12 - Letters

Summary

Letters are undoubtedly the most ubiquitous written form surviving from the pens of early modern women. Letter-writing was a quotidian activity connected to the rhythms of women's everyday lives. Perhaps more than any other type of text, letters - given their apparent immediacy and autobiographical flavour - lend themselves to intersecting methods of inquiry: historical, literary, palaeographical, linguistic and gender-based. They shed important new light on female education and literacy and on the nature of early modern women's writing; reflect family, gender and other social relations; map the social and political activities of networks of female letter-writers; and permit the reconstruction of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century mentalités. Recent work has challenged traditional perceptions of women's letters as largely 'private', non-political forms and of letter-writing as a solely male activity. Furthermore, new approaches to Renaissance letters have encouraged scholars to rethink the ways in which we read, interpret and understand women's letters. Letters are not simply depositories of 'historical fact', windows into women's souls or indeed vehicles capable of echoing unproblematized women's voices down the centuries. Increasingly, correspondence is viewed as a highly complex genre that requires layers of careful unpacking, an awareness of the multi-dimensional nature of epistolarity (literally, the 'letterness' of letters) and sensitivity to social and cultural meaning inscribed textually and materially for full understanding.