Motherhood and epistolary exchange in the letters of Ippolito d'Este with Eleonora and Beatrice d'Aragona

From the end of the Middle Ages and throughout the modern age, we witness a wide diffusion of the letter, developed, in the chancelleries of the European courts and among the elites, according to their own canons that mix the rhetorical and chancery tradition with humanistic knowledge. The epistolary style is adapted to the transmission of information and political decisions, but also to a frequent exchange of news on everyday life, revealing, between public and private, the network of interpersonal relationships and, with it, clues of feelings that bring out 'emotional communities' to which, in many of the cases examined here, individuals in search of social recognition belong.