Man of letters

From Textus Receptus

Men of letters

The term "Man of Letters" ("belletrist", from the French belles-lettres), has been used in some Western cultures to denote contemporary intellectual men; the term rarely denotes "scholars", and is not synonymous with "academic".[3][4] Originally the term implied a distinction between the literate and the illiterate, which carried great weight when literacy was rare. It also denoted the literati (Latin, plural of literatus), the "citizens of the Republic of Letters" in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, where it evolved into the salon, usually run by women.