Latin and Classical Chinese Epistolographic Communication in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

A comparative history of the social and stylistic characteristics of letter-writing in the Western Latin world and in China has yet to be written. Among other difficulties, the historical study of letter-writing in China has only recently attracted scholarly attention, and the social and intellectual contexts of epistolary culture in China and the Latin West were in many respects strikingly different. This chapter compares, in a longue durée perspective, the differing assumptions that conditioned the development of epistolary genres in China and Europe, with a particular focus on the Song period (the period of ars dictaminis in Western letter-writing culture). It concludes by proposing a variety of potential methodological frames that could be fruitful in future comparative research.