European Women's Letter-writing from the 11th to the 20th Centuries

Monagle, Clare/ James, Carolyn/ Garrioch, David

Amsterdam University Press（2023/07発売）

• 製本 Hardcover:ハードカバー版／ページ数 296 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9789463723381
• DDC分類 809.6

Full Description

This book reveals the importance of personal letters in the history of European women between the year 1000 and the advent of the telephone. It explores the changing ways that women used correspondence for self-expression and political mobilization over this period, enabling them to navigate the myriad gendered restrictions that limited women's engagement in the world. Whether written from the medieval cloister, or the renaissance court, or the artisan's workshop, or the drawing room, letters crossed geographical and social distance and were mobile in ways that women themselves could not always be. Women wrote to govern, to argue, to plead, and to demand. They also wrote to express love and intimacy, and in so doing, to explain and to understand themselves. This book argues that the personal letter was a crucial place for European women's self-fashioning, and that exploring the history of their letters offers a profound insight into their subjectivity and agency over time.

Contents

Introduction
1 Authority and the Self: the Letters of Medieval Women
2 The Rise of Vernacular Letter-writing
3 The Triumph of the Familiar Letter
4 Intimate Letters
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Endnotes