What is a premodern letter: a roundtable

The NWO VIDI Project Lettercraft and Epistolary Performance in Early Medieval Europe, 476-751 CE is seeking contributions to a roundtable on letters at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, (7-10 July 2025) We invite reflections on the question, What is a premodern letter?

Defining the letter continues to challenge scholars and students of premodern epistolography. Ancient definitions were contradictory: Greco-Roman epistolographers often framed the letter as a dialogue between a single author and addressee, whose conversation took place across barriers of time and space. At the same time, they grappled with the reality that their work was shared with (and sometimes written for) a wider audience. Modern theory on the letter, such as Altman’s Epistolarity: Approaches to A Form (1982) and Malherbe’s Ancient Epistolary Theorists (1988), underlines the complexity of the issue. The question ‘what is a letter’ has often been raised in edited collections, monographs, and translations of ancient and medieval letters; it sometimes seems that each epistolary corpus can be used to generate its own definition. Answers to the question can also vary widely by a letter’s place of origin, date, language, and the scholarly tradition in which it is studied.

In this roundtable, we would like to build on this work by fostering a conversation about the fluidity of epistolography as a genre and the range of medieval texts that were considered— by authors, audiences, and later generations of readers—to be letters.

We welcome short (5-10 minute) reflections on the challenges and opportunities of defining the premodern letter, including but not limited to:

• Examples of specific premodern letter(s) or letter collections which confirm or challenge standard definitions
• Types and typologies of letters
• Letters which confirm, challenge, or subvert audience or reader expectations
• Unexpected uses of the letter, or evidence of uses of the letter which engage with a

  letter’s text or materiality in surprising ways

• Lost or ‘ghost’ letters
• Use and reproduction of letters outside of their original contexts

  We ask that interested participants contact lettercraft@uu.nl, providing their name, preferred email address through July 2025, any accessibility needs, and a short (max. 100-word) paragraph about the texts or questions they might address in relation to the roundtable theme by 25 September 2024. 

  Please note that the Lettercraft project is unable to contribute to participants’ travel or registration costs. Participants without sources of conference funding are encouraged to apply for the IMC bursary scheme.