AIX-EN-PROVENCE, FRANCE — Sometimes the journey is as important as the destination.
So it is for Emil J. Polak as he strides into the Bibliothèque Méjanes here. It is the 728th library -- nearly all of them in Europe -- that Mr. Polak, a historian at Queensborough Community College of the City University of New York, has visited for a one-man research project he began in 1977. He is compiling an inventory of early medieval and Renaissance sources for the rhetorical art known as ars dictaminis, or letter writing. He seeks out Latin manuscripts from the 11th through 17th centuries that offer advice on writing to popes and kings, bureaucrats and noblemen, scholars and lovers, even students seeking financial aid. So far he has produced two book-length volumes of sources; two more are in the works.
Being a community-college professor on the research circuit can get a bit lonely. “It’s a double life,” says Mr. Polak, who has a tweedy, gentlemanly demeanor and uses a typewriter to compose his own letters. “You have to love what you’re doing.” He fits his travel and conference obligations around the heavy teaching schedule common at two-year colleges -- in his case, four courses one semester and five the next. Patching together grants and fellowships (24 so far) and using mostly vacation time, he makes an intensive trip to Europe each year.
Mr. Polak, 64, spent almost a year in East Germany when it was still a Communist state. Most years, though, he makes shorter trips, devoted to a single nation or region -- Albania, Britain, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Scandinavia, Spain. Sometimes, as in Albania, he finds nothing relevant in the Latin manuscripts he views -- an observation that he adds to his inventory. Because so many manuscripts are recorded incompletely or not at all, “you never know what’s there until you look at the document,” he says. Once, on the other hand, he found three treatises on letter writing in a single text.
“Imagine the excitement!” He says that often.
This year Mr. Polak is spending the second half of a sabbatical visiting 47 libraries in 41 French cities. With his wife, Patricia, navigating, he drives across central and southern France, stopping in at libraries and archives run by regional governments, towns, monasteries, universities, and individuals. Sometimes he visits several in one day. He racks up miles, memories, and incipits (the term for a manuscript’s first line) during a two-month trip that reads like a scholarly whistle-stop tour: Fontainebleau. Évreux. Troyes. Nancy. Metz. Strasbourg. Colmar. Montbéliard. Dijon. Beaune. Lyon. And so on.
The rigorous schedule doesn’t include major libraries, like France’s Bibliothèque Nationale and the Vatican Library. He figures he’ll save those for when all that driving becomes too demanding.
Mr. Polak’s passion for Latin was first stirred by a high-school teacher in Sayville, N.Y., named J. Letetia Washburne, who, he notes, was not replaced when she retired in 1969. At Columbia University, where he earned a doctorate in medieval history in 1970, he met the renowned Renaissance scholar Paul Oskar Kristeller, who was second reader for Mr. Polak’s dissertation and remained Mr. Polak’s mentor until his death two years ago, at the age of 94.
It was Mr. Kristeller, author of a comprehensive inventory of Latin manuscripts, who inspired Mr. Polak to do a separate inventory of letter-writing sources. For his dissertation, Mr. Polak had done a textual study of a 13th-century Latin treatise on letter writing believed to have been used at the University of Bologna, in Italy, where letter writing was part of the curriculum.
Mr. Polak’s current scholarly interest lies in locating source material on letter writing rather than studying the substance of the letters. He has left that to other scholars, who use the letters to reconstruct intellectual and social history.
“For 20 years I worked extensively on ars dictaminis, and you can’t do that without encountering Emil,” says Ronald G. Witt, a Duke University historian who is vice president of the Renaissance Society of America. Had Mr. Polak’s inventories been available when Mr. Witt began his work, he says, “I’d have saved a year of my life.”
Letter writing as an art form began in monasteries and spread as the papacy gained power, city-states and universities sprang up, and the need for diplomacy and bureaucracy grew. A branch of rhetoric, one of the seven liberal arts, letter writing borrowed from such classical sources as Cicero. A proper letter contained the salutation, or greeting; the exordium, or appeal for good will from the recipient; the narration, or purpose; the petition, or specific request; and the conclusion. Professional letter writers called dictatores compiled collections of model letters to aid an increasingly literate population.
In Italy, a related genre -- that of secular oratory, or speechmaking -- developed, and Mr. Polak’s inventory includes sources for that as well.
Many medieval letters used flourishes and lengthy salutations. Here’s part of a model letter written for a parent whose son had disgraced himself during his university studies. Composed in the 13th century by a Bologna professor named Guido Faba, it carries the title De parentibus ad malum filium (“From parents to a bad son”): ". . . Grief has thrown me in confusion, and because of many distresses my insides are disturbed because we have learned not only by public rumor but also the report of many that you, the study of letters abandoned, from which we expected great joy with honor, shamefully kept company with harlots day and night in a brothel. Therefore under the cover of our blessing we order you that you strive to remove the previous deed and infamy with good character and a subsequent praiseworthy life so that our lute which came to sorrow may be turned to joy, and our relatives as well as friends may cheer for you...”
Perhaps, says Mr. Polak, Faba knew from experience that there was a demand for such letters.
The model response letter for the accused son, meanwhile, expresses astonishment that his parents actually believed all those lies.
Conciseness was not necessarily the goal of medieval letters. Nor is efficiency Mr. Polak’s goal. Letter writing may be a lost art, but not for Mr. Polak. He doesn’t use e-mail, much less the Internet, and doesn’t plan to learn.
“Can’t people write or call me?” he asks.
Perhaps. But wouldn’t the Internet be a great research tool? Wouldn’t he like to have instant access to maps of small towns, library hours and certain catalogs? Imagine the excitement! Mr. Polak sighs and repeats what he has said many times to many others: In the end, you still have to go to the library and look at the manuscript.
After Valence, Clermont-Ferrand, Limoges, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Pau, Toulouse, Montpellier, and yet other places, Mr. Polak arrives in this elegant Provençal city known for its fountains and stately mansions. He knows from scouring Mr. Kristeller’s inventory and Columbia’s catalogs that the local library has a collection of letters compiled by Petrus de Vinea, a dictator who was imperial chancellor to Emperor Frederick II. In the darkened reading room reserved for old books, a curator sets the manuscript on a leather-covered table. Mr. Polak examines it, then writes down the author, title, number of pages, incipit, and other descriptive details.
Today’s library visit is an easy one, but that isn’t always the case. Mr. Polak once visited a monasterial library on a secluded Yugoslav island that required a specially arranged boat trip. At one convent library, the nuns, to avoid being seen by outsiders, spoke from behind a wall and delivered the manuscripts on a turntable. In Modigliana, Italy, the library -- which had moved to a new location -- didn’t have the manuscripts listed in its catalog. When Mr. Polak insisted on visiting the old location, he and the librarian found them in a dirty heap in an abandoned room.
Now Mr. Polak thanks the French curator and leaves. Another day, another library. “I’m delighted,” he says.
You can’t help wondering whether he’ll miss his scholarly days on the road once his project ends -- if it ever does. He’s already working on next year’s trip, to Austria. After that, he’ll visit libraries in Paris and Italy.
Only 200 more to go, and he’ll be done.
Imagine the excitement!
http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Page: A40
