Editing Early Modern Women's Letters for Print Publication

Abstract

Literate early modern women were far more likely to write a letter than any other literary or non-literary genre. The early moderns viewed the letter as a quotidian form dignified by classical precedent and scholarly tradition. Although it is true that only a small number of women letter-writers self-consciously claimed this heritage, and most wrote for prosaic reasons, nevertheless in writing letters women engaged a respected rhetorical and cultural discourse to conduct conversations unbound by time and space, participate in all facets of public life, intervene in established political, intellectual, familial,and religious networks, and establish new terms of engagement. As James Daybell has shown, women's letters were collated, emended, adapted, copied, and circulated in manuscript. Recent work on women's manuscript letters has raised a range of issues about authorship and attribution, as Leah Marcus discusses in her chapter on the editing of Elizabeth I's letters in this volume. In print, however, women's letters had an even broader circulation, a topic neglected in scholarly discussions of early modern letters. The editing of women's letters for print publication has a surprisingly long history dating back to the sixteenth century. Early modern editors of women's letters established the place of women's letters in print culture and, at the same time, disseminated the radical idea that the virtuoso woman writer could emerge from quotidian beginnings.