In Rohinton Mistry's 2002 novel Family Matters, Vilas Rane, salesman at the Jai Hind Book Mart in Bombay, has a sideline business as a reader and writer of letters for the illiterate. Despite the practical, mercantile nature of his enterprise, he has a romantic view of the capacity of letters to represent humanity:

Vilas is a modern-day scribe, playing a role similar to that of the medieval notarius: a professional letter writer, who shaped oral accounts into epistolary form. He also performs the job that medieval messengers did upon delivery of letters, reading aloud to customers letters addressed to them that they cannot read themselves. As his business grows, he fanta-sizes that letters provide an unmediated access to humanity, an elusive goal that unites the medieval and the contemporary: understanding of our human condition. However, as his example shows, this unmediated access is just that, a fiction. His dream of unfettered access to humanity is highly dependent on scribal interventions: his customers report their news to him, he crafts their accounts into written messages, and he reports the contents of the responses these letters engender, no doubt shaped on the other end by a scribe like himself who reads letters and crafts responses in turn. By the time news arrives at its destination, it has been mediated by multiple stages of representation and separated by several degrees from its “original version”: the events, thoughts, or ideas to be told.

As I have examined, premodern letters were, much like Vilas's letters, deeply mediated documents. Far from providing a transparent portrayal of events or sentiments, letters offered a complicated conjunction of meanings shaped by compositional forms and conventions and the conditions of their expedition and reception.