Expressing friendship in letters: Conventionality and sincerity in the multilingual correspondence of nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen
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Francesco De Toni
Abstract
The relationship between the polite and conventional nature of friendly language and the sincerity of the writer’s feelings is a central topic in linguistic and historical research on friendship in epistolary communication. This relationship can be understood in the context of the emotional values and conventionalised emotional practices that characterise the writer’s emotional community.
The language of friendship has a significant role in the history of letter writing in religious communities. However, epistolary and emotional practices among religious groups in the modern era remain a rather unexplored filed of research. In this regard, the nineteenth century is of particular interest, as it saw the consolidation of sincerity as a central notion in European standards of letter writing.
Bringing together historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, this paper describes the forms and functions of sincerity in the negotiation of friendships between nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen. The article analyses a corpus of letters in Italian and Spanish from the multilingual correspondence of European Benedictine missionaries in Australia between the 1850s and the 1890s. The results of the analysis show that sincerity and emotional self-disclosure, while dependent on the pragmatic conventions of letter writing, belonged to cross-linguistic cultural scripts typical of religious communities.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship and by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100–1800 (CE110001011). I am thankful to Associate Professor John Kinder and to Associate Professor Jacqueline Van Gent for supervising my research. I am also thankful to Dr Joshua Brown and Dr Federica Verdina for allowing me to view their transcriptions of some of the archival documents analysed in this study. Finally, I am grateful to all the archivists at the archives that hold the documents analysed in this study.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Sincerity and epistolarity: Multilingual historical pragmatic perspectives
- Articles
- Performative speech act verbs and sincerity in Anglo-Norman and Middle English letters
- Expressing friendship in letters: Conventionality and sincerity in the multilingual correspondence of nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen
- Sincere or heart-felt?: Sincerity, convention, and bilingualism in French and Spanish letters
- ‘With the greatest sincerity’: expressing genuineness of feeling in nineteenth-century business correspondence in English
- Sincerity in Lithuanian epistolarity: Between truth and emotion
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Sincerity and epistolarity: Multilingual historical pragmatic perspectives
- Articles
- Performative speech act verbs and sincerity in Anglo-Norman and Middle English letters
- Expressing friendship in letters: Conventionality and sincerity in the multilingual correspondence of nineteenth-century Catholic churchmen
- Sincere or heart-felt?: Sincerity, convention, and bilingualism in French and Spanish letters
- ‘With the greatest sincerity’: expressing genuineness of feeling in nineteenth-century business correspondence in English
- Sincerity in Lithuanian epistolarity: Between truth and emotion
