How Letters Matter
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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: How Letters Matter Jason Scott-Warren (bio) James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, editors
For those who see the history of letter writing as a story of continual decline, the Prince of Salina might seem to be living in the ancien régime of correspondence as well as the twilight of the aristocracy. With its beautiful paper, elegant handwriting, and polished style, its quasi-magical power to conjure up the writer and perhaps to control the reader, and its presumption that it will be shared in whole or part, the letter belongs to an alien world—a world in which people appear to have the time to communicate. Letter writing is often said to be one of the many art forms that we are in danger of losing in the transition to digital technology. But despite the gulf that yawns between our hurried emails and the artful missives of previous generations, we are nonetheless aware that letters require all kinds of tact. Pressing the “send” button, we are haunted by stories of emails accidentally fired off to the wrong account, of private “replies” that were unwitting “reply alls,” of messages that were misinterpreted or that struck precisely the wrong tone. If my overstuffed inbox is anything to go by, reports of the death of the letter are greatly exaggerated. Yet our sense of being overwhelmed by correspondence does little to mark us out from past eras, in which letters could be quite as pressing and oppressive as they are today.
This complex interplay between continuity and change goes some way to explaining why interest in early modern letters has been growing in recent years, such that we now have several painstaking studies of letter writing in theory and practice, and an increasing array of digital resources that bring the archive to our desktops. Such studies have coincided with the “material turn” in the humanities and have insisted that letters were anything but a disembodied conversation between absent friends. Instead they were messy congeries involving numerous collaborations with secretaries and messengers, complex protocols of epistolary theory, social etiquette, and tacit knowledge, and endless anxieties about the future fate of the document. Merely to write a letter in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...
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1544-399X