Renaissance Letter Writing: Humanists, Couriers, Ciphers and the Republic of Letters

If you want to understand the European Renaissance, read its letters. Scholars, merchants, princes, diplomats and a growing number of women wrote to one another constantly, and the letter was the genre in which Renaissance thinkers tested ideas, built friendships, made enemies, carried on business and invented new ways of talking about themselves. Petrarch, often called the father of humanism, collected and polished hundreds of his own letters and wrote letters to authors who had been dead for over a thousand years. Erasmus ran an international intellectual network from his writing desk. Machiavelli described the writing of The Prince in a letter to a friend. Mary, Queen of Scots, fought for her life in ciphered letters, and her last letter was locked shut with a strip of paper cut from its own margin.

This article explains how Renaissance letter writing worked: the medieval rules it inherited, the rediscovery of Cicero's letters that transformed it, the most important letter writers and what they actually wrote, the courier systems that carried letters across Europe, the methods used to keep letters secret, and the rise of the printed letter collection. It ends with some misconceptions and a set of frequently asked questions. All quotations and figures come from published editions, library and archive material and the scholarship listed at the end.

Before the Renaissance: The Medieval Art of Letter Writing

The ars dictaminis

In the Middle Ages, letter writing was a professional skill taught by rules. The ars dictaminis, the art of composing letters and documents, developed in Italy from the eleventh century onward. Alberic of Monte Cassino is one of the early figures associated with it, and by the twelfth century teachers in and around Bologna were producing manuals that set out how a letter should be built.

These manuals treated a letter as a formal structure with fixed parts. A widely taught scheme divided it into five sections:

The greeting alone could be elaborate, because the correct form of address depended precisely on the relative status of sender and recipient: a pope, a bishop, a prince, a city council and a fellow notary all needed different formulas.

Letters as legal and administrative tools

Much medieval letter writing was official: chancery letters issued by popes, kings and cities, legal instruments, and business correspondence. Notaries and chancery clerks were trained in the ars dictaminis because their careers depended on it. Personal letters existed, but the dominant model was formal, rule-bound and tied to the business of institutions.

The Renaissance did not abolish this tradition. Chanceries kept producing formal letters, and merchants kept writing business letters. What changed was that a new ideal of the letter appeared alongside it: the personal, conversational, classical letter between friends.

Petrarch and the Rediscovery of Cicero

Verona, 1345

In 1345 the poet and scholar Francesco Petrarca, known in English as Petrarch (1304–1374), found a manuscript of Cicero's letters to his friend Atticus, the Epistulae ad Atticum, in the chapter library of Verona Cathedral. These letters had been largely unknown to medieval readers.

The discovery was a shock. Petrarch had admired Cicero as a philosopher and orator, a model of wisdom and eloquence. The letters to Atticus showed a different Cicero: anxious, ambitious, gossipy, changeable, caught up in the political crises of the late Roman Republic. Petrarch responded, in typical fashion, by writing a letter to Cicero himself, reproaching him for his involvement in politics. He also wrote letters to other ancient authors, and these letters to the dead were placed in the final book of his collected familiar letters.

The Familiares

The Cicero discovery inspired Petrarch to collect his own letters. His Rerum familiarium libri, usually called the Familiares, was largely gathered in Provence between 1351 and 1353 and completed in Milan in 1359, with more letters added in 1366. The finished collection contains 350 letters in 24 books, spanning roughly 1325 to 1366. Petrarch dedicated it in January 1350 to a Flemish friend he called "Socrates".

The Familiares were not simply copies of letters sent. Petrarch revised, rearranged and sometimes rewrote his letters for the collection, shaping them into a literary work that presented a portrait of himself as a thinker. This is an important point for anyone reading Renaissance letters: a letter in a published collection may be quite different from the letter that was actually delivered.

