Letterwriting in Renaissance England

Letterwriting in Renaissance England PDF Author: Folger Shakespeare Library
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Reproduces in full size and transcribes a number of letters from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries

Letterwriting in Renaissance England

Letterwriting in Renaissance England PDF Author: Folger Shakespeare Library
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Reproduces in full size and transcribes a number of letters from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries

The Material Letter in Early Modern England

The Material Letter in Early Modern England PDF Author: J. Daybell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137006064
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England

Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England PDF Author: James Daybell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192566687
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
This book represents the most comprehensive study of women's letters and letter-writing during the early modern period so far undertaken, and acts as an important 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 activity than has been hitherto assumed. In that letters constitute the largest body of extant sixteenth-century women's writing, the book initiates a reassessment of women's education and literacy in the period. As indicators of literacy, letters yield physical evidence of rudimentary writing activity and abilities, document 'higher' forms of female literacy, and highlight women's mastery of formal rhetorical and epistolary conventions. The book also stresses that letters are unparalleled as intimate and immediate records of family relationships, and as media for personal and self-reflective forms of female expression. Read as documents that inscribe social and gender relations, letters shed light on the complex range of women's personal relationships, as female power and authority fluctuated, negotiated on an individual basis. Furthermore, correspondence highlights the important political roles played by early modern women. Female letter-writers were integral in cultivating and maintaining patronage and kinship networks; they were active as suitors for crown favour, and operated as political intermediaries and patrons in their own right, using letters to elicit influence. Letters thus help to locate differing forms of female power within the family, locality and occasionally on the wider political stage, and offer invaluable primary evidence from which to reconstruct the lives of early modern women.

Used Books

Used Books PDF Author: William H. Sherman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812203445
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as "rather soiled by use." When the book was displayed the next year, the exhibition catalogue described it as "well and piously used [with] marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand [that] bring to life an early and earnest owner"; and the book's buyer, for his part, considered it to be "enlivened by the marginal notes and comments." For this collector, as for an increasing number of cultural historians and historians of the book, a marked-up copy was more interesting than one in pristine condition. William H. Sherman recovers a culture that took the phrase "mark my words" quite literally. Books from the first two centuries of printing are full of marginalia and other signs of engagement and use, such as customized bindings, traces of food and drink, penmanship exercises, and doodles. These marks offer a vast archive of information about the lives of books and their place in the lives of their readers. Based on a survey of thousands of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics. The chapters address the place of book-marking in schools and churches, the use of the "manicule" (the ubiquitous hand-with-pointing-finger symbol), the role played by women in information management, the extraordinary commonplace book used for nearly sixty years by Renaissance England's greatest lawyer-statesman, and the attitudes toward annotated books among collectors and librarians from the Middle Ages to the present. This wide-ranging, learned, and often surprising book will make the marks of Renaissance readers more visible and legible to scholars, collectors, and bibliophiles.

Early Modern Women's Letter Writing, 1450-1700

Early Modern Women's Letter Writing, 1450-1700 PDF Author: J. Daybell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230598668
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
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.

Letter-writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present

Letter-writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the Present PDF Author: Carol Poster
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9781570036514
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
Once nearly as ubiquitous as dictionaries and cookbooks are today, letter-writing manuals and their predecessors served to instruct individuals not only on the art of letter composition but also, in effect, on personal conduct. Poster and Mitchell contend that the study of letter-writing theory, which bridges rhetorical theory and grammatical studies, represents an emerging discipline in need of definition. In this volume, they gather the contributions of eleven experts to sketch the contours of epistolary theory and collect the historic and bibliographic materials - from Isocrates to email - that form the basis for its study.

Women Writers in Renaissance England

Women Writers in Renaissance England PDF Author: Randall Martin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317862910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
Of all the new developments in literary theory, feminism has proved to be the most widely influential, leading to an expansion of the traditional English canon in all periods of study. This book aims to make the work of Renaissance women writers in English better known to general and academic readers so as to strengthen the case for their future inclusion in the Renaissance literary canon. This lively book surveys women writers in the sixteenth century and early seventeenth centuries. Its selection is vast, historically representative, and original, taking examples from twenty different, relatively unknown authors in all genres of writing, including poetry, fiction, religious works, letters and journals, translation, and books on childcare. It establishes new contexts for the debate about women as writers within the period and suggests potential intertextual connections with works by well-known male authors of the same time. Individual authors and works are given concise introductions, with both modern and historical critical analysis, setting them in a theoretical and historicised context. All texts are made readily accessible through modern spelling and punctuation, on-the-page annotation and headnotes. The substantial, up-to-date bibliography provides a source for further study and research.

The Material Letter in Early Modern England

The Material Letter in Early Modern England PDF Author: J. Daybell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137006064
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
The first major socio-cultural study of manuscript letters and letter-writing practices in early modern England. Daybell examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter before Charles I's postal reforms in 1635, one that witnessed a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society.

Shakespeare's Letters

Shakespeare's Letters PDF Author: Alan Stewart
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191563560
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 423

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Book Description
Shakespeare's plays are stuffed with letters - 111 appear on stage in all but five of his dramas. But for modern actors, directors, and critics they are frequently an awkward embarrassment. Alan Stewart shows how and why Shakespeare put letters on stage in virtually all of his plays. By reconstructing the very different uses to which letters were put in Shakespeare's time, and recapturing what it meant to write, send, receive, read, and archive a letter, it throws new light on some of his most familiar dramas. Early modern letters were not private missives sent through an anonymous postal system, but a vital - sometimes the only - means of maintaining contact and sending news between distant locations. Penning a letter was a serious business in a period when writers made their own pen and ink; letter-writing protocols were strict; letters were dispatched by personal messengers or carriers, often received and read in public - and Shakespeare exploited all these features to dramatic effect. Surveying the vast range of letters in Shakespeare's oeuvre, the book also features sustained new readings of Hamlet, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merchant of Venice and Henry IV Part One.

Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664

Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664 PDF Author: Diana G. Barnes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317141938
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Epistolary Community in Print contends that the printed letter is an inherently sociable genre ideally suited to the theorisation of community in early modern England. In manual, prose or poetic form, printed letter collections make private matters public, and in so doing reveal, first how tenuous is the divide between these two realms in the early modern period and, second, how each collection helps to constitute particular communities of readers. Consequently, as Epistolary Community details, epistolary visions of community were gendered. This book provides a genealogy of epistolary discourse beginning with an introductory discussion of Gabriel Harvey and Edmund Spenser’s Wise and Wittie Letters (1580), and opening into chapters on six printed letter collections generated at times of political change. Among the authors whose letters are examined are Angel Day, Michael Drayton, Jacques du Bosque and Margaret Cavendish. Epistolary Community identifies broad patterns that were taking shape, and constantly morphing, in English printed letters from 1580 to 1664, and then considers how the six examples of printed letters selected for discussion manipulate this generic tradition to articulate ideas of community under specific historical and political circumstances. This study makes a substantial contribution to the rapidly growing field of early modern letters, and demonstrates how the field impacts our understanding of political discourses in circulation between 1580 and 1664, early modern women’s writing, print culture and rhetoric.