Lars Boje Mortensen

Medieval letters : between fiction and document

By convention and almost by nature, letters embody exclusive communication between writer and recipient (who may then exchange roles). But purported privacy does not exclude both parties having a wider audience in mind. A further layer must be considered too since the versions of the medieval letters or model letters that have come down to us in the manuscripts are frequently suspected to be rewritten, faked, or composed as model letters. Modern scholarship often focuses on the fictionality of such letters and is used to distinguish stylistic models from “real” letters, so preventing letters which appear as didactic examples from being used as historical sources. And yet many of the modelepistles included in the medieval treatises of letter-writing cannot be easily defined as “fiction” in the modern sense of the word. Thus the exploration of the meeting points between different disciplinary approaches itself represents a highly productive research method. This conference will bring together speakers on letters as literary documentations and as documentary inventiveness. How do letters document specific instances of reading, writing or rewriting? How do we distinguish between fictional letters, if any, and real ones? How does looking at ‘made-up’ letters help us to better understand medieval notions of fictionality? Why and how are letters produced to inform the historical context of other texts? The Latin tradition will be of special interest, but contributions from other European literatures are most welcome. The program includes papers on unedited texts, a workshop on celebrated cases of disputed authorship: womens letters, Epistolae duorum amantium, Baudri of Bourgueil and Constance, Dante’s (?) Letter to Cangrande.