Romanian letter-writing: a cultural-rhetorical perspective (II)

Gabriela-Iuliana Morcov,Ioan Milică

doi:10.17684/i4a51en

Abstract

The article aims at revealing the features of Romanian letter-writing during its stages of formation and consolidation. The structural and the stylistic analysis of letters is carried out with regard to the composition of the documents written in Old Romanian according to the requirements imposed by the Slavonic template and with regard to the rhetorical division of the three styles: the simple style, the middle style and the grand style. The description of the Old Romanian epistolary style is based on a taxonomy inspired by Roman Jakobson’s functional communicative model (1964). Following the six factors identified by Jakobson, letters are classified according to the socio-cultural status and the communicative competence of the addresser and of the addressee and in line with the context, the channel and the linguistic code used to write them.

Highlights

Old Romanian according to the requirements imposed by the Slavonic template and with regard to the rhetorical division of the three styles: the simple style, the middle style and the grand style
As one can find in the surviving documents, the addressers of the epistles dating from around the 17th century came from the middle of simple, uneducated people, and most of the time the success of their written interaction was dependent on the intervention of the scribe
Even if it is a compositional element that differentiates letters from other types of documents, the salutation scarcely occurs in the letters of the ruling voivodes in the 16th and 17th centuries, and when it does appear, in a letters exchange with a church official (DRH B, XXXVII/309), with a boyar (DRH B, XXXVII/306) or with a boyar’s wife (DRH B, XXXIV/247), it is restricted to the simple formula “sănătate” or its Slavonic equivalent “jdravne” [Good health to you!]

Summary

The structure and the stylistic features of the epistolary text

The fact that letters had been written in Slavonic or in other languages of diplomacy narrowed the range of epistolary exchanges inasmuch as letter-writing was confined to certain privileged social categories: rulers, high clergy, high officials or boyars. * proviso / the prohibitive clause sanction corroboration valediction date (time and place of writing) attestation (subscriptions, seal) It is St. Augustine who deserves the credit for having adapted the threefold division of style—the simple style, the middle style and the grand style—to the stylistic needs of Christian oratory (see, for instance, Milică, 2015) and, implicitly, to the art of letter writing, by means of the rhetorical analysis of the Pauline epistles in the light of the classical precepts of elocution. The grand epistolary style is used in the solemn correspondence between kings or between erudites and it is rarely used in old Romanian letter-writing (Table 4):.

The sender

Letters of the rulers

Letters of the high clergy

Letters of various officials

The collective sender

Letters to rulers

Letters to the high clergy

Letters to various officials

The collective receiver

The initiative of writing

The message and the context

The channel and the code