ARS DICTANDI. – The art of composing letters and documents, known since antiquity, was particularly taught in theoretical-practical treatises that flourished in great numbers in the 12th and 13th centuries, exerting a decisive influence on the formation of the epistolary style of the time and on the development of notarial art.
The first expositor of its precepts, which were rhetorical in form and juridical in content, was ALBERTO DI MONTECASSINO, who lived in that monastery between 1057 and 1086 during the splendid era of Abbot Desiderius. He gathered the fruit of his oral teaching in his works *Breviarum de dictamine* and *Flores rethorici*. Among his principal successors were Ugo di Bologna with his prosaic *Rationes dictandi* (c. 1124), Alberto de Morra, papal chancellor and later Pope (Gregory VIII, in 1187), who wrote a *Forma dictandi* for the use of the scribes of the Holy See, the Florentine Buoncompagno da Signa, the greatest among the dictatores (among his many works the most important is the *Rethorica antiqua*, of 1215), the Bolognese Guido Fava with the *Summa dictaminis* and the *Dictamina* (1229), and the papal scribe Tommaso da Capua, later made a cardinal in 1215 (*Summa dictaminis*).
Common to all these compositions is their practical character, whereby theoretical discussion is followed by examples of immediate relevance, which completely replaced the ancient dry formularies no longer suited to the changed cultural and juridical conditions.
The new doctrine soon spread widely in the chanceries and schools of every country. When applied particularly to notarial practice it was called *ars notaria*; the fundamental work in this field was Rolandino de' Passeggieri’s *Summa artis notaria* (1256), which long dominated the field and was expanded and commented upon by many.