Learning to Write Letters in Sixteenth-Century Florence

Abstract

In sixteenth-century Italy, more and more women began to actively participate in the practice of private letter-writing. This contribution presents the analysis of the language of twenty archival letters written in the Florentine vernacular by Lucrezia di Matteo Albizzi Ricasoli, a Florentine patrician woman who had a low level of writing experience. Lucrezia began to write quite late in her life and went on to correspond with her sons over the next twenty-six years (1539–1565). Focusing on the formulae she used in the epistolary frame and in the superscriptions, my analysis assesses the degree of fixedness of these elements, discusses the functions they might have played in her letter-writing process, and investigates possible lifespan changes in relation to her progressive increase in writing experience. Drawing from hitherto unknown archival material, this study offers a contribution to the historical sociolinguistic debates on the use and social functions of formulae.

Keywords

• epistolary formulae
• private letters
• Renaissance Florence
• women's language
• writing experience