engleski

Structural elements in Ritter's early verse epistles

Taking a sample of Paulus Ritter's (Croatian historiographer and poet [Senj 1652 - Vienna 1713]) juvenile epistles, I shall present an example of late 17th-century usage of necessary epistolary segments in this author. In writing a humanistic epistle, the ars epistolandi sugested salutatio, captatio benevolentiae, narratio, petitio and conclusio as its obligatory elements, but here, in Ritter's epistles, created in 1676-7 and 1682, some of them are omitted, while others seem rather to belong to the mediaeval ars dictaminis. The reason should be seen in the author's dependence on most of his recipients. The fact that here we deal with verse epistles should also be considered, and in many respects Ovid's Epistolae ex Ponto and Heroides were Ritter's epistolary models. The aim of my presentation is to help creating a clearer picture of Latin verse epistolography before the 1700s, by means of pointing at some of the conclusions regarding this author's work.

epistolography; 17th century; Paulus Ritter; neolatinism in Croatia

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