ABSTRACT
The wide-ranging essays in this volume demonstrate that scholarship on early modern women’s letters is very much alive and flourishing. The authors of these essays have evidently scoured repositories to track down women’s correspondence and have carefully analysed it in order to offer fresh insights about early modern women’s contributions to intellectual, cultural and gender history. In so doing, they have participated in a recent wider efflorescence of scholarship on early modern correspondence, both in print and digital forms. To be sure, over the past decade or so, literary, historical, and other researchers have come to recognize the immense value of letters not only as purveyors of vital biographical information about individuals but also as rich sources of prosopographical data on wider familial, social, and learned networks. Letters are sometimes the only historical records conveying information about certain figures from the past, including scribes, letter carriers, household or court servants, and, of course, women. That is not to say that other documents, such as records of sociability (including wills, household inventories, and diaries), should be neglected by researchers in favour of letters but rather that a particularly strong case can be made for the innate historical value of letters. Because they are sent from one person and location to another, letters can reveal much about the circulation of ideas and different cultures of knowledge. They also function as important cultural and communicative conduits, with other textual forms (books and manuscripts) regularly travelling with them as enclosures. Moreover, letters represent the most ubiquitous form of writing by women from the early modern period, a fact which the essays in this volume judiciously exploit in order to deepen and broaden our understanding of the multifarious roles women played in politics, religion, science, education, the arts, and other public (not to mention private) spheres in this period. This recent ‘epistolary turn’, which has without a doubt invigorated early modern scholarship, has been complemented by a concomitant ‘digital turn’, which has profoundly changed the way humanities scholars conduct their research. This essay explores how these disciplinary shifts have both exposed some old problems and opened up new possibilities for scholarship on early modern women. In particular, it focuses on the development and emergence of a new digital editorial interface and a union catalogue called Women’s Early Modern Letters Online (WEMLO).
