CULTURES OF CORRESPONDENCE IN EARLY MODERN BRITAIN

The letter is a powerfully evocative form that has gained in resonance as the habits of personal letter writing have declined in the digital age, faith in the letter as evidence of the intimate thoughts of individuals underplays the sophisticated ways letters functioned in the past. In our book leading scholars approach the letter from a variety of disciplines to uncover the habits, forms and secrets of letter writing. The look at such elements as handwriting, seals, ink, and the arrangement of words on the manuscript page which were significant carriers of meaning alongside epistolary rhetorics. Chapters explore the travels of the letter uncovering the many means through which correspondence reached a reader by messenger and horse and carriage, and the ways in which the delivery of letters preoccupied contemporaries. They reveal how other practices such as the use of cipher and the designs of forgery threatened to subvert the surveillance and reading of letters. Individual chapters study the language of letter writers and their thoughts and discover deliberate, skilful exercises in managing the conventions and expectations of the form. Letters enjoyed textual and archival afterlives whose stories are rarely told except those which have been celebrated for their historical or literary significance. From Palatino to Cresci, carriers and posts, enigmatic culture of cryptology, the culture of copying and counterfeit correspondence, allegory in Sidney and Spenser, Cicero, the effects in the Herrick family letters of the 16th century, John Stubbs's left-handed letters, and preservation and early archive are among the artful qualities of letters and the cultures of collaboration and re-writing that produced them in this magnificent study. 322pp, illus.