ABSTRACT
If importance is measured by sheer numbers, then few medieval genres were as important as the letter. Moreover, since the ars dictaminis, the art of letter writing, was widely taught in late-medieval schools and universities, the artes dictandi, the treatises of the dictatores who practiced and taught this art, provide an invaluable tool for evaluating the vast corpus of letters that medieval scribes saw fit to collect and copy. Hundreds of artes dictandi survive, providing commentary on the individual components of a letter, taxonomies of the various kinds of letters and quasi-epistolary documents, and abundant illustrative examples of whole letters or parts of letters. Just as the originally oral message passed through a series of mediations before it was transformed into the written text of a letter, so too a similar process occurred when the letter reached its destination. The private reading of a written text was not the normal mode of reception for medieval letters.
