Published respectively in 1549 and 1560, the epistolary collections of Bernardo Tasso, father of Torquato of the same name and a renowned poet in his time, obey different logics and needs. The first is presented as a model for a wide public, with a clear desire to educate in good letters and morals. It includes a wide variety of epistolary typologies, and focuses on the turbulent history of the early 16th century. Tasso asserts himself as a chronicler and diplomat, while emphasising his stature as a mentor to a prince, anxious to appear as a paragon of professional and personal virtues. The second collection, on the other hand, responds to the desire to publish the exchanges linked to the development of his chivalric novel, Amadis, but is largely dependent on the Neapolitan events of 1547, which transformed this perfect secretary into a penniless courtier. The book thus partly traces the deterioration of Tasso’s relationship with his patron, Ferrante Sanseverino. Together with his denigration of the prince, material contingencies and the intrusion of everyday vocabulary contribute to distancing this collection from the previous one and to drawing a very different self-portrait of its author. The courtier with an exemplary cursus honorum gives way to a pugnacious intellectual aware of the power of his pen. The modus vivendi of 1549 collides with the reality of an ageing servant in adversity, while the modus scribendi of an ideal secretary is succeeded by a lexicon of the ordinary and sometimes of the sour.

This book is included in DOAB.