Early Modern Women's Letter Writing, 1450-1700

J. Daybell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780333945797
• eBook ISBN: 9780230598669
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature générale

This landmark book of essays examines the development of women's letter writing from the late fifteenth to the early eighteen century. It is the first book to deal comprehensively with women's letter writing during the Late Medieval and Early Modern period and shows that this was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has generally been assumed. The essays, contributed by many of the leading researchers active in the field, illustrate women's engagement in various activities, both literary and political, social and religious.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on the Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Reaction, Consolation and Redress in the Letters of the Paston Women
• 3. Letter-Writing by English Noblewomen in the Early Fifteenth Century
• 4. Commanding Communications: the Fifteenth-Century Letters of the Stonor Women
• 5. Female Literacy and the Social Conventions of Women's Letter-Writing in England, 1540-1603
• 6. Deference and Defiance in Women's Letters of the Thynne Family: the Rhetoric of Relationships
• 7. Fighting for Family in a Patronage Society: the Epistolary Armoury of Anne Newdigate (1574-1618)
• 8. ‘How Subject to Interpretation’: Lady Arbella Stuart and the Reading of Illness
• 9. Tudor and Stuart Women: their Lives through their Letters
• 10. Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics: the Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley(1598-1643)
• 11. ‘Doe not supose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world’: Letter-Writingin Early Modern English Convents
• 12. Gentle Companions: Single Women and their Letters in Late Stuart England
• 13. ‘Begging pardon for all mistakes or errors in this writeing I being a woman & doing itt myselfe': Family Narratives in some Early Eighteenth-Century Letters
• Index