Supplication, Authority, Militancy: Epistolary Conventions and Rhetorical Strategies in Letters by Female Members of the Burgundian Dynasty (Fifteenth Century)

Summary

Letters by Noble women from late medieval Europe are an invaluable source for their involvement in matters ranging from the administration of their own domains to political, diplomatic, and family affairs as well as finances and religious patronage. Although such women, like their male counterparts, usually knew how to read and write, these were not normally written in their own hands, but by clerks and secretaries. The sender's degree of authorial influence on style or content of medieval epistles, generally, can be hard to determine.

Focusing on letters written in Latin from the period 1000–1400, Kathleen Neal and Clare Monagle have discerned different strategies which aristocratic women used to exercise power and influence through their correspondence. Epistles from this period were highly constructed and based on formal epistolary rules which were laid down in ars dictaminis manuals: handbooks on the art of letter-writing. The main principles, based on Ciceronian rhetoric, were developed in twelfth century Italy, whence they spread to the rest of Europe. Partly as a result of this formal approach, letter-writing was a concerted effort in which counsellors, secretaries, and scribes interacted with the sender-author. Women, like men, expressed their messages and achieved their aims by making use of rhetorical formats and conventions, either stressing their submission or their lordship, depending upon the situation and the relationship between sender and addressee. Focusing on a corpus of thirteenth-century royal letters from England, France, and Spain, Anaïs Waag has noticed that rules described in ars dictaminis manuals were not rigidly followed. In additional to personal preferences and styles, deliberate adherence to or deviation from specific formulae could serve to convey pointed personal or political messages.

The transition from Latin to vernacular languages in the later medieval period went hand in hand with the involvement of non-elite social groups in letter writing, as well the use of less formal writing styles. As a result, the influence of ars dictaminis gradually diminished. Although little is known about the situation in France, research carried out so far points to a strong decline in the reliance on these conventions during the second half of the fourteenth century. How the translation of letter-writing principles, which were based on Latin usage, into the different vernacular languages of Europe took shape in different linguistic areas, and how it affected letter-writing theory as well as practice, is a topic which requires further investigation.