Letters

Renaissance humanists classicized their letters so as to approximate the familiar style of sermo—but they also inherited the medieval tradition of ars dictaminis, which had shifted letters toward the public realm. Humanist letters therefore continued to depart from familiar style in practice—and in Erasmus’ theory, he explicitly acknowledged that letter-writing was no longer entirely a genre of familiar communication. The Renaissance humanist letter became a mode of communication mediating between conversation and oratory, and firmly oriented toward the public world. One descendant of the humanist letter would be the newspaper—that genre that Habermas took to constitute the public sphere. The newspaper, by way of the news letter, preserved aspects of the style of familiar communication, but, as it shifted in medium toward print, transformed into a distinctly persuasive communication between anonymous correspondents and anonymous recipients. Conversation had shifted in theory to be able to address the public world; the newspaper would be the genre that embodied a familiar conversation, universal and anonymous, that discussed all the subjects of the world.