Later collections and the Letter to Posterity

Petrarch began a second collection, the Seniles ("letters of old age"), in 1361. It contains 128 letters written between 1361 and 1373, arranged in 18 books. The final book contains a single, unfinished letter, the Letter to Posterity, an autobiographical account of his life and outlook addressed to future readers. He also kept a separate group of nineteen letters, the Liber sine nomine ("book without a name"), out of his main collections, reportedly because they sharply criticised the papal court at Avignon.

The ascent of Mont Ventoux

The most famous of Petrarch's letters describes climbing Mont Ventoux in Provence on 26 April 1336 with his brother and two servants, for no practical purpose but to see the view. It is addressed to his friend and confessor, the Augustinian friar Dionigi di Borgo San Sepolcro. At the summit, Petrarch says, he opened his copy of Augustine's Confessions at random and read a passage about how men go to wonder at the heights of mountains but neglect themselves. He turned his attention inward and descended in silence.

The letter is often treated as a founding moment of modern landscape appreciation and introspection. It also shows the Renaissance letter as a literary form: the letter was written some time after the climb and is carefully constructed around a moment of reading. Many scholars think it was composed or revised years later for the collection. It is a letter about an experience, but it is also an essay in letter form.

Why Petrarch matters for letter writing

Petrarch established several things that later humanists took for granted:

• The letter as self-portrait. A collection of letters could present the writer's inner life, opinions and friendships.
• Classical Latin as the model. The ideal was Cicero's style, not the formulas of the medieval manuals.
• Friendship as the setting. The familiar letter assumed a relationship of equals sharing ideas, even across great distances.
• The letter as publication. Letters were written knowing they might be copied, circulated and collected.

Salutati, Florence and the Political Letter

The second great Cicero discovery

Petrarch had found the letters to Atticus. The other great body of Cicero's correspondence, the Epistulae ad familiares (letters to friends and family), came to light in a different way. In 1392 Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), the chancellor of Florence and a devoted follower of Petrarch, obtained a copy of the complete collection from a ninth-century manuscript held at Vercelli. One account credits Pasquino de' Capelli, chancellor of Milan, with locating the manuscript at Salutati's urging. The copy made for Salutati in 1392 survives, and almost all Italian Renaissance manuscripts of the text descend from it.

Letters as statecraft

As chancellor, Salutati wrote Florence's official letters, and he brought humanist eloquence to diplomatic correspondence. Official letters were read aloud, copied and circulated, so they were a kind of propaganda: a well-argued letter defending Florentine liberty against a rival state could influence opinion across Italy. Salutati's career shows how humanist letter writing was not only private and literary but also a tool of politics. His successors in the Florentine chancery, including Leonardo Bruni and Poggio Bracciolini, were also leading humanists, and the chancery became one of the places where the new style of writing was practised professionally.

The handwriting changed too

Humanists did not only change how letters sounded. They changed how they looked. Around 1400 Florentine humanists, including Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò Niccoli, developed a new script based on the clear minuscule they found in older manuscripts, which they believed to be ancient. This humanist script, and the faster, slanted cursive that developed from it, became the basis of italic handwriting. Writing masters later taught it in printed manuals such as Ludovico degli Arrighi's La Operina (1522). A humanist letter, written in this hand, announced the writer's allegiance to the new learning before a word of it was read.

The Republic of Letters

Where the phrase came from

The phrase "Republic of Letters" (respublica literaria) names the international community of scholars who corresponded with one another across political and religious borders. Its first known appearance is in a letter of 6 July 1417 from the Venetian nobleman Francesco Barbaro to Poggio Bracciolini, praising Poggio's discoveries of lost classical manuscripts during the Council of Constance and saying that he deserved immortal glory in the republic of letters. The expression was rare in the fifteenth century and became common in the sixteenth. Its later French form, République des Lettres, became famous through Pierre Bayle's journal Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, begun in 1684.

How the Republic worked

The Republic of Letters had no territory, government or membership list. It existed through correspondence. A scholar in Basel could exchange letters with colleagues in London, Paris, Rome and Kraków, sharing manuscripts, criticising each other's editions, recommending students, passing on news of books and arguing about everything. Letters were often meant to be shared: a recipient might read a letter aloud to friends, copy it for others, or forward it.

