Valla's 'Elegantiae' and the humanist attack on the ars dictaminis

Renaissance humanists modified rather than rejected the medieval adaptation of classical rhetoric to letter writing, but they came to scorn the 'barba ric' grammar of the ars dictaminis. This development followed the widesprea d dissemination through printing, beginning in 1471, of the Elegantiae of L orenzo Valla and its imitators. Niccolo Perotti incorporated Valla's approa ch to language in a section on epistolography of his Rudimenta grammatices, and soon letter writing and elegantiae became closely associated in textbo oks. By about 1500, not only medieval writers but even humanist pioneers of an earlier generation and contemporary professionals who dared to defend e stablished epistolary etiquette were under attack. By 1522, when Erasmus pu blished his De conscribendi epistolis, medieval formulas had become merely comic.