructed truth and potential fiction. Mark Thue Kretschmer notes in \u201cThe Play of Ambiguity in the Medieval Latin Love Letters of the Ovidian Age (Baudri of Bourgueil and Gerald of Wales)\u201d that \u201cour modern almost automatic urge to determine whether a medieval letter is authentic or fictional does not seem to have troubled medieval readers (or listeners)\u201d (247). The juxtaposition of the medieval reading and the modern reading is a valuable one, and invites the modern reader to consider truth and fiction through the lens of the ambiguous medieval letter.<\/p>\n

Julia King
\nUniversity of Toronto<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christian H\u00f8gel and Elisabetta Bartoli, eds. Medieval Letters: Between Fiction and Document. Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 33. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. x, 471 p. ill. ISBN 9782503555201. EUR \u20ac110.00 (hardcover). Born out of a 2013 Siena conference on the same subject, Medieval Letters: Between Fiction and Document presents a nuanced view of the medieval relationship […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1893,1929,1937],"class_list":["post-803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-12th-14th-centuries","tag-epistolary-culture","tag-literature"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=803"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2562,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/803\/revisions\/2562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}