This volume explores the history of a cultural practice that has become common and widespread: the writing of letters. It begins by examining the invention of norms for writing letters in the middle ages, and the fixing of these norms in popular manuals of various kinds. It then analyzes the letter-writing models developed in the Ancien Regime, showing how these models were linked to court literature, on the one hand, and to the popular books distributed by pedlars, on the other."