The Practice of Letter Writing: Skills, Models, and Early Modern Dutch Manuals

Abstract

In this paper, formulaic language in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch private letters is compared with formulae presented in letter-writing manuals. The most frequent formulae in the Dutch letters show a striking similarity with those found in private letters from other language areas. Such an eye-catching similarity points clearly to a shared European epistolary tradition which has been the topic of various previous studies. Being aware of this widespread tradition, we address the question of how letter writers acquired the formulae characteristic of that tradition by first discussing briefly literacy in the Dutch Republic and by subsequently taking into consideration the possible influence of theory and models provided in letter-writing manuals. After having established similarities and differences between the ‘theory’ of the more modest manuals or schoolbooks and actual practice of private letters, we conclude that direct influence of letter-writing manuals on the actual practice is not very likely. In the same vein as claims made for other languages, we furthermore argue that letter-writing conventions such as formulae were rather acquired by active participation in writing practice.

Keywords:

• letter writing
• literacy
• formulaic language
• formulae
• letter-writing manuals
• epistolary tradition
• private letters
• the acquisition of writing skills

Notes

1 The s morpheme of names such as (Grietje) Paals indicates ‘wife of’ or ‘daughter of’.

2 For further information see <www.brievenalsbuit.nl>.

3 Around 1800 the northern Netherlands, Scandinavia, Iceland, Prussia and Scotland had less than 30 per cent male illiterates, a much lower percentage than e.g. the southern Netherlands, England, Ireland, and France (cf. Boonstra, 1993: 22–23; see also Graff, 1987: 173–248).

4 The formulae 2 and 6, which refer to God, could be considered as Christian-ritual formulae, but, since they occur only in this specific health discourse structure, we prefer considering them as subordinate health formulae.

5 Note that there is not any punctuation in the seventeenth-century writing proof (Figure 2) either which could indicate that punctuation was not considered a necessary part of acquiring writing skills.

6 The addressee may be commended to God or the Lord, but also to His protection or mercy, and the protection may be expressed by the lexical variants bescherminge, protectie, and bewaringe ‘lit. keeping’.

7 Particular remarks in their prefaces, mentioning the possibility of translating the example letters into Latin and French, indicate that some of them were also intended to be used in secondary education.

8 Part of this research was conducted in the MA research seminar Letters as Loot (autumn 2011, taught by Van der Wal), with contributions from Gábor Bécsi and Emma Kastelein.

9 For the present research we refer to Jacobi’s 1645 edition, which was printed in the province of Holland just before the period from which our seventeenth-century letters date (1660s/1670s).

10 One of the letters figures among the moral lessons, the four others form a separate unit. For the present research we refer to the 1614 edition.

11 We have excluded the Christmas, Easter, and similar letters in rhyme.

12 The recommendation in your grace formula occurs once in the Materieboekje and the den waaromme van dezen formula twice, but even in our extended corpus of about 600 letters (594 letters, i.e. 210 seventeenth-century and 384 eighteenth-century letters), we did not find one single instance of these two formulae and only one example of the oorzake mijns schrijvens formula.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marijke van der Wal

Marijke van der Wal is Professor in the History of Dutch (Chair Merweborgh Foundation) at Leiden University where she directs the research programme Brieven als Buit/Letters as Loot. Towards a non-standard view on the history of Dutch (<www.brievenalsbuit.nl>).

Correspondence to: Marijke van der Wal, Leiden University, Department of Dutch Language and Culture, P.N. van Eyckhof 1, PO Box 9515, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands. Email: [email protected]

Gijsbert Rutten

Gijsbert Rutten is Assistant Professor and Researcher working at Leiden University and at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Correspondence to: Gijsbert Rutten. Email: [email protected]

Both authors have published in the fields of historical linguistics and the historiogra- phy of linguistics. Their current sociohistorical linguistic research focuses on ego-documents and language history from below.