Several features made this possible:

• A common language. Latin was the shared language of educated Europeans, so a Dutch scholar could write to a Hungarian one without translation.
• Shared models. Everyone had been trained on the same classical authors, so allusions and quotations were understood across borders.
• Courtesy and reciprocity. Letters were expected to be answered, and failure to reply could damage a reputation.
• Introductions. A letter of recommendation from a respected scholar could open doors for a young traveller.

Erasmus: The Great Correspondent

A life lived in letters

Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1466–1536) was the most famous scholar of his time, and his correspondence is one of the great sources for the intellectual history of early sixteenth-century Europe. He wrote to and received letters from scholars, printers, patrons, princes and churchmen across western Europe, and corresponded directly with kings and popes.

The surviving correspondence is huge. The standard Latin edition, the Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, was begun by P. S. Allen in 1893; its first volume appeared in 1906, and after Allen's death in 1933 it was continued by his wife and his colleague H. W. Garrod, with the last volume of text, volume XI, appearing in 1947. The English translation in the University of Toronto Press's Collected Works of Erasmus numbers the letters individually, and its volumes run beyond letter number 3,100. The Toronto editors note that about 85 per cent of the surviving letters were written after Erasmus reached the age of forty-five, so most of what we have comes from the years of his fame. Volume 3 of the Toronto series alone, covering August 1514 to August 1516, contains 151 letters, more than survive from the whole of his first forty years.

Early letters

Some of Erasmus's earliest surviving letters are intensely personal. As a young canon at the monastery of Stein, he wrote passionate letters to a fellow canon, Servatius Rogerus, calling him "half my soul". Later, when Rogerus became prior of Stein in 1504, he pressed Erasmus to return to the monastery, and Erasmus's replies are a careful defence of the wandering scholarly life he had chosen.

England and Thomas More

Erasmus visited England several times and formed close friendships there, especially with Thomas More and John Colet. In a 1509 letter to Colet he wrote that no place in the world had given him so many friends as London. His satire The Praise of Folly (Moriae encomium) was dedicated to More in a prefatory letter that puns on More's name and the Greek word for folly, moria. More, in turn, opened his Utopia (1516) with a letter to his friend Peter Giles, and the book's early editions were surrounded by letters from humanists praising it. Prefatory and dedicatory letters were a standard way of presenting a book to the Republic of Letters.

How to write a letter, according to Erasmus

Erasmus also wrote the most influential Renaissance manual on letter writing, De conscribendis epistolis ("On the Writing of Letters"), published in 1522. Unlike the medieval manuals, it argued that letters should be flexible and suited to their purpose and recipient, rather than built to a fixed formula. Drawing on the ancient idea of the letter as a kind of conversation between absent friends, Erasmus classified letters by type (persuasive, consoling, recommending, congratulating, advising and so on) and gave models of each, while insisting that variety and naturalness mattered more than rules. The book was widely used in schools, and through it generations of students learned to write letters by imitating classical and humanist examples.

Erasmus was also wary of slavish imitation. In his dialogue Ciceronianus (1528) he mocked writers who refused to use any word or phrase not found in Cicero, arguing that a Christian writer of the sixteenth century could not and should not sound exactly like a Roman of the first century BC.

Letters as self-presentation

Erasmus understood that letters shaped reputation. He arranged for selections of his letters to be printed during his lifetime, and some letters were clearly written with publication in mind. One of the most revealing is a letter to a fictitious papal secretary, "Lambertus Grunnius", written in 1516 and published in 1529, in which Erasmus told the story of his own youth in the third person, presenting his entry into monastic life as the result of pressure from his guardians. Readers of Erasmus's letters, like readers of Petrarch's, have to remember that the author was always partly performing.

