Letterwriting in Renaissance England

Letterwriting in Renaissance England, part of the Exhibitions at the Folger opened on November 18, 2004 and closed April 2, 2005. The exhibition was curated by Alan Stewart, Guest Curator and Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts.

It could be argued that the letter was the single most important genre of the Renaissance: not merely one literary form among many (though it was that too) but the very glue that held society together. Letters were the “ligaments” tying the world together—the primary form of non-oral communication for hundreds of years, with the power to inform and influence people over long distances, for better and for worse.

This exhibition devoted itself to the myriad processes of letterwriting: the penning, sending, receiving, reading, circulating, copying, and saving of letters. Examples range from the early sixteenth to the early eighteenth centuries, the period in which the Folger Shakespeare Library has its strongest collections, but also the period in which the culture of letterwriting underwent several massive transformations from the rise of the printed book, popularizing the letterwriting manual, to the growth of a reliable postal system.

The text of a letter provides one part of the story, while its very tangibility—the folds, the grime and fingerprints deposited by the writer, deliverer, and readers, the broken seals, the inkblots, the idiosyncratic spelling, the location of a signature—tells another. An understanding of a letter’s written and unwritten social signals brings into focus a fuller, grittier, and ultimately more convincing picture of everyday life in early modern England.

Supplemental materials

Related publications

The exhibition catalog can be purchased from the Folger Shop.

Published in conjunction with our exhibition, Letterwriting in Rennaisance England, John Donne's Marriage Letters is a facsimile edition edited with an introduction by M. Thomas Hester, Robert Parker Sorlien, and Dennis Flynn and an afterword by Heather Wolfe. It consists of 18 documents relating to Donne's secret marriage to Anne More in 1601 and his relationship with the More family in the ensuing years, including 8 extraordinary letters written in the immediate aftermath of his marriage. The first time the letters have been published as a group, this edition is also the first time they have been published in facsimile.