Patrick Koch

• A3: Pure Language, Good Form – Purism and the Aesthetics of Social Interaction in Early Modern Courtesy Books

The Italian section of the project A3 is dedicated to the figure of the "buon segretario", the letters he wrote and the aesthetic implications that appear in them. The text genre of the trattati sul Segretario represents a promising object of praxeological observation in the dynamic interplay of heterological and autological components, which converge in two respects in the aesthetic figure of reflection  –  the "good secretary": On the one hand in his linguistic and behavioural representation as a stylised "product", on the other as a style-giving "producer" in a context of profession-specific bienséance within the poles of faithful silence and conventional writing. The questions that form the focus of the project include how (and whether) the behavioural categories and virtues exposed in the treatises are reflected in the linguistic-formal design of the model letters, which linguistic-theoretical and normative implications are explicitly or implicitly negotiated, whether diachronic "shifts" can be detected between the aesthetic figures of reflection contained in the individual texts, which (possibly) relate to the increasing nationalisation of Italy and which relationships exist with France and Germany.