Machiavelli and the Letter to Vettori

Exile and a famous letter

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) served the Florentine republic as a secretary and diplomat until the Medici returned to power in 1512. Early in 1513 he was arrested on suspicion of involvement in a plot against them and tortured, then released. He retired to his small farm near San Casciano, outside Florence, and kept up a correspondence with his friend Francesco Vettori, then Florentine ambassador in Rome, hoping Vettori could help him find work.

On 10 December 1513 he wrote Vettori a letter that has become one of the most quoted in European literature. In a widely used English translation, he describes his days: snaring thrushes in the autumn, overseeing the cutting of a wood and quarrelling with buyers about firewood, reading Dante, Petrarch or the Latin love poets by a spring, then going to the local inn:

"Having eaten, I go back to the inn; there is the host, usually a butcher, a miller, two furnace tenders. With these I sink into vulgarity for the whole day, playing at cricca and at trich-trach, and then these games bring on a thousand disputes and countless insults with offensive words, and usually we are fighting over a penny, and nevertheless we are heard shouting as far as San Casciano."

Then comes the evening:

"On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which only is mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them."

And then the announcement that he has written "a little work On Principalities", debating "what a princedom is, of what kinds they are, how they are gained, how they are kept, why they are lost". This is the book we know as The Prince.

Why the letter matters

The letter is valuable for several reasons. It is the earliest description of The Prince by its author. It shows the humanist ideal of conversation with the ancients, the same ideal that led Petrarch to write to Cicero, transformed into a picture of reading as a dialogue with the dead. And it shows the Renaissance familiar letter at its most personal: funny, bitter, self-mocking and deeply serious within a few paragraphs. Machiavelli's correspondence with Vettori also shows how letters served as a lifeline for someone shut out of public life, a way of staying in contact with the world of politics.

Letters Beyond the Scholars

Humanist letters get most of the attention, but they were a small fraction of what Renaissance Europe wrote.

Merchants

Commerce depended on letters. The archive of Francesco di Marco Datini (c. 1335–1410), a merchant of Prato near Florence, gives a sense of the scale. His papers were rediscovered in 1870 in a disused stairwell of his house. Britannica describes some 150,000 letters, more than 500 account books and ledgers, about 300 deeds of partnership and 400 insurance policies. Modern counts by researchers working on the archive put the letters at about 143,000, exchanged among almost three hundred towns and cities. Merchant letters carried prices, exchange rates, shipping news, political rumours and family news, and they are among the richest sources for everyday life in the period. Datini's wife, Margherita, also corresponded with him while they lived apart, and her letters are a rare record of a merchant's wife's voice.

Families

In England, the Paston family of Norfolk left one of the best-known collections of fifteenth-century family letters, now largely held in the British Library. They deal with property disputes, lawsuits, marriages and the turmoil of the Wars of the Roses. Among them is a letter of February 1477 from Margery Brews to her fiancé John Paston III, addressing him as her "right well beloved Valentine", regularly described as the earliest surviving valentine letter in English. She dictated it to a clerk, a reminder that writing a letter did not always mean writing it with your own hand.

Women of the courts

Some of the largest Renaissance letter archives belong to women. Isabella d'Este (1474–1539), marchioness of Mantua, was a patron of artists, a collector and an active political figure, and her correspondence survives on a remarkable scale. Deanna Shemek's English edition of her Selected Letters draws on over 16,000 manuscript letters held in the State Archive of Mantua and translates 830 of them. The IDEA project (Isabella d'Este Archive), a partnership involving the University of California, Irvine, and Italian archival institutions, has been digitizing the correspondence. Isabella's letters deal with art commissions, diplomacy, family matters, fashion and the running of a state, and they show a woman using letters to exercise power that her position did not formally give her.

How Letters Travelled

Couriers, carriers and private messengers

There was no public postal service in the modern sense for most of the Renaissance. Letters travelled with merchants and their agents, with travellers who agreed to carry them, with private messengers paid by the sender, with diplomatic couriers, and through the courier services of cities and religious orders. A scholar might wait for a trusted traveller heading in the right direction rather than risk a letter with a stranger. Letters were frequently lost, delayed or delivered out of order, which is why correspondents often began by listing which of the other's letters they had received.

