On the Borders of the «mundo de carta». Origins and Diffusion of the Italian «lettera cancelleresca» (13th-15th centuries)

Abstract

This communication focuses on the Italian lettere cancelleresche between 13th and 16th century : that is, the letters written by chancellors, ambassadors, officers of the Italian states. In the first part of the essay, the characters of this specific group of epistolary written records are identified and described thanks also to the analysis of 16 plates. Its origins are traced back to the High Middle Ages, when the material form of the littera clausa was born, imitating the public written records : the choice to put the addressee’s name in the first line of the letter, a crucial difference from the ancient tradition, emerged already in the first medieval exemplars of letters. The various characteristics of the lettera cancelleresca appeared separately since the 13th century, and their convergency gave birth to a standardised and long-lasting epistolary model between the end of the 14th and the middle of the 15th century. In the second and final part of the essay, an autograph letter of Diomede Carafa is compared to a chancery letter on the same subject, aiming both to enlighten the peculiarity of Carafa’s writing culture as regards to the chancery’s epistolary usual practice, and to strongly recommend a careful analysis of specific historic contexts in every research on communication patterns and forms.