Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters

Abstract

As Ovid’s heroine Briseis acknowledges, letters carry material traces of the emotions that motivated the writer. This is true of any handwritten document, but more so for letters that stand in for face-to-face conversation with familiars. Emotion may be suggested by a tremor in an upright line, an ink blot, a torn page, or a hurried scrawl. Nevertheless, it is difficult to pin these signs to a manifest emotion with certainty. And yet we should not disregard these traces altogether; they were part of an epistolary vocabulary familiar to early modern writers and readers. This chapter elucidates affective traces by reading letters written by early modern women through the literary lens of Ovid’s Heroides, a key text in humanist pedagogy with broad influence across literary and non-literary writing.