Some thoughts about letters

I have drawn much of my body of scholarship from early medieval letter collections, and therefore I have spent a lot of time thinking about letters as a historical source.  That being said, I was very excited delve into the Cortes letter collection.  At the same time, I expected to find something very different in this text.  The early medieval letter collections that I have used have all been collections that were published and promulgated for a public consumption, either by the author, a prominent recipient of letters, or sometimes by heirs.  These letters tend, therefore, to be highly polished versions of actual letters, and the collections are often arranged thematically, rather than chronologically.  The end result is a collection of letters meant to be regarded as literature, not an authentic private correspondence between associates.  In many cases, it is not even clear if the authors ever even sent these letters to their listed recipients, or if they were merely composed for publication.  I have often regarded this type of letter collection as a peculiar phenomenon of the ancient world, stretching back to Cicero, forming the bulk of the New Testament, and gaining prominence as a leading form of art during the period of late antiquity.  I assumed, therefore, that the Cortes collection would contain authentic private correspondence to friends and family in Spain, and offer readers a glimpse into the character and private life of this important historical figure.

Obviously, I was very wrong.  These highly polished, official communiqués to the central government bear little resemblance to my expectations of what a letter should be.  Rather, these letters seem to be little more than chapters in a narrative history with some salutations and felicities attached.  Cortes even goes so far as to engage in many of the tropes associated with formal narrative chronicles, such as using the “my writing sucks” topos.  Furthermore, Cortes hints that these letters were meant for a purpose other than the stated aim of informing the sovereign about affairs in New Spain.  At the end of some of these letters, Cortes usually mentions that he has also sent some other form of communication in addition to this letter.  At the end of the second letter, for example, Cortes writes “and in another letter which I send with this one, I beg Your Royal Excellency …,” clearly indicating that the real matters of state were to be dealt with in another form.  In the third letter, Cortes writes “of all this, the representatives who are now leaving New Spain will give a more detailed account to Your Majesty.”  All of this makes me wonder about the real form of communication within the early Spanish Empire and whom Cortes expected would read these letters.  For one thing, it seems that the real matters of state were being addressed by other forms of communication, either by a second letter, in person by the bearer of the letter, or by copies of ordinances that Cortes had issued.  These letters, then, seem to have served a less-than-official purpose, and I wonder if they were not in fact meant more for public consumption.  That these letters were collected into a codex while the other communications were not seems to suggest this.  I look forward to learning more about official communication within the Spanish Empire and also about the manuscript tradition for this text next week.