The Tassis family and the imperial post

The most important innovation in letter transport came from a family of Italian origin, the Tassis (later known as Thurn und Taxis). According to historian Rachel Midura's Postal Intelligence (2025), as summarised in the London Review of Books, the family began running courier services in the Italian city-states around 1290. They became postmasters and couriers for the Habsburgs, translating, in Midura's words, "a northern Italian technology of running mail in relay into a powerful international network".

The key idea was the relay. Instead of one rider carrying a letter all the way, fresh riders and horses waited at stations along a fixed route, and the mail bag was passed from one to the next. Under the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, the Tassis set up a permanent relay line between Innsbruck and Mechelen in the Low Countries; sources date the first route to 1489 or 1490. In 1516 a new agreement extended the network to include Verona, Rome and Naples, and the imperial post was later centred on Brussels. By 1506 the family employed forty postal couriers in Brussels.

Speed was the selling point. Francesco Tassis promised Philip I of Castile that a letter could travel from Brussels to Granada in fifteen days, with three days' allowance in winter. Midura reports that a horse carrying mail between Tassis relay stations in 1425 averaged just under 15 kilometres per hour.

The system was originally for rulers' correspondence, but over time private letters were carried as well, for a fee. The family's imperial postal monopoly was confirmed by Emperor Rudolf II in 1595, and the family took the name Thurn und Taxis in 1650. Their postal rights lasted until 1867, when they were surrendered to Prussia.

"Quickly, quickly, quickly"

Letters themselves carried instructions to their carriers. Some were marked cito cito cito, "quickly quickly quickly". Others were decorated with a sketched hangman's noose, a warning to anyone who might delay them. Dispatch notes and receipts let postmasters trace delays and assign blame. In times of plague, couriers and their letters might be doused in vinegar as a precaution. Couriers carrying valuables risked robbery: Midura records a Mantuan courier robbed of jewels, silverware and coins in 1587.

Approximate travel times

The seventeenth-century figures are slightly later than the Renaissance, but they give a realistic sense of how long news took to cross Europe even after postal networks had matured.

Keeping Letters Secret

Why secrecy mattered

Letters were vulnerable. They passed through many hands, and rulers had strong reasons to read other people's mail. Midura notes the existence of "black chambers" in Brussels, Vienna and Paris, where letters were secretly opened and read. Diplomats, conspirators, merchants protecting business secrets and lovers protecting reputations all had reasons to make letters hard to read or hard to open without detection.

Letterlocking

Before envelopes became common, a letter was usually folded into its own packet and sealed. Renaissance writers developed many ways of folding, cutting and securing letters so that they could not be opened without leaving traces. The conservator Jana Dambrogio of MIT Libraries coined the term "letterlocking" for these techniques after encountering locked letters as a fellow at the Vatican Secret Archives in 2000.

The most elaborate method is the spiral lock. A narrow strip is cut from the blank margin of the sheet, still attached at one end, and threaded through slits in the folded letter in a spiral before being sealed. Making one takes more than thirty steps. A 2021 study published in the Electronic British Library Journal described a dozen spiral-locked letters dated between 1568 and 1638, including examples by Catherine de' Medici and Elizabeth I. Dambrogio and her colleagues regard the spiral lock as one of the few letterlocking techniques that score high for security.

The best-known spiral-locked letter was written by Mary, Queen of Scots, to King Henri III of France on the eve of her execution in February 1587.

Ciphers

Locks protected against opening; ciphers protected against reading. Diplomatic and political letters were often partly or wholly written in cipher, using substitution tables in which letters, syllables and common words were replaced by symbols.

