Introduction

Abstract

Introduction Linda C. Mitchell more than a decade ago, several articles on letter writing were accepted for publication in the Huntington Library Quarterly. Susan Green, then the editor of the journal, knew that I was working on the subject, along with some of my colleagues. We proceeded to assemble a group of articles for a double issue of the journal (vol. 66, nos. 3 and 4, now available on JSTOR). Like the articles in the present issue, those in that double issue ranged over about five centuries and examined materials of differing nature and purpose. The earlier issue, published in 2003, reflected a sense that the varying generic contexts of letter writing deserved investigation within the compass of a single volume. The richness of epistolary forms has since been treated in many books and articles, including Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (2016), edited by James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, reviewed in the current issue by Jason Scott-Warren. Lines of inquiry pursued in literary studies have brought greater attention to letters, as scholars have extensively researched the material aspects of the transmission of manuscripts. In the current issue, essays by Daybell and Graham Williams address these concerns in particular. Many recent studies have called attention to the inter-section of manuscript and print as forms of dissemination in the early modern period. Letters, because they typically originated as manuscripts but were then circulated and collected in a variety of ways, have proved important sources for these investigations. Rachael Scarborough King’s essay on newsletters in this issue is one such study. Yet the articles in both issues lead collectively to an appreciation of epistolary form as a lens through which many other kinds of discourse, in both manuscript and print, can be viewed. The basic rhetorical situation of an exchange between individuals, regardless of how avowedly public or private, shares intriguing boundaries with various genres. In some of the best-known early novels, epistolary form links the rhetorical convention of reliability to persuasive fiction (and both Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson published letter-writing manuals, which Victoria Myers discusses [End Page 343] in the earlier issue). As Daybell notes in the current issue, “the letter acted as a kind of textual or cultural portmanteau, facilitating the broader transmission of other manuscript texts (prose, verse, libels, and recipes) as well as the wider dissemination of news, information, scientific knowledge, and ideas.” One of the most important roles of letters in the early modern period was communication across formidable distances. Bill Sherman, in an essay published in the earlier issue, surveys documents dispatched from the American continent to Europe, but sometimes not recognized as epistolary. Though strongly linked, rhetorically, to reportage, this material was subject to editorial intervention and frequently failed to reach its intended destination. A few examples Sherman points to originated among the Jesuits. Grant Boswell’s article in the same issue urges that, despite the longstanding reputation of Jesuit correspondence among scholars for inaccuracy and inconsistency, the Society’s establishment of hierarchical epistolary networks led to the efficient transmission of news, once the order expanded exponentially. The ars dictaminis derived from classical practice blended literary, political, and juridical modes of discourse, ultimately reflected in the publication of a great many prescriptive letter-writing manuals in the early modern period. The impact on medieval pedagogical practice is exemplified in Martin Camargo’s essay in this issue. Letter-writing manuals included both general instruction and model letters for nearly every social and business purpose, and they linked epistolary norms to proper behavior in surprisingly specific ways. I provide a brief bibliography of letter-writing manuals in my article in the earlier volume, which has been revised for this issue. Full of admonition, and designed to influence behavior even more than to demonstrate letter-writing etiquette, such manuals were highly conventional and quite literally redundant—and they were nearly as popular as Bibles. But despite didactic purposes in common with scripture, the sample letters in these volumes narrate harrowing predicaments in the kind of detail that invites comparison with epistolary fiction. Each of the two issues contains an article focused on a pair of correspondents of whom only one was...