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  • Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700: Form and Persuasion
  • Diana Barnes
Couchman, Jane and Ann Crabb, eds, Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700: Form and Persuasion, (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005; cloth; pp. xv, 336; 12 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £47.50; ISBN 075465107X.

This edited collection of essays on women's letters is further evidence of the growing interest in manuscript and print letters of the early modern period, and is a good example of the variety of work being generated. The editors' introduction gives a useful overview of the field. Epistolary form is defined by its proximity to life. The editors claim that although letters are 'composed' according to rhetorical rules, they provide 'however briefly and partially, a window on [their writer's'] worlds' (p. 5, 3). The letter is a functional form of writing, shaped by rules and codes. The letter is a quotidian form of writing practised by a broader group of authors than elite literary genres. It is also a purpose-driven form: the letter-writer writes in order to achieve something.

Potentially, epistolary rhetoric empowers letter writers. This is complicated by the conditions of early modern literacy and readership. Many letters are collaboratively written, some with the aid of an amanuensis, a professional secretary, or a government or church official. Some female letter-writers of this period were able to write their own letters but others had partial literacy (they may have been able to read and not write, or they may have had signatory [End Page 192] literacy only). Many of the essays collected in the volume endorse the editors' claim that letters allow today's readers to 'hear' the 'voices' of the early modern letter-writers under consideration, that is letters provide documentary evidence of women's agency in the period. Undoubtedly some epistolary conventions are deliberately manipulated by letter-writers, but others are stock attributes of epistolary rhetoric.

The collected essays are presented in three sections entitled Persuasion for Family and Personal Goals; Public and Private Intersecting; and Validated by God and by Reason. Mostly the collection focuses on manuscript letters but there is some discussion of what happens in particular cases when the letters are re-presented either in print, or translation. Each of the essays discusses a case history of a particular early modern woman's letters (with the exception of James Daybell's general account of Elizabethan women's letters). The variety of these studies is refreshing. The collection covers the letters of a range of women: elite, learned, uneducated, religious (both Roman Catholic and Protestant examples are included), and letters written for a range of purposes: intimate, public statesmanship, legal, family businesses; to establish, consolidate and define female communities in spite of distance. I particularly welcome Ann Crabb's discussion of mercantile women's letters; Susan Broomhall's study of the letters of lower-class, indeed impoverished, women of sixteenth-century Tours; Anne R. Larsen's study of the French Roman Catholic rescripting of Anna van Schurman's Protestant letters; and Erin Henriksen and Mark Zelcer's work on the late-seventeenth-century Jewish letter-writer Glikl of Hamlyn. This work demonstrates the agency available to women of different classes and makes a valuable contribution to the study of early modern society.

The question then is whether an overall impression of early modern women letter-writers can be gleaned from reading these case studies. Malcolm Richardson warns that 'it is futile to look either for a continuing "tradition" of women letter writers … or for a particular feminine style, however devoutly sought' and calls on scholars to 'analyse and celebrate resourceful and persuasive writers wherever they appear, either part of a historical pattern or not' (p. 62). He implies that the resourceful female writer is an isolated accident. The sheer variety of examples in this volume challenges this idea and offers an impression of the myriad of possibilities for participation in public and private life letter-writing offered early modern women.

Although I agree with the editors and authors collected in this volume that the resourcefulness of a letter-writer's intent is often obvious, I...

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