Literary Sociability in Early Modern England: The Epistolary Record by Paul Trolander (review)

Literary Sociability in Early Modern England explores the relationship between literary culture and letter writing from 1620-1720. Paul Trolander analyses correspondence across the period in order to emphasize the persistent dynamism of manuscript practices following the advent of print, to complicate the historical paradigm of 'coterie' authorship, and to demonstrate how epistolary mechanisms were structurally established and replicated across networks of writers and readers. His study is methodologically innovative, deploying a relational database to inform much of the argument, although in this respect it raises questions as well as answers them.

A pair of contentions concerning information and communication in early-modern England is fundamental to Trolander's book. First, letter writing formed a "highly structured means for accomplishing specific social, political, and economic goals" (71). Secondly, manuscript and print were symbiotic technologies, mutually imbricated in shaping the multiple contexts for the production and reception of texts. "Literary sociability" is the phenomenon generated by the interaction of these conditions. It is "literary" in two respects: both in that Trolander's focus is the business of writing; and because it was enabled textually via correspondence networks (Trolander enjoys playing upon Eve Tavor Bannet's concept of "letteracy"), rather than simply through direct personal contact.

In order to understand how this particular formation of sociability was instrumental for the development of contemporary literary culture–while also evolving in response to it–Trolander has isolated a corpus of just over 3000 letters for quantitative and qualitative analysis. These have been handpicked from a much larger (indeed, a rather impressive) survey of 28,600 items, so as to ensure an even spread of source material across the century, and to restrict the examination to correspondence that includes calls to "literary action." Such "actions" might be a matter of "exchanging manuscript poetry, mending and editing galleys, proffering friendly commentary to authors among their literary circles[,] sanctioning or reporting state or ecclesiastical censorship" (4).

Trolander maps contemporary literary culture in its broadest terms, correctly eschewing a narrower focus on "creative" or "imaginative" genres while incorporating instances of performance as well as print. His research covers the gamut of early-modern writing, marshalled within six categories: antiquarianism, belles lettres, natural science, philosophy, politics, and religion. While the book is peppered with case-studies concerning particular authors and readers across these fields–John Donne, Ralph Thoresby, Anne Finch Conway, Henry More, Robert Baillie, Alexander Pope, Katherine Fowler Philips, and Henry Oldenburg, to name a few–it is most engaging in its quest to delineate a bigger picture. This is achieved primarily through an argument that narrates the structure and meanings of the information that Trolander has organized and queried within his literary actions database, and which falls into three related record-sets: 860 or so individual correspondents, 3002 letters that they collectively exchanged (and within which they adopted a range of "subject positions"), and the near 6500 literary actions that those letters "reported, requested, or inferred" (139).

At the heart of Trolander's thesis and method is the notion that early-modern authorship–and literary culture more generally–was necessarily and structurally social. As such, it depended on networks that connected writers (sometimes directly, sometimes via "facilitators") with the producers, regulators, and consumers of print publications. Despite their multiple literary interests and the expedient character of literary sociability itself, a series of stable and transferable epistolary habits is shown to be observable across the correspondents. In part (as Trolander explains) this is because contemporary letter-writing manuals captured and promulgated a repertoire of rhetorical gestures that embedded epistolarity within seventeenth-century friendship discourse. Similarly, a repeated appeal to linguistic registers of value, worth, exchange, sale, and profit is seen to typify the language of these letters (upon which Trolander stages a discussion of the inter-relationships between economic, social, and cultural capital in early-modern England). It is however his taxonomy of 22 specific literary actions, assessed within three broad genres of activity–"collaboration and...