Mary, Queen of Scots, again provides the most dramatic example. During her long captivity in England she corresponded in cipher with supporters and diplomats. In 1586 her ciphered letters were intercepted and read by agents working for Elizabeth I's principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the correspondence about the Babington Plot was used as evidence against her.

Many of her ciphered letters were long thought lost. In 2023, the codebreakers George Lasry, Norbert Biermann and Satoshi Tomokiyo announced that they had identified and deciphered more than fifty letters by Mary held, unattributed, in the online collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. They had initially assumed the documents were in Italian; they turned out to be in French, and the appearance of the name "Walsingham" helped confirm the author. The letters date from 1578 to 1584 and discuss her health, negotiations for her release, the abduction of her son James in 1582 and her conditions in captivity. The team reported transcribing about 150,000 cipher symbols, and published their findings in the journal Cryptologia. The historian John Guy, a biographer of Mary not involved in the work, called it the most important new find on Mary for a century.

From Manuscript to Print: The Letter Collection as a Bestseller

Printing changes the letter

The printing press, spreading across Europe from the mid-fifteenth century, transformed letter collections. Cicero's letters were among the classical texts printed early and often, and they became standard school texts. Collections of humanist letters followed. Printed prefaces and dedications, often written as letters, became part of the apparatus of nearly every book; Marc Fumaroli argued that the very phrase "Republic of Letters" spread through the prefaces and dedications of the Aldine Press in Venice between 1499 and 1527.

Aretino and the vernacular letter

A decisive moment came in January 1538, when the Venetian printer Francesco Marcolini published the first book of the Lettere of the writer Pietro Aretino (1492–1556). It contained 324 letters written between 1524 and 1537, and it is described as the first printed collection of letters by a living author in Italian rather than Latin. Aretino's letters were bold, flattering, insulting and self-promoting by turns, and they were addressed to everyone from princes and popes to painters and courtesans. They sold well. Over about twenty years, from 1538 to 1557, six volumes appeared, containing almost 3,000 letters.

The success of Aretino's letters set off a fashion for printed letter collections in Italian, known as libri di lettere. Collections of letters by various authors, model letters for every occasion and anthologies of elegant correspondence flooded the Italian book market. Letters became something people read for pleasure and for instruction in how to write, not only something they sent.

Letter-writing manuals in English

England developed its own vernacular manuals later in the century. William Fulwood's The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568) is usually counted as the first English letter-writing manual, and Angel Day's The English Secretorie (1586) was one of the most successful, combining model letters with instruction in rhetoric. These books spread humanist ideas about letters to readers who did not know Latin: merchants, gentry, secretaries and anyone who needed to write a persuasive letter.

What a Renaissance Letter Looked Like

Materials and form

A typical letter was written in ink on paper, which had largely replaced parchment for everyday correspondence by the fifteenth century. It was folded into a small packet, addressed on the outside, and sealed with wax, sometimes with a signet ring or personal seal. There was usually no separate envelope. The address on the outside might include directions for finding the recipient, and sometimes instructions to the carrier.

Openings and closings

Humanist letters in Latin often began with a short classical formula of the "writer to recipient, greetings" type (Latin salutem, often abbreviated), modelled on Cicero's own openings, rather than the elaborate status-based greetings of the medieval manuals. They closed with a short farewell (vale, "farewell") and often the place and date. Vernacular letters, especially to superiors, kept more elaborate courtesies, and correct titles still mattered a great deal in diplomatic and court correspondence.

Style

The humanist ideal was a style that was elegant, natural and suited to the subject and the recipient. A letter to a friend could be playful, digressive and full of quotations. A letter of consolation would draw on classical and Christian sources. A letter of recommendation would be concise and persuasive. Erasmus's manual codified this flexibility. In practice, letters ranged from polished literary works intended for publication to hasty notes about money and travel.

Common Misconceptions

"Renaissance letters were private messages"

Many were, but the humanist letter was often semi-public. Writers expected letters to be read aloud, copied and circulated, and many revised their letters for publication. A letter in a printed collection may differ from the one actually sent.

