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Never ask, never apologise

Politeness strategies in Italian merchant letters between London, Milan, Florence, 1397–1401

 | The University of Western Australia
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with The University of Western Australia.

Published online: 3 February 2026
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00080.bro
Abstract
This paper details two case-studies in which politeness strategies are conveyed through practices of mitigation in Italian merchant letters during the Renaissance. The first case-study concerns the successful negotiation of trade practices between Italian merchants working in London with the “merchant of Prato”, Francesco di Marco Datini. The second case-study looks at the collaboration between local merchants from Milan and the Datini merchants back in Tuscany. How were practical goals requested and achieved? And what were the linguistic manifestations of such requests? What “work” is language doing when we examine the pragmatics behind (im)politeness in letter writing? This article aims to investigate these questions in a corpus of merchant letters from the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries. The results show that negotiation occurs through indirect requests, shedding further light on how politeness is expressed in a framework of historical pragmatics.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Historical context: London–Milan–Florence “triad” in the fourteenth century
  • 3.The corpus: Letters from London and Milan
  • 4.Methodology
  • 5.(Im)Politeness strategies in Italian merchant letters
    • 5.1Requests: Never ask
    • 5.2Complaint resolution: Never apologise
    • 5.3What “work” is language doing in making requests?
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (61)
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