Manuscript and Women’s Letters

Letters in manuscript are the largest category of early modern women’s writing and are vital to understanding how women from across the social spectrum engaged with literate practices throughout their lives. Considering production and reception, this entry examines how the linguistic forms and meanings of letters were shaped by and intersected with the material realities of textual cultures. The development of the field over recent decades means that we are now far better placed to answer questions about how many letters women sent and received, to whom, when, where, on which topics, and for what purposes. Our interpretation of epistolary cultures and the gendered power structures with which they were enmeshed have been transformed through case studies, survey projects, and digital resources. This entry emphasizes the variety of rhetorical forms of letters, in different languages, on a wide array of topics, which brought women into networks and enabled their participation in a range of realms. Next, it discusses how the handmade forms of letters (their paleography, collaborative process, and physical features) relate to their communicative functions and meanings. The concluding section observes that the patterns we are seeing based on quantitative and qualitative research help to make more realistic assessments about the representativeness of the archive. It considers how digitization has massively expanded access to archival letters. The digital landscape is heavily imprinted with remediated Victorian editions and catalogs, so researchers are advised to be aware of this as well as of the contingencies of search and browse.