Prof James Daybell has just published a new book, with Andrew Gordon of Aberdeen University, entitled Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain.
This edited collection about early modern letter writing, published in the University of Pennsylvania Press’ Material Texts series, brings together leading scholars in the field from around the world including Nadine Akkerman, Mark Brayshay, Christopher Burlinson, Jonathan Gibson, Arnold Hunt, Lynne Magnusson, Michelle O’Callaghan, Alan Stewart and Andrew Zurcher
The volume overturns the notion that letters are private, unmediated sources of the writer’s thoughts and instead reveals and delights in the literary, artful qualities of letters and the cultures of collaboration and rewriting that produced them.
By attending to what is described as the ‘social materiality’ of letter writing – the physical features of the text; the social and cultural practices of epistolary culture; and the material contexts in which letters were produced – this new collection provides a rich sociology of early modern letter writing.
James Daybell is Professor of Early Modern British History at Plymouth University.