Philological-literary conversations: the correspondence between Ernesto Monaci (1844-1918) and Teófilo Braga (1843-1924)

Abstract

The letter is a means of communication between two or more individuals united by affections, interests, solidarity of various kinds. It is to be considered a textual typology in its own right, due to the expressive solutions it gives rise to, the peculiar use it makes of language in comparison with other exclusively public or exclusively private writings, the individual strategies and the communicative registers it uses. By widening the perspective to a broadly understood social history, the letter is also configured as a valuable key to the study of the boundaries between public and private, to understand the evolution of relationships and attitudes, to measure the perception that writers have of themselves, of their correspondents and in general of their contemporaneity. What we discover by analysing the letters that Teófilo Braga and Ernesto Monaci exchange between 1873 and 1880 is a relationship of mutual and intense esteem that arose from a communion of philological-literary activities. They prove to be a document of great historical and cultural interest, as well as linguistic, especially for the information they offer on the state and evolution of the various disciplines and works, on the personal relationships between the two scholars and on the scientific activity of the two eminent academics. The shadow of the 1875 diplomatic edition of the Canzoniere portoghese della Biblioteca Vaticana hangs like a giant over all the correspondence.