Abstract
On the morning of 23 September 1601 Secretary of State Robert Cecil sent a brief letter to the soldier Sir Francis Darcy, a letter that never in fact arrived:
Sr Francys Darcy. I haue receaued this inclosed from the court this morninge, wch I haue thought good to send to you with speed to be deliuered by you accordinge as you are directed: and soe for this tyme I committ you to God. from London this 23 of September 1601
your verie lovinge freind
Ro Cecyll 1
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Notes
Mark Bland (2004) ‘Italian Paper in Early Seventeenth-Century England’, in R. Graziaplena (ed.) Paper as a Medium of Cultural Heritage: Archaeology and Conservation (Rome: Istituto centrale per la patologia del libro), pp.243-55.
James Daybell (1999) ‘Women’s Letters and Letter-Writing in England, 1540–1603: An Introduction to the Issues of Authorship and Construction’, Shakespeare Studies, 27, 161–86.
Mark Brayshay, Philip Harrison, and Brian Chalkley (1998) ‘Knowledge, Nationhood and Governance: The Speed of the Royal Post in Early-Modern England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 24, 265–88. I am grateful to Professor Brayshay for discussion on the postal endorsements in this letter.
For a classic account of epistolarity see, Janet Gurkin Altman (1982) Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus, OH: Ohio State UP).
Daybell (2005) ‘Recent Studies in Renaissance Letters: The Sixteenth Century’, ELR, 35/2, 331–62; idem (2006) ‘Recent Studies in Renaissance Letters: The Seventeenth Century’, ELR, 36/1, 135–70. Recent linguistic approaches include Graham Williams (2009) ‘Pragmatic Readings in the Letters of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575–1611, With Diplomatic Transcriptions of Their Correspondence’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Glasgow).
Roger Chartier (1997) ‘Secrétaires for the People? Model Letters of the Ancien Régime: Between Court Literature and Popular Chapbooks’, in Roger Chartier (ed.) Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing From the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Polity Press), pp.59-111.
David M. Bergeron (1999) King fames & Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City: U of Iowa P)
Alan Bray (1990) ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990), 1–19.
See also, T. Van Houdt, et al. (eds) (2002) Self-Presentation and Social Identification: The Rhetoric and Pragmatics of Letter Writing in Early Modern Times (Leuven: Leuven UP).
Daybell (2006) Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: OUP)
Daybell (ed.) Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001)
Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (eds) (2005) Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700: Form and Persuasion (Aldershot: Ashgate).
Giora Sternberg (2009) ‘Epistolary Ceremonial: Corresponding Status at the Time of Louis XIV’, P&P, 204/1, 33–88 (esp. pp.66-74).
Tanselle, ‘Textual Criticism’, p.83. Heather Hirshfield (2001) ‘Early Modern Collaboration and Theories of Authorship’, PMLA, 116/3, 609–22.
Heidi Brayman Hackel (2005) Reading Material in Early Modem England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: CUP)
Jennifer Anderson and Elizabeth Sauer (eds) (2002) Books and Their Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P).
Jason Scott-Warren (2001) Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: OUP).
Raffaella Sarti (trans. Allan Cameron) (2002) Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800 (New Haven: Yale UP).
Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass (2000) Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: CUP), p.11.
Julian Yates (2002) ‘Towards a Theory of Agentive Drift: Or, A Particular Fondness for Oranges in 1597’, Parallax, 22, 47–58.
Rachel P. Garrard (1980) ‘English Probate Inventories and their Use in Studying the Significance of the Domestic Interior. 1570–1700’, in Ad Van Der Woude and Anton Schuurman (eds) Probate Inventories: A New Source for the Historical Studies of Wealth, Material Culture and Agricultural Development (Utrecht: HES Publishers), pp.55-82.
Margaret Spufford (1990) ‘The Limitations of Probate Inventory’, in John Chartres and David Hey (eds) English Rural Society, 1500–1800: Essays in Honour of Joan Thirsk (Cambridge: CUP), pp. 139–74.
Philip Beale (2005) England’s Mail: Two Millennia of Letter-Writing (Stroud: Tempus)
Mark Brayshay, Philip Harrison and Brian Chalkley (1998) ‘Knowledge, Nationhood and Governance: The Speed of the Royal Post in Early-Modern England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 24/3, 265–88.
Lena Cowen Orlin (2007) Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: OUP)
Linda Pollock (1993) ‘Living on the Stage of the World: The Concept of Privacy Among the Elite of Early Modern England’, in Adrian Wilson (ed.) Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and Its Interpretation (Manchester: Manchester UP), pp.78-96 (pp.79-80).
Claudio Guillen (1986) ‘Notes Toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter’, in Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (ed.) Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP), pp.70-101.
Judith Rice Henderson (1993) ‘On Reading the Rhetoric of the Renaissance Letter’, in Heinrich F. Plett (ed.) Renaissance-Rhetorik Renaissance Rhetoric (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter), pp.143-62 (p.149).
Peter C. Sutton, et al. (2003) Love Letters: Dutch Genre Paintings in the Age of Vermeer (Greenwich, CT and Dublin: Frances Lincoln).
Hilary Jenkinson (1922) ‘Elizabethan Handwriting: A Preliminary Sketch’, The Library, 3/1, 1–34 and plates (p.34). Cf. Beal, Dictionary, p.188.
Jenkinson (1926) ‘Notes on the Study of English Punctuation of the Sixteenth Century’, RES, 2/6, 152–8 (p.156).
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© 2012 James Daybell
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Daybell, J. (2012). Introduction. In: The Material Letter in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137006066_1
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