ABSTRACT
The ars dictaminis or rhetoric of letter writing was one of the most widely taught subjects in the late middle ages. Hundreds of artes dictandi and summae dictandi survive, along with equally numerous collections of model letters and documents. Another contributing factor is the relative absence of pedagogical apparatus, such as commentaries, in the manuscripts containing textbooks on the ars dictaminis. By the time the ars dictaminis emerged as a discipline with its own distinctive textbooks, the letter had long since become the principal form of artistic prose. The proliferation of dictaminal textbooks well under way by the second decade of the twelfth century only enhanced the existing preeminence of epistolary form. The same is true of the teaching methods that came to distinguish the ars dictaminis. Thus, to understand the pedagogy of the dictatores, one must study carefully the manuscript contexts of their surviving treatises.
