Letters Across Time: a Diachronic Study of the Epistolary Formulas in Cicero, Jerome and Peter Damian

The epistolary genre has its roots in Antiquity and is born from a strong need of communication: the tone and style vary, however, according to the addressee and the nature of the letter, whether it is private, administrative, political, consolatory, etc. Despite its different forms and modalities, the epistolary genre also has fixed and formulaic characteristics: the inscriptio with the abbreviation of the name and title of the addressee, as well as the initial and final formulas of salutatio to the addressee.
The goal of our presentation is to explore this formulaic nature of the epistolary genre and its possible developments over time from a diachronic point of view. We will go through the various centuries, using examples found in the letter collections of some of the most important epistolary authors: Cicero for the Republican age, Saint Jerome for the Late Antiquity and Peter Damian for the Central Middle Ages. Do the epistolary formulas evolve over time? If they do, are these variations related to the socio-cultural context of the author or to linguistic phenomena particular to the Latin language? In other words: can formulaicity, despite its fixed nature, also be subject to change? To answer these questions, we will also explore our corpus using an innovative method: Hyperbase, a software developed by the LASLA which enables a statistical and quantitative survey of the Latin language.