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  3. Letter-writing goes back thousands of years but heated up during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Historically (perhaps now) let

Letter-writing goes back thousands of years but heated up during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Historically (perhaps now) let

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问题     Letter-writing goes back thousands of years but heated up during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Historically (perhaps now) letters were indicators of status and breeding. Like conversation, they were used to manipulate, embellish, entertain, threaten, seduce and of course do business. On the way home from discovering America, Christopher Columbus got caught in a storm and his mind turned—as a good bourgeois parent—to his two sons. Who would pay their school fees if he came to a watery end? He picked up a quill and documented his accomplishments on the voyage for his Spanish patrons, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, rolled up the letter in a wooden Madeira cask and threw it into the sea. This was not so much for posterity but rather what University of York professor William H. Sherman has called "a father’s desperate petition for the future support of his children".
    The 18th century was strong on the epistolary book, which made authors’ quarrels especially amusing. Tobias Smollett wrote Travels Through France & Italy (my favourite letter contains his description of French women: "As their faces are concealed under a false complexion, so their heads are covered with a vast load of false hair, frizzled at the forehead, so as exactly to resemble the woolly heads of the Guinea negroes"). His approach to anything foreign was considered so full of spleen by author Laurence Sterne that he was moved to write A Sentimental Journey. This satirical novel gives Smollett the name Smelfungus—a cantankerous man addicted to exaggeration, who talks of being "flay’d alive" by cannibals: "I’ll tell it, cried Smelfungus, to the world. You had better tell it, said I, to your physician". Samuel Johnson, in referring to his own letters, claims "...his soul lies naked" but he had doubts about the truthfulness of others, writing that there was "no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse".
    How-to books abounded. Letters, apart from business ones, were seen as a feminine task, and templates addressed feminine problems. The New Academy of Complements, for example, published in 1671, titled the letter to be written by abandoned women "A Crack’t Virgin to Her Deceitful Friend". Hand-wringing is the motif. "Now you appear so foul, that nothing can be more monstrous; is this the fruit of your Promises and Vows...how comes it then to pass, that you forsake me, ruin my Reputation, and leave me to become the Map of Shame and Ignominy..." I long to use the Map of Shame bit but I suspect it was as unhelpful then as boiling bunnies is now.
    A Vanderbilt University study says children taught cursive writing learn and express themselves better. If so, I have a few suggestions for our educators; How about letters "On Reprimanding a Person of Difference Without Incurring Hate Charges", or "An Ailing Citizen to His Callous Minister of Health". The possibilities are, sadly, limitless.
选项 A、was widely accepted thousands of years ago.
B、could serve a wide variety of purposes in the past.
C、served as a document forwarded to the King and Queen in Columbus’ case.
D、helped Columbus obtain financial support for his sons.
答案B
解析
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