La "Compendiosa doctrina" nella tradizione teorica delle epistole formate

This paper contains the critical edition of the Compendiosa doctrina, a short anonymous ars dictandi of XIIth century (preserved in Manuscript Verona, Biblioteca Capitolare CCLXII, 234) that focuses on the composition of the formed letters. The analysis of the historical and rhetorical environment, as well as of the codicological context of the small treatise, allow us to formulate some hypotheses on its composition and to connect it with important epistolary collections (in particular the Lombardische Briefsammlung) and masters active in the twelfth century. This study, however, starts from the element of greatest interest in the Compendiosa - the theory of the formed epistle – proposing an examanination that highlights its place within the subset of the artas that adress this same topic. Preliminarily, therefore, the rhetorical tradition of the formed letters will be briefly reconstructed with the aim of making the reasons that induce the dictatores to dwell in theory, still in the mid-twelfth century, on topics already obsolete at the birth of the epistolography (end of XIth century).