ARS DICTANDI. – The art of composing letters and documents, known since antiquity, was taught especially in theoretical and practical treatises, which flourished in great numbers in the 12th and 13th centuries, exercising a decisive influence on the formation of the epistolary style of the period and on the development of the notarial art.
The first expositor of its precepts, rhetorical in form and juridical in content, was Alberto di Montecassino who, having lived in that monastery between 1057 and 1086 during the splendid times of Abbot Desiderio, gathered the fruit of his oral teaching in his works Breviarium de dictamine and Flores rethorici. Following him, among the principal figures, were Ugo di Bologna with his Rationes dictandi prosaica (c. 1124); Alberto de Morra, papal chancellor and later Pope (Gregory VIII, in 1187), who wrote a Forma dictandi for the use of the notaries of the Holy See; the Florentine Buoncompagno da Signa, the foremost of 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 notary Tommaso da Capua, later made a cardinal in 1215 (Summa dictaminis).
Common to all the compositions is their practical character, whereby theoretical discussion is followed by examples of immediate relevance, which entirely replaced the ancient arid formularies, no longer suited to the changed cultural and juridical conditions.
The new doctrine was soon widely disseminated 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 the Summa artis notariae of Rolandino de' Passeggieri (1256), which long held sway and was enlarged and commented upon by many.