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Correspondances, clientèle et culture politique dans l’État ecclésiastique au début du xvii e siècle.

This essay focuses on the question of authorship in clientele correspondence in the Papal States. It considers the rhetorical devices of state authorship, and explores how, as a result of secretarial intervention and the influence of handbooks, these letters can be viewed as authorless. The final section demonstrates how and why the ‘real letters’ were eventually fed into the corpus of manuals of letter writing. It argues that the decontextualizing which the letters underwent in this operation led to a dialectical re-creation of the secretaries as authors not only of letters but also, more importantly, of texts on virtuous politics.