期刊名称：Rhetorical Review : The Electronic Review of Books on the History of rhetoric
印刷版ISSN：1901-2640
出版年度：2007
卷号：5
期号：02
页码：1-5
出版社：Pernille Harsting
摘要：Pedro Martín Baños’s study of the art of letter writing in the European Renaissance, 1400-1600,
is a corrected and improved version of his doctoral dissertation, directed by Dra. Elena Artaza
Álvarez and defended 23 June 2004 on the Bilbao campus of the Universidad de Deusto.
Intending originally to treat only Spanish epistolary theory in the Renaissance, Martín Baños
enlarged his vision to encompass the development of Renaissance epistolary theory in Latin and
the vernacular languages from its classical and medieval predecessors up to 1600. The result, a
monograph of more than seven hundred pages, carefully synthesizes for readers of Spanish the
existing scholarship on manuals and textbooks of letter writing, much of it published in English,
French, German, Italian, and Spanish, since the 1970s. Occasionally Martín Baños acknowledges
gaps in the current state of research that he is unable to fill. However, he demonstrates
his mastery of the primary as well as secondary sources catalogued in his two bibliographies
and his index of manuscripts by providing Spanish translations of key passages from the
literature on epistolary theory up to 1600 and by footnoting the original quotations.
