Authenticity and authorship

Abstract

Petitions are seductive documents because they seem to offer intimate detail of everyday lives in the words of the people most closely affected by potentially important life changes. Reading a few petitions creates an impression that one is dealing with unique expressions of individual circumstances, the authentic voice of downtrodden and desperate, yet dignified people. It feels like eavesdropping. Reading many petitions leaves one with the sense that all tenants were in the same boat. One is left with a sense of predictable, if not always edifying excuses and special pleading. In the vast majority of estate petitions, refinements of style overpower revelations of self. Writers conformed to epistolary conventions and to models of structure, rhetoric, language, and manuscript layout. Letters show familiarity with classical and Renaissance rhetorical conventions and are thus the product of artifice as much as individuality, which is shown only as fashioned by a specific rhetorical purpose.¹ Petitions ‘are not thoughtless outpourings; their charm and their power, as well as their very appearance of spontaneity, are the result of considerable, if varied, art’ that blended literary convention with didactic purpose.² Authors usually took great care to narrate well, framing their requests in ways that allowed the recipient to recognise a shared classical culture (even if not truly that of the aspirant) and respond in ways that he or she hoped would be structured by the norms of largitas and affability, duty and honour that provided the core of that culture.