Una tradición textual en el primer español moderno : los tratados de misivas

The Modern Age of the Spanish language remains an obscure era. Recently, there have been indications of a new evolutionary phase within the periodizations of Spanish, designated First Modern Spanish. Chronologically speaking, this new era spans from the latter third of the 17th century to the first third of the 19th. The present work is situated in this period. Its main objective is to demonstrate the modernization of the epistolary genre in the diachrony of Spanish. In doing so, it looks at a European textual tradition barely explored in the Hispanic sphere to date: the letter-writing Manual. In Enlightened Spain, a modern epistolary art was formed, counterposed to the long-standing court style. Both tendencies are analyzed across thirteen writers who published their works during the first phase of the modernization of Spanish. The work of these authors constitutes the corpus for the present study, which offers the first exploration into this historiographic genre that had been prevalent in Europe from the Middle Ages.