And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode More Rare than Phoenix, Italian women humanists.

I was just complaining in a recent episode about how people don't write letters anymore,

but at the risk of sounding difficult, but please, I have to say that when people

did write letters they often weren't very interesting.

College students wrote to mom and dad, but just as an excuse to ask for money, and don't

get me started on the literary merits of the average love letter.

It's for good reason that we say they are full of sweet nothings.

The letters of Italian humanists are another case in point.

Elegant though they are they tend to follow

predictable motifs. There's the epistle of consolation sharing in the grief of

losing a loved one before saying it's time to pull yourself together.

Then there's the letter in which the recipient's eloquence is extravagantly praised, and the response to such a letter, where the done thing is to respond with even more extravagant false modesty.

Closely related is the plea for patronage.

A show piece of verbal dexterity in which fulsome praise of some rich person

is used to entice that rich person to pay for more of the same.

Most characteristically, there is the letter that is not about much of anything apart from the fact that one is writing a letter.

It begins by apologizing for not writing sooner, goes on to apologize again for having to be brief, and then closes with the admonition that the recipient should reply as soon as possible.

Renaissance rhetoric is at its purest when it uses beautiful well-balanced

cisironian sentences to say nothing.

The Episcillary art was so prized by the humanists and so central to their project of refined self-representation that it became standard for them to publish volumes of collected correspondence.

Petrarch had already done so, and his example was followed by such figures as Salutati, Poggio, Bruni, and Filelfo.

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