This study examines letters and letter writing in early modern England to 1700, texts which were circulated, were intended to circulate, or were perceived to circulate within what I call "the culture of epistolarity" in early modern England. The study examines a wide array of early modern letters in a variety of contexts in order to suggest that letters, in their multiform sociocultural environments, worked within a dynamic of knowledge and affect--a dynamic which mediated epistolary articulations of authenticity, credibility, emotion, and information. This analysis of early modern letters comprises a distinction between face-to-face interaction, which was immediate, and letter exchange, which was materially and physically detached in time and space. There were numerous anxieties attendant on epistolary communication, which in turn threatened social connection and epistemological clarity; but these anxieties were frequently attenuated by the imaginative expression and recuperation of certain forms of epistolary rhetoric consistently employed in all sorts of letters.
Chapter 1 presents a comprehensive overview of the early modern culture of epistolarity in England. Chapter 2 approaches the material and organizational components of letter exchange, emphasizing the anxieties which accompany letter writing in all its modes. Chapter 3 investigates how social custom, the physical body, and various emotions were persuasively textualized in the letter. Chapter 4 shifts the focus from affect to information in order to consider the sociocultural meanings inhering in the transmission of news and intelligence, information frequently exchanged via letters and professional manuscript newsletters. Chapter 5 examines the intersection of print culture with the idea and practices of letter writing. Discourses which used the designation "letter" or "epistle," those either transferred from manuscript or constructed especially for print, often functioned as persuasive tools in print. Chapter 6 continues to examine manuscript letters in the context of print culture, although the focus here is on the publication of letter collections. These consist of moral-didactic, personal, and state letters in the vernacular, most of which began to be regularly published in England after 1645. The study concludes by reaffirming the necessity of a rigorous historicization in assessing letters within the field of epistolary studies.
