«Pochi fatti et assai parole». Language and style in two of Anton Francesco Doni’s letters

Abstract

After a short overview on sixteenth-century Italian comic epistolography, this essay focuses on the writing of the Florentine polygraph Anton Francesco Doni. Particularly, two tonally divergent letters from the Tre libri di lettere del Doni e i termini della lingua toscana (1552) take focus in terms of their phonetic, morphological, syntactic and stylistic elements in order to highlight the author’s dual nature as both moralist and humorist. A glossary of popular and obscene expressions follows each text.