Over the past few decades, one of the most striking features of early modern studies has been a resurgence of interest in the “materiality” of both “literary” and “nonliterary” manuscripts. Scholars such as Peter Beal, Mary Hobbs, Harold Love, and Henry Woudhuysen have alerted us to the importance of manuscript circulation in English literary and cultural life, and historians are now much keener than before to integrate the physical and generic complications of manuscript source material into their work. Of “nonliterary” genres, letters have been particularly fortunate in the attention that they have received, thanks in no small part to James Daybell's groundbreaking first book, Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford, 2006). Daybell's new monograph, like its predecessor, explores matters such as handwriting, scribes, and postal procedure. His emphasis on the “material,” however, now has rather more of a polemical edge: though Daybell says he does not want to “privilege material reading,” his avowed aim is “to argue that analysis of the physical characteristics must reside alongside and complement literary, stylistic and more recent gender-based approaches to letters” (19). The Material Letter carries out this agenda, not by looking in any detail at those rival ways of reading letters and showing how a knowledge of material features might modify them, but, rather, by a fascinating and unprecedentedly rich account of material factors on their own terms. No bad thing, perhaps: it certainly makes for an exciting and enjoyable book.

The introduction (chapter 1) begins with something of a tour de force: a Holmesian feat of deduction in which Daybell extrapolates from the slightest epistolary communication imaginable (a note written by Robert Cecil to Sir Francis Darcy in 1601) a gripping narrative involving multiple agents and a doomed postal history. Chapter 2 looks at “The Materials and Tools of Letter-Writing”—paper, ink, quills, and the surfaces on which and the rooms in which people wrote letters: “material” features essential to the very existence of manuscript letters. Chapter 3 explores both the use of secretaries and other types of scribe, and (a less obviously “material” feature) the influence (or otherwise) of letter-writing manuals on argumentative structure. The heart of the book is the fourth chapter, on “Interpreting Materiality and Social Signs.” Here Daybell expertly unpicks the meanings—and thus highlights the importance—of a range of physical features found in early modern letters: handwriting, blank space, signatures, paper, paper-folding methods, dating, and seals. The rest of the book sheds light on the passage of the manuscript letter from its place of composition (the writer's private chamber or “closet,” perhaps, or, in less well-heeled households, maybe just a desk in the hall) out into the world: in successive chapters we read about postal methods, the variety of techniques used to keep the contents of letters secret, the copying and circulation of letters in the early modern “manuscript system,” and (in an afterword) archival practice ancient and modern. Daybell provides comprehensive surveys of each topic, docketing them for our convenience as neatly as an Elizabethan secretary arranging his employer's correspondence. The book is rooted in enviable mastery not just of numerous manuscript archives but also of the secondary literature of a clutch of distinct academic fields—from paleography to literary theory, by way of social history and Shakespeare criticism. As a result, The Material Letter is, among its many other virtues, a lucid and copiously referenced introduction to a multitude of different topics: it is an excellent first stop for anybody wanting to know about, inter alia, the range of different paper types in early modern England, the intellectual affiliations of “thing” theory, the English road system, and modern-day manuscript restoration techniques.

Daybell has important interventions to make. Throughout, The Material Letter highlights two things in particular: the crucial influence of the uncertainties of early modern delivery methods on early modern epistolary practice in general, and the collaborative nature of early modern letter-writing. Daybell shows, too, that the use of “significant space” in manuscript letters to register aspects of the relationship between writer and addressee was more extensive than some scholars have recently claimed. One of his most intriguing chapters, the sixth, on “Secret Letters,” ranges from the use of childish nicknames to the activities of the government cryptographer Thomas Phelippes. Daybell very valuably compares precept and practice, concluding that real-life uses of codes and ciphers were far more slapdash than the practices recommended in contemporary cryptography literature. (He makes a similar point about the uses of letter-writing textbooks in chapter 2.) Chapter 7 argues that letter-books were, perhaps more often than not, deployed for specific reasons (in a new job or in connection with a legal dispute)—they do not seem to have been a genre in common use. This chapter also contains a lucid and inspiring anatomy of the varieties of early modern manuscript circulation.

The ambition of The Material Letter is enormous, and so inevitably there are gaps. (I felt the absence, for example, of a sense of the institutional contexts that must have underpinned many of the letters Daybell discusses: when and why and how did state-employed secretaries, parliamentarians, lawyers [the list goes on] write their letters?) There are some nice pictures, but, unavoidably in a book in standard academic monograph format, not enough of them. (The reader in search of visual stimulation should consult Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe's lavishly illustrated Letterwriting in Renaissance England [Folger Shakespeare Library, 2004]). Faced with the abundance of fascinating details and conclusions served up by Daybell, however, objections such as these seem churlish. As its author himself says, The Material Letter is the culmination of fifteen years of research. It is a superb achievement and an essential purchase for anyone—whatever his or her level of expertise and knowledge—currently working with early modern manuscripts.