With Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain James Daybell and Andrew Gordon have compiled a very useful book precisely because its focus on the material, social, and cultural dimensions of early modern letters is not as new as they suggest. Early modern scholars have long since discovered that manuscript letters were often written collaboratively and read by any number of persons besides their addressees, in a wide range of public and domestic settings; that writing and orality were still closely aligned; that the letter form was used for a variety of legal, political, institutional, and commercial, as well as personal and literary, purposes; and that the method by which a letter was sent, and delays, interceptions or failures in its transmission, were central concerns. Scholars have also established that letters were used by the partly illiterate (with the aid of amanuenses and local barber-readers) as well as by the learned; that letter writing was taught in schools and through manuals; that writers strove for spontaneity despite the genre's many fixed rhetorical, social and material conventions; that they resorted to ciphers and codes; and that letters were only very selectively preserved. The great value of this collection lies in its bringing together first-rate essays that summarize and build on this previous work by scholars such as Daybell himself. It thus serves students seeking an introduction to early modern letter-writing practices, as well as scholars looking for interesting new research.
The collection is organized into four sections: “Material Practices,” “Technologies and Designs,” “Genres and Rhetorics,” and the “Afterlives of Letters.”
Handwriting was an important material practice because early moderns used different scripts and variants on them to signal a letter's subject, its relative formality or informality, its writer's rank, gender and age, and whether some or all of the writing had been delegated to a secretary or scrivener. But, as Jonathan Gibson demonstrates in the first essay, it can be easier to identify a major change in a script over the longue duree than it is to locate that change in particular manuscripts, or decide what information letter-variants signaled in particular cases. The stronger essay in part one is Mark Brayshay's on methods of conveying letters. Though the story of the rise of the post office has been told many times, Brayshay's essay is exemplary both in showing what other methods of conveyance existed or stubbornly persisted and in explaining when and why different classes of letter writers would have chosen one method over another.
The three essays in part two bear on secret writing. After historicizing the ubiquity of ciphers and codes in the letters of political actors, diplomats, and spies, Nadine Ackerman uses the correspondence of Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, to address the interesting question of whether secret writing had become “a secondary mode of literacy” for the elite (72) that was deployed for purposes other than concealing information from the enemy. Authenticity was an issue in a culture in which the skills required for forging letters and signatures abounded because people learned to write by copying models, and accomplished letter writers were expected to master multiple scripts and hands. In his fine essay, Gordon's relates the inception of forgery as a criminal act in 1541 to the increasing importance of credible documentation in legal and political disputes and shows how forged letters were detected, or commissioned and manipulated for treason trials. And beginning with the clandestine copying of an unguarded prince's letter in Phillip Sidney's Arcadia (1593), Andrew Zurcher's thought-provoking chapter considers how anxieties over the security of coded letters and revelation of their secrets inform allegoresis in the Arcadia and Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596).
Epistolary style is at issue in part three. Lynne Magnussen's admirable study of the correspondence of two members of the same sixteenth-century family—one a Latin grammar-school boy who imitated Ciceronian epistolary models, the other an apprentice drawing on vernacular mercantile forms shaped by orality—challenges current assumptions about the utility of humanist education, and the social capital men gained from it. Magnussen's findings prefigure arguments made for the rise of the “English school” movement in the next century. Analyzing letters signed “Scaeva” or “with his left hand” (166) that John Stubbs wrote after his right hand was amputated in 1579 for a libel on the queen, Christopher Burlinson argues that Stubbs's construction of a new left-handed epistolary identity depended materially on his epistolary network of close friends and coreligionists. However, this calls for comparison to the functioning of other pseudonymous signatures in court circles and coteries. Michelle O'Callaghan concludes this section by analyzing how close to the boundary of indecorum the honor code permitted women to go in letters designed to insult or affront their correspondents.
The final section contains three strong essays on changing attitudes to the preservation and archiving of letters. Arnold Hunt documents the practice among the Elizabethan political elite of sending a packet of letters and enclosures to the same addressee, some of which were designed to be burned as soon as read, others to be shown to the Privy Council or the queen. He argues that fear that a correspondent did not burn his letters sometimes led writers to safeguard themselves from that correspondent's archive by preserving letters of his that should have been burnt. By reference to the kind of material that was preserved in family papers, the historical or biographical value a child or spouse placed on those letters, and how they were subsequently kept, sold, or archived, Daybell explains why so few of the letters written (and not burned) by women were preserved in family archives. Alan Stewart picks up the story here. Describing how archives of state papers were collected from family papers long kept in private hands, he questions our assurance that state papers and familiar letters were different things.
This cohesive and well-written essay collection supplies essential information, food for thought, and possible directions for future research; it is a pleasure to read.
