James Daybell

University of Plymouth | UoP · School of Humanities and Performing Arts

This article presents two case studies, which are the result of the application of a gendered interpretative tool to the collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum (London) and the Vasa Museum (Stockholm). Objects and their gendered narratives within the museums’ collections were researched across their lifecycle, from commission and manufacture t...

This essay looks at the scribal circulation of letters in early modern England. Building on the work of scholars such as Mary Hobbs, Harold Love, H. R. Woudhuysen, Arthur Marotti, and Peter Beal, it outlines the range of lettertexts copied and collected, and the manuscript forms and writing technologies that facilitated circulation. It contributes...

This article examines correspondence between mothers and daughters in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England, as a way of investigating the distinct nature of mother-daughter relationships during this period, and of studying the ways in which such relationships were negotiated through the epistolary medium. Based on approximately 100 lett...

SmithHilda L.. All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640–1832. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+235. $70.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-271-02181-0. - Volume 44 Issue 3 - James Daybell

Letters represent one of the most common forms of women s writing that survives for the late-medieval period, and thus an important source for re-examining levels of lay female literacy and for exploring the lives and experiences of a range of women: royal, aristocratic, and mercantile. Perhaps the most probing question that confronts scholars of w...

This chapter examines the manuscript practices associated with what I call ‘secret letters’ in early modern England. Clandestine communications were often disguised as innocuous everyday forms of correspondence. The study of secret letters is therefore a heightened version of the concerns of this book. Its focus on the material aspects of covert co...

Material readings are central to a full understanding of the early modern letter, and represent a mode of analysis that complements traditional historical and literary approaches, as well as more recent linguistic and gender-based analyses. The physical characteristics of manuscript letters in addition to rhetorical and stylistic features imparted...

The task of writing in early modern England was a rather laborious one — far more complicated than merely picking up ‘pen and paper’ — and various skills had to be acquired and materials assembled before sitting to write a letter.1 Paper was an expensive commodity, often imported, that needed to be treated before it could be written on, cut to size...

While the previous two chapters were concerned with materials, tools and technologies of letter-writing, this chapter concentrates on investigating the meanings attached to distinct physical characteristics and attributes of letters, paying particular attention to the social signs, codes and cues inscribed materially within the form. Several schola...

The practical side of letter-writing was learned and disseminated through pedagogy, print and practice. Formal letter-writing skills formed a central part of the curriculum for boys at grammar school and university; classical epistolary models (as taught in Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis) were a staple for anyone educated beyond the elementar...

This chapter examines the peculiarities of early modern postal conditions in the period before the postal reforms of Charles I. It focuses on the underlying physical structures upon which postal networks rested, the differing postal modes utilised, and the mechanics, practices and nature of dispatch. Examination of these different aspects of letter...

Early modern letters survive to us today in range of material forms. While multiple copies of an individual letter may be textually identical, one might survive as an‘original’ letter sent ostensibly to its first reader; another as a copy made by the sender or recipient and preserved in a formal ‘letter-book’; and ten others might be copies — extan...

Early modern letters once composed and dispatched had a peculiar afterlife that is textual, historic and archival. Letters were preserved and archived by contemporaries in a range of ways. They were locked in muniments rooms, endorsed usually with the date and a brief note of contents then folded and placed in bundles; they were kept in studies or...

An increasing body of scholarship has begun to elucidate early modern women’s involvement in the circulation of news, and to understand more fully female roles in news networks, as gatherers, readers, purveyors and writers of manuscript and printed news. What is less clear, however, is firstly the extent to which these kinds of informal news-relate...

This article examines obedience and authority through the lens of sixteenth-century women's correspondence as a way of unlocking the gendered nature of deferential behavioral codes and social attitudes in early modern England. Above all, it is interested in looking at women's status and place within the household, the ways in which familial relatio...

Early modern letters have long been utilized for the light they shed on the religious consciences of women. In his seminal work, Patrick Collinson outlined the ‘confessional’ nature of women's correspondence with reformation preachers such as John Knox, Edward Dering, Thomas Cartwright and Thomas Wilcox. Traditional studies have approached letters...

This article investigates the physical features and characteristics of early modern manuscript letters – paper, ink, handwriting, physical layout, signatures, seals and fastenings, and addresses and endorsements – paying attention to the significant meanings generated by such material forms. It is thus concerned more with the kinds of analysis trad...

This book presents a study of women's letters and letter-writing during the early modern period, and acts as a corrective to traditional ways of reading and discussing letters as private, elite, male, and non-political. Based on over 3,000 manuscript letters, it shows that letter-writing was a larger and more socially diversified area of female act...

The early modern letter represents the dominant written form by which women exerted power and influence. Nowhere is this more explicit than in the study of letters of petition, requests for favour to monarchs and government officials, of which more than 1000 examples survive for the period 1540–1603 in England. This article focuses on women's rheto...

English women’s letters for the period 1540 to 1603 exhibit widely diverging levels of female scribal activity. While many letters are holograph, written by women in their own hands, others were penned by amanuenses, bearing only the signature of a female correspondent. This in some measure reflects variations in degrees of women’s literacy during...