ABSTRACT
In his book Epistolary Fiction in Europe, 1500–1850, Thomas Beebee writes that "epistolary fiction can be found everywhere, and not just in texts aimed specifically at aesthetic consumption". This statement could have served equally well as the epigraph to this chapter, for it embodies a comprehensive perception of epistolary fiction in the early modern period. A few early seventeenth-century epistolary fictions preceded their wholesale publication after 1640. Two epistolary fictions that ventriloquize the dead conclude John Reynolds's Vox Coeli, or Newes from Heaven Whereunto Is Annexed Two Letters Written by Queene Mary from Heaven, the One to Count Gondomar the Other to All the Romane Catholiques of England. Epistolary fiction in pamphlet and broadside form radically increased beginning in 1641. Among the first printed were letters attributed to Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, appearing immediately after his May 12, 1641, execution.
