Editing Gender, Language and Family in the Letters of the Seventeenth-Century Boyle Women

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe seventeenth-century Boyle women were members of a noble Protestant family with vast lands and powerful ties stretching across Ireland, Britain and Europe. Three hundred and eighty-four of the women’s outgoing letters have been identified, and included in that number are twenty-five different female correspondents spanning three generations. These multi-voiced letters are defined and connected by gender, language and family, and my article shows how those three elements have shaped my editorial policy. I will discuss how the processes of retrieval, transcription and annotation have been adapted to accommodate and retain those features of the letters which are commonly shared but also distinct to the individual writer. Reflecting on past conventions and earlier editions of women’s letters, I will challenge some misconceptions about female illiteracy, demonstrating how a transcription policy can enable accessibility while also offering alternative strategies for reading and interpreting these female-voiced texts. This article suggests ways to annotate the localised spelling of placenames and secret forms of writing and, in doing so, preserving some of the hidden resonances of the letters and what they might more broadly signify about the lives, relationships and attitudes of this family of women over the course of a century.