Medieval romance epistolarity: The case of the iberian jews

In the article it is argued that the corpus of early modern Spanish and Judeo-Spanish epistolography has antecedents in a tradition, albeit unstudied and unnoticed which may be traced to the Middle Ages, From c.1300 to the expulsions of the 1490's there existed a Jewish cultural practice of epistolarity in the Romance. Examples of this practice are studied here. It is argued that its coherence is expressed at various levels. Historically the authors generally belong to the leading strata of their community. Their correspondents are monarchs and nobility. On a literary level one may notice examples of rhetoricism. Intellectually the ideas expressed may sometimes be traced to earlier Hebrew sources. In the fifteenth century currents of vernacular humanism make themselves evident in these texts.