"Kepe wysly youre wrytyngys": Margaret Paston's Fifteenth-Century Letters

This article presents a case study of fifteenth-century personal letter-writing practices. Using as examples the letters of the Paston family and particularly those of Margaret Paston, the family's most prolific letter writer, the article discusses the letters' physical characteristics and the methods used to dispatch them as well as intellectual issues associated with medieval women's letter writing, including questions of literacy and authorship, generic conventions, and the social and legal functions that letter writing fulfilled.