Some years back, while studying a fifteenth-century manuscript of a text she was editing, Eleanor discovered that it also contained a new text, one she’d never seen before. This was a set of 37 letters, presented both in Greek and in Latin without any indication of who had written or received them. Intrigued, she started reading.
Lettres Fictives d’un Humaniste: L’Enseignement du Grec A la Renaissance – Sous la direction de Eleanor Dickey (2025)
‘I hear that you’re wasting your time and money. That you throw yourself into gambling and music and frequent parties. If you act like that, you’re going to end up hiring prostitutes – and everyone knows what kinds of damage they do to university students. I’m well aware how upset your father will be when he hears this; perhaps you will drive the poor old man to an early grave. That’s why I beg you to change your ways, because carrying on like this will completely discredit you.’
‘You shouldn’t trust every spirit, as the old proverb says. Because to put it simply, everything you’ve heard about me is wrong. I only do what everyone else does. Enjoying music and throwing oneself into it are totally different things. I flee from gambling as a little sparrow flees a hawk – no-one has ever seen me with dice! Just once a year there’s a party here, and all the students go to it together; is it wrong for me to do what everyone else does? If I didn’t go, I’d be called snooty. My father isn’t going to be at all worried about that. He knows me well and appreciates that one has to cut young people some slack. What happens only occasionally is excusable. And if there’s anyone who really studies hard, that’s me. I don’t say that to boast about myself, but because truth demands it and so that you will change your opinion of me, seeing as it’s wrong.’
Who was this student? What university did he attend, and when – antiquity, the middle ages, or the Renaissance? Why were his letters bilingual, and why were they preserved as a collection? These questions were perfect for answering as a class project, and in 2023 the Sorbonne University offered Eleanor a visiting professorship with a class of students eager to undertake that project. Each student took one or more letters to study and gave it an edition, translation and commentary. As they worked through the collection they found more and more clues to its origins, which turned out to be northern Italy in the fifteenth century. They also found more manuscripts of it: two in Paris, one in Karlsruhe, one in Copenhagen, and a sixteenth-century printed version of which a copy was conveniently located in Oxford. They studied letter-writing in the Renaissance and discovered that the student who speaks so eloquently in these letters never existed, nor did his family: the letters are purely fictional creations. And the class learned that fifteenth-century Greek students, lacking the textbooks we take for granted today, often studied bilingual texts: the letters had been copied as easy reading material for Greek learners. Examining the Greek letters, several students observed that this Greek was not really suitable to learn on, having been written by a fifteenth-century Italian who had failed to grasp several important points of Greek grammar. But it was better than nothing for learners who had no other easy Greek texts to hand, so they used it anyway. In 1548 one class of Greek students in Freiburg, Germany, became so fond of these texts that they published an ‘improved’ version of them as a class project; this was the origin of the printed version in Oxford.
Eleanor’s students took inspiration from the Freiburg class and decided that they too should publish their work on the letters as a book. Of course this required considerably more work than they had done in class, but this group were up for that challenge and happily produced not only publishable versions of their editions, translations and commentaries, but also an introduction explaining what they had discovered about the letters’ history. The Sorbonne put Eleanor in touch with Les Belles Lettres, a wonderful publisher who was able to produce the book less than a year after she handed it to them. Working with this publisher meant publishing in French, which made Eleanor a little nervous; although the class had been conducted in French, not only Eleanor but also quite a few of the students are not native speakers of that language. But the Sorbonne professors rallied around and corrected the French, resulting in a finished product that the authors are delighted with.
The book is published from 6th June 2025; for more information, see:
https://www.lesbelleslettres.com/livre/9782251457093/lettres-fictives-d-un-humaniste
