Identità cultuale della chiesa Maria SS. Assunta a Ravanusa. Regesto storico, Progetto di Restauro e Adeguamento Liturgico

The four quotations above are definitions of the literary genre of the epistle and, though from different authors, they share the same opinion: it is seen as a means of communicating which succeeds in bringing two distant persons as close as possible. The first comes from Desiderius Erasmus (1466 – 1536), the Dutch humanist regarded as a major figure in the subjects of religion and literature: the second is voiced by Juan Luis Vives (1493 – 1540), a Spanish scholar, whereas the third is penned by Angel Day (1546? - unknown), an Elizabethan rhetorician.

The fourth is given by Donne, who in one of his Verse Epistles addressed to his friend Henry Wotton expands on the idea that writing a letter can get two friends together. Since the ancient times the kiss has been held as the moment when the two parties' souls become one, yet Donne's Verse Epistle to Sir Henry Wotton claims that letters blend the friends' souls better than kisses: when a letter is written to a friend, the sender's soul permeates the letter, and when the receiver reads the letter his soul and that of the sender fuse together, enabling their dialogue through 36 the physical letter, indeed "the site for mixing souls". This is just one example of Donne's peculiar use of the Verse Epistle, that is why it is necessary to situate such literary genre within a longstanding tradition reaching back to the Antiquity so as to understand its value and complexity. The history of the Verse Epistle is closely linked to that of the letter-writing manuals because the need to write to someone entails having a clear idea of what to write and how to address the receiver.

Nevertheless, it would be wrong to imagine an ancient letter-writing manual as a book on its own devoted to letter-writing alone. The first major letter-writing manual is Demetrius of Phalerum's De elocutione, a treatise on style, including instructions on letter-writing. According to the Athenian orator the style of a letter should resemble that of a conversation: epistles must be written neither too plainly, lest they become too 'oral', nor too formally, otherwise they would turn into orations. Letters are not monologues but "conversations halved", because they contain the sender's spirit, which finds his other half in the receiver's reply: such affectionate mode is not to be used only amongst friends, but also amongst members of aristocracy, who may not know each other personally, and yet share the same upbringing.

Ps.-Demetrius' Typoi Epistolikoi (Letter Types) is instead primarily conceived for the profession of secretary. He must know letter-writing rules and conventions as well as the differences among styles, which here are twenty-one: "friendly, commendatory, blaming, reproachful, consoling, censorius, admonishing, threatening, vituperative, praising, advisory, supplicatory, inquiring, responding, allegorical, accounting, accusing, apologetic, congratulatory, ironic, thankful".

The author, anyway, mostly focuses on the first type, because it sums all the others up: the friendly type also gives the possibility to mellow orders and commands by means of persuasion. Persuasion, declares Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC), is the device around which rhetoric is built: it is exploited in the deliberative genre of rhetoric by the orator, whose goal is to cause a reaction or influence the opinion of an audience about a specific course of action: in order to do so, the orator will discuss only the arguments which are more likely to win the audience, whether the course of action is or is not to be taken.

In the field of letter-writing, however, persuasion serves another purpose: backed up by argument, ethos and pathos, it may be used in order to give orders and commands, and it is not only justified by the bond of friendship between the sender and the receiver, but is also instrumental to the existence of the bond itself. The friendly style entails a frequent correspondence, in which what is said between the sender and the receiver is less important than the act of writing which sustains such a friendship (p. 27): in this case Donne's ideas about letter-writing may be considered traditional, in that, as he writes to Bridget White,

[...] it may be so many of my letters are lost already that it is time that one should come, like Job's servant, to bring word that the rest were lost. [...]. It comes to you like a bashful servant, who, though he have an extreme desire to put himself in your presence, yet hath not much to say when he is come. (July, 1610, p. 236).

Poster traces two more seminal works in the antiquity, the first is Ps.-Libanius's Epistolimaioi Kharactêres (Epistolary Types, 4th century): Ps.-Libanius emphasizes that a letter must be of whatever length is appropriate to the subject, and in this this manual differs from the two earlier Greek ones. The style on which Ps.-Libanius mostly insists is very simple, deprived of figures of speech: the letter models present in this treatise are very brief and vague in order to be copied and applied to any situation, as in the following example:

The letter of denial. I have done none of those terrible things, most noble sir, which you listen to and accuse me of. So, do not think badly of me. For it is not right to believe a false accusation and an idle rumour that contains nothing sound. For false accusation is the mother of war. (p. 32)

The second seminal work is that of Philostratus of Lemnus (3rd century), which does not exist in its entirety, but is cited by his uncle, Flavius Philostratus (170 – 247), Gregory of Nazianzus (329-389) and Ps.-Libanius. Philostratus of Lemnos (190 -?) is a Greek sophist of the Roman imperial period who aspires to the office of the imperial ab epistulis grecae, coveted by many philosophers and orators: Philostratus, nevertheless, is appointed precisely because of his skill in letter-writing. The treatise underlines the difference between epistolary and oratorial arts: the former is considered more suitable for letters than the latter because letter-writing is characterised by clarity, brevity, a certain elegance in style, and must be devoid of literay allusions, ornate language, exempla and periods, which would otherwise transform it into an oration. […]