{"id":978,"date":"2017-04-15T17:40:48","date_gmt":"2017-04-15T17:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=978"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:37:18","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:37:18","slug":"james-daybell-and-andrew-gordon-eds-cultures-of-correspondence-in-early-modern-britain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2017\/04\/15\/james-daybell-and-andrew-gordon-eds-cultures-of-correspondence-in-early-modern-britain\/","title":{"rendered":"James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, eds. Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, eds.\u00a0Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain<\/em><\/a>. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2016. x., 336p. 36 ill. ISBN 9780812248258. USD 69.95 (hardcover).<\/p>\n

In this exemplary collection of essays, James Daybell and Andrew Gordon provide an astute, comprehensive, and intellectually stimulating view on the early modern culture of correspondence. As the authors clarify in the introduction, \u201ca fundamental aim of the book is the reconstruction of the material conditions and practices of the early modern letter\u201d (8), which includes close readings of its content, careful analyses of its materiality, attention to its carrier networks, consideration of the relationships between writers and recipients, and explorations of the early modern letter\u2019s classification and archival practices. Building on important studies in the field of Renaissance letters, such as Gary Schneider\u2019s The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500-1700<\/em> and Susan Fitzmaurice\u2019s The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English<\/em>, this collection also considers the significant expansion in resources allowed by digitization programs undertaken by major research libraries, explores new case studies, and approaches the letter as a complex sociotext of the early modern period.<\/p>\n

The book is divided in four sections of equal strength. Part I, \u2018Material Practices,\u2019 contains two outstanding articles by Jonathan Gibson, who eruditely explores the varieties of italic script in early modern English letters (and provides a wealth of suggestive visuals to complement his argument), and Mark Brayshay, who analyzes the means by which official and private letters were carried between 1500 and 1640, in an argument aptly supported by maps indicating the post stages in England that required payment between 1553-1557, and the \u201chub postmasters\u201d in England and Wales toward the end of the seventeenth century. Part II,\u2018Technologies and Designs,\u2019 starts with a very engaging article by Nadine Akkerman on the \u201cenigmatic cultures of cryptology\u201d during the early modern period. The author takes as her case study the correspondence networks of Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, a proficient cryptologist, to argue that, \u201cin addition to concealing information, cryptography might have had a larger and more subtle social function\u201d (83): that of establishing exclusive writing coteries. Andrew Gordon\u2019s essay compellingly discusses how the cultures of correspondence had been infiltrated by a culture of counterfeiting in modern England, and takes a close look at the case of John Daniell, who admitted to have procured some of Earl of Essex\u2019s letters to be copied, counterfeited, and forged. Andrew Zurcher looks at the use of ciphers in Sir Philip Sidney\u2019s Arcadia<\/em> and Edmund Spenser\u2019s Faerie Queene<\/em>, and argues for a reading of these works as necessarily informed by anxieties about epistolary security. Part III,\u2018Genres and Rhetorics,\u2019 starts with Lynne Magnusson\u2019s essay on the role of letter writing within the \u201ceducational revolution\u201d that occurred between 1560 and 1640, and looks at a merchant\u2019s family letters and their use of the Ciceronian epistolary model. Christopher Burlinson explores the epistolary career of John Stubbs\u2019s left hand (after his right one was publicly cut off in November 1579, following his inflammatory writings against Queen Elizabeth\u2019s proposed marriage with the Duke of Anjou) as a material sign of his newly acquired, \u201cloyal-in-opposition,\u201d identity (as suggested by his Scaeva signature alluding to Livy\u2019s hero). Michelle O\u2019Callaghan writes a very compelling piece on the codes of politeness instituted by the letter-writing and courtesy manuals of the time, delivering a nuanced, gender-sensitive analysis of several epistolary exchanges (between men, women, and both). The author argues for a close connection between the vituperative letter and verse libel during the Renaissance period, and insightfully gestures toward the (lack of) limits of textualized violence against women.<\/p>\n

Finally, Part IV, \u2018The Afterlives of Letters,\u2019 focuses on the archival practices that allowed the preservation of early modern correspondence. Arnold Hunt\u2019s article discusses archival preservation and destruction of letters in the late Elizabethan period as politically inflected by the complicated public\/private status of such messages and the inherent dangers of newswriting. In the next article, James Daybell reads letter writing within a gendered framework, using Derrida\u2019s term \u201cmatriarchive\u201d as a useful conceptual tool that draws attention to women\u2019s role in archiving correspondence and preserving papers within their households. Often turned into family books of remembrances, family histories and memoirs, or pedigrees and miscellanies, such letters circulated, were annotated, and were archived in ways that \u201cdestabilize our understanding of early modern letters as fixed texts, especially in their later reincarnations\u201d (233). Last but not least, Alan Stewart\u2019s essay shifts focus from the content and\/or materiality of letters to the places they occupy over time, from the moment of their creation to their eventual preservation in digital, museum, or private repositories. Bringing again to the fore the private\/public division, the author takes a perceptive look at the history of the State Paper Office by delving into the activities of Thomas Wilson, the keeper of the records at Whitehall between 1606 and his sudden death in 1629. His analysis demonstrates how \u201cfamiliar letters may tell us a good deal more about the places occupied by state papers than the official papers\u201d (252) themselves.<\/p>\n

This volume does, indeed, deliver on its promise: it provides the readers with varied, suggestive, and genuinely interesting cases that are made available by recently digitized repositories, and sheds new light on the multifarious ramifications of letter writing during the early modern period. The collection is also rich in visuals that aptly support the authors\u2019 arguments and is clearly organized conceptually. As such, it is a necessary work for the specialist and also, given the focus of some of the articles on representative figures of the time, for a broader audience as well.<\/p>\n

Ileana Baird
\nZayed University<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, eds.\u00a0Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2016. x., 336p. 36 ill. ISBN 9780812248258. USD 69.95 (hardcover). In this exemplary collection of essays, James Daybell and Andrew Gordon provide an astute, comprehensive, and intellectually stimulating view on the early modern culture of correspondence. As the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1894,1929,1930,1940],"class_list":["post-978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-15th-17th-centuries","tag-epistolary-culture","tag-europe","tag-material-culture"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=978"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1078,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/978\/revisions\/1078"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}