Romanian letter-writing: a cultural-rhetorical perspective (I)

Abstract

The paper aims at revealing the cultural and rhetorical features of the Romanian letter-writing by outlining the key stages in the evolution of the letter in Europe and in the Romanian cultural space. In the subsequent ages, the profile of the rhetorical frame that enabled the development of letter-writing was governed by distinct guidelines, from the discursive canons of the Antiquity and the attempts to set out an epistolary theory in the postclassical age or the emergence of the medieval epistolary manuals and of the works of epistolary rhetoric from the Renaissance to the flourishing of private correspondence in the Baroque and the Enlightenment. The natural tendency to adapt the epistolary rhetoric to the idiomatic resources of the vernacular languages spoken in Europe favoured the outset and the advancement of a Romanian epistolary style whose cultural and rhetorical coordinates are sketched in the present article."The letter is a faithful messenger" Bernhard Perger, Grammatica Nova, 1485 Preliminary remarksA multimillennial history ties letter-writing to the life of human societies, and the epistolary cultures nourished by the avatars of this major communicative activity prove that along the way the letter was conferred a rich variety of uses, either of public or of private nature. As a means of ensuring long-distance communication between individuals and/or groups, the letter preserves historical data that highlight both the circumstances of the communicative process and the personality facets of the protagonists involved in the epistolary exchange.The presence of the letter in various fields of human life reflects the old age of this efficient means of communication which was progressively adapted to face the challenges and the changes in technological progress, from the ancient Babylonian messages engraved on clay tablets (Roberts, 1843, p. 1) to the first medieval treatises on the art of letter-writing, ars dictaminis (Murphy, 2001, p. 203), and, later on, to the tradition of epistolary etiquette manuals (Bly, 2004) or to the electronic patterns of e-mails (Crystal, 2004, p. 94-128). More than a form of dialogue at a distance, as it was defined by some of the Greek and Roman rhetoricians, the letter is the expression of the human ability to store in writing flashing sequences from the kaleidoscope flux of reality, as filtered in the mind's laboratory of notions and images. From this point of view, one might even argue that all the relevant elements in the history of writing (Fischer, 2001), namely the writing tools, materials and devices, the types of writing and the canons of textual construction, also shed a light on the cultural destiny of the letter. Moreover, letters do not provide only the material evidence that certifies the advancements in the dynamics of writing, but they can also be interpreted as ideological artefacts that mirror the individual mentalities or the spirit of an age. Just as a painting offers the viewer clues and insights on both the outer, material world in which th...

Romanian letter-writing: a cultural-rhetorical perspective (II)

“…In the first part of Section 3 (Milică & Morcov, 2016), we noticed that the cultural evolution of the Romanian letter-writing developed under the influence of some foreign models, the most important being the Slavonic template. During the 16 th century, the tendency to compose letters by means of foreign patterns gradually gave way to the initiative of writing the official and private letters in Romanian.…”