The black box of delegated writing: Early Modern scribes and female literacy in The Netherlands

Abstract

Abstract Apart from literacy rates and reading and writing acquisition, the actual writing practices of the past, which include the phenomenon of delegated writing, belong to a history of literacy. Delegated writing occurred when illiterate or partly literate individuals wanted to keep in contact with relatives at a distance and had to rely on the assistance of professional or social scribes. The details of this process and the role played by the sender of a letter and its actual, usually unknown, scribe often remain unclear, although different scenarios may be assumed. Cultural historian Lyons explored scenarios for delegated writing in France, Italy and Spain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the writing of ordinary people during the First World War and in the age of mass migration. For the Dutch language area, we have the opportunity to delve further back in time by exploring the late-seventeenth-century part of the Letters as Loot (LAL) corpus. This corpus previously allowed us to establish linguistic differences between autographs and non-autographs. For a detailed view of the delegated writing process, however, the LAL corpus also provides us with instances of two types of letters written by the same, identified, female scribes: their own letters and the letters they wrote for others. A comparative analysis of these different letters will be shown to contribute to opening the black box of Early Modern delegated writing.