Half his life writing letters: Erasmus in furs by Holbein.

      His letter-writing guide, compiled while he was a teacher in Paris in the early 1500s, covered some familiar ground (the clarity and aptness of expression), and he wrote particularly well about how the writer should above all be versatile: a letter should be ‘as closely suited as possible to the argument, place, time, addressee; which when dealing with weighty matters is serious, which with mediocre matters is neat; with humble matters elegant and witty; which is ardent and spirited in exhortation, soothing and friendly in consolation.’

      But perhaps the most noteworthy element of both the manual and the collections of his own letters that Erasmus supervised towards the end of his life was that they were formulated not for the scribe but for the printing press, initially in Cambridge in 1521, and then widely disseminated through several other printing houses in Italy and Germany. However ironic it seemed, the art of letter-writing had found its greatest ally in moveable type. Far from inhibiting the art, machines only amplified its significance to history and ideas.

      Letters could now be collected and bound; printing ensured archiving, and a greater shot at survival; the unique letter cache, the rare fair manuscript copies – these would still be posterity’s wonderful and invaluable things. But now, for the great public thinkers whose collected letters were regarded as both history and currency, their discovery and safe-keeping may not be so necessary; libraries would take care of that from here on. The printing press brought with it the collected letters and the man of letters (and, within two centuries, women of letters too). Erasmus claimed that his letters were not history but literature, and now both arts would have their day, and it would be a lasting one.

      Two English publishers produced manuals that swiftly became vernacular classics, and to turn the pages of the first of these at the Bodleian Library in Oxford is to experience an early tang of Machiavellian intrigue notably absent from previous guides. The new letter specimens continued to be predominantly concerned with respect – the correct form, the ever-humble approach – but now there were new considerations: technique, mild manipulation, clever compromise, advice on the use of letters to get one’s way. Cicero had employed letters to his political ends, and now there was guidance on how we could all do it.

William Fulwood’s The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568) was the first bestselling guide published in English, enjoying ten editions in the next 50 years.* One reads it with a clear sense of the growing importance of letters in Elizabethan society, not least their use in bonding a society; largely through trade and other economic necessities, families were beginning to disperse. Fulwood’s work was translated from a successful French guide, but the author was careful to adapt as much of the local colour and situations as possible to his English readers, although he kept most of the addresses in his examples as either Lyons or Paris. Fulwood’s main appeal lies in his acknowledgement that most letters are replies to others, and the fact that the hypothetical situations he presents are not only practical but highly engaging. In one, he ponders the scenario of a merchant father suspecting his son of selling their silk goods at far below their market value. In the first letter, the father writeth unto the sonne.**

      Verily my sonne, though wilt be the occasion through thy evill behavior, to haste me sooner than I thought unto my grave: for one of these dayes in this Towne of Lyons many gentlemen and marchants confirmed unto me that all the clothes of scarlet which thou didst cary with thee are lost. Also I am advertised by my trusty frends, that sundry dames in Lyons go sumptuously arayed with our clothes of Silke, and thou of them hast none other payment, but that thou takest accompt secretly in ye night.

      This is not the fayth which thou didst promise me at thy departure: therefore thy mother continually weepeth, and thy two virtuous and honest Sisters lament without ceassing. But tell me, with what knyves thinckest thou that thou doest wounde the most secrete partes of our heartes: therefore be redy to amend thy errour, or else veryly cease to call me Father, and holde thy selfe assured (except thou amend) that neither of my goods nor money thou shalt ever have any parte hereafter.

      Thy Carefuull Father

      The Sonne Maketh Answere Unto His Father

      My dearly beloved Father, I have ben advertised by your sorowful letter of evill adventure of our merchandise: but bicause you are my Father & a prudent Father, it is lawfull for you without occasion, to reprehende and threaten me: howbeit he that who committeth not the fault, is always accompanied with sweete hope. Those that have tolde you that I give your clothes of Silke unto the dames of Lyons, peradventure have taken it in evill part, that I have not given some peece of silk unto their wives, & would peradventure have taken no care to have asked them from when ye garments have come, so that they spare theyr pens.

      I praye you therefore my deare father, be content & glad: for I consume not your goods, but I sell them aswel unto women as unto men. I send you by our Factour two thousand pounds for clothes of scarlet, & six hundreth poundes for clothes of silke: I will tary to finish the rest, & the cursed envie languishing shall fall unto the ground: and you shal finde me (God to frend) a good, just & faithfull Sonne &c.

      The other highly successful manual (nine editions in 50 years) was Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586). This contained more original material than Fulwood, not least when it came to guidance over love letters. And the specimens were convincing creations, often involving the resolution of conflicts between lovers or fathers and sons, a basis perhaps for the earliest epistolary novels. In English Elizabethan schools the most popular Latin manual, taught consistently alongside letters from Cicero and Erasmus, was Georgius Macropedius’s Methodus de Conscribendis Epistolis. The theory holds that it was this guide, more than any other, that influenced the style of letters in the works of Shakespeare.

      But not everyone subscribed to the wisdom of these guides. Writing in the 1570s, the progressive French essayist Montaigne claimed he was ‘a sworn enemy to all manner of falsification,’ (by which he meant inauthenticity), and in an essay entitled ‘A Consideration upon Cicero’ he took sceptical issue with Erasmus when it came to the formality of a letter. Montaigne rejected studiousness in favour of expressive spontaneity, and he believed his own style suited only ‘familiar’ letters rather than business ones. He thought his language ‘too compact, irregular, abrupt, and singular’ to suit formal composition, and he mistrusted letters that ‘have no other substance than a fine contexture of courteous words’. He said that he always wrote personally rather than employ a scribe, even though his handwriting was ‘intolerably ill’. And the less he thought about things in advance, the better the letter.

      I have accustomed the great ones who know me to endure my blots and dashes, and upon paper without fold or margin. Those that cost me the most pains, are the worst; when I once begin to draw it in by head and shoulders, ’tis a sign that I am not there. I fall too without premeditation or design; the first word begets the second, and so to the end.

      And there was another thing Montaigne didn’t like about the manuals with their ideal specimens: the beginnings and the endings. ‘The letters of this age consist more in fine edges and prefaces than in matter,’ he argued. He said he had deliberately avoided writing to ‘men of the long robe and finance’ for fear of making mistakes in addressing them. And for the closing niceties, ‘I would with all my heart transfer it to another hand to add those long harangues, offers,

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