"The Renaissance invented the personal letter"

Personal letters existed throughout the Middle Ages, and the ancient world produced great letter writers, Cicero first among them. What the Renaissance did was to revive classical models, raise the familiar letter to the status of literature and build an international culture around it.

"There was no postal service"

There was no public national post in the modern sense for most of the period, but there were extensive courier networks, including the Tassis relay system serving the Habsburgs, which grew to carry private letters as well.

"Sealing a letter with wax made it secure"

A wax seal showed whether a letter had been opened, but skilled agents could lift and replace seals, and governments did open mail. That is why writers developed letterlocking techniques and ciphers.

"Latin letters were dry and formal"

The letters of Petrarch, Erasmus and others can be intimate, funny and emotional. Erasmus's early letters to Servatius Rogerus are passionate; Machiavelli's letter to Vettori moves from comedy to deep seriousness in a few lines.

A Short Timeline

Frequently Asked Questions

Why was the letter so important to Renaissance humanists?

Because it combined the things they cared about most: classical style, friendship, the exchange of ideas and self-presentation. With Cicero's letters as a model, humanists treated the letter as a literary form, and their correspondence knitted scholars across Europe into the community they called the Republic of Letters.

What did Petrarch discover in 1345?

He found a manuscript of Cicero's letters to Atticus in the chapter library of Verona Cathedral. The discovery inspired him to collect his own letters and to write letters addressed to Cicero and other ancient authors.

How many letters did Erasmus write?

Nobody knows how many he wrote, but the surviving correspondence, including letters to him, runs to more than 3,100 numbered letters in the Toronto Collected Works of Erasmus. The earlier standard Latin edition by P. S. Allen filled eleven volumes of text.

What is Machiavelli's letter to Vettori?

A letter of 10 December 1513 in which Machiavelli, in exile on his farm, describes his daily routine and announces that he has written "a little work On Principalities", the book now known as The Prince. Its description of entering his study at night to converse with the ancients is one of the most famous passages in Renaissance writing.

How did letters travel in the Renaissance?

With merchants, travellers, private messengers, diplomatic couriers and organised courier services. The most important was the relay system run by the Tassis family for the Habsburgs from around 1490, which used stations with fresh riders and horses to move mail quickly across Europe.

What is letterlocking?

The practice of folding, cutting and sealing a letter so that it becomes its own secure envelope and cannot be opened without visible damage. The term was coined by the conservator Jana Dambrogio. The spiral lock, used by Mary, Queen of Scots, for her final letter, is one of the most elaborate forms.

When were Mary, Queen of Scots's lost letters decoded?

The decipherment of more than fifty ciphered letters from 1578 to 1584, found in the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, was announced in February 2023 by George Lasry, Norbert Biermann and Satoshi Tomokiyo.

Who published the first collection of letters in Italian?

Pietro Aretino, whose first book of Lettere was published by Francesco Marcolini in Venice in January 1538. It is described as the first printed collection of letters by a living author in the Italian vernacular.

Did women write letters in the Renaissance?

Yes, in large numbers, although fewer of their letters have been published. Isabella d'Este's surviving correspondence runs to more than 16,000 manuscript letters in the State Archive of Mantua, and family collections such as the Paston Letters include letters by and dictated by women.

Conclusion

Renaissance letter writing was at once a literary art, a scholarly network, a business system and a political weapon. It inherited the medieval rules of the ars dictaminis, overturned them with the rediscovered letters of Cicero, and built on them a culture in which a letter could be a self-portrait, an essay, a manifesto or a plea for help. Petrarch talking to the dead, Erasmus advising half of Europe, Machiavelli changing into his courtly clothes to read at night, Isabella d'Este managing a state through correspondence, and Mary, Queen of Scots, locking her last letter with a spiral of paper all belong to the same world. It was a world held together by ink, paper, wax and relay riders, and most of what we know about it we know because people wrote to each other and someone kept the letters.

Sources

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