This course explores the central relationship between archival materials and biographical writing. It focuses especially on the role played by autograph and printed letters, whose apparent transparency and strong affect render them particular irresistible to biographers. We shall be studying the rhetorical forms used in letter-writing, the circulation and use of letters in the early modern period, and the many factors at work in the creation of the archives. We shall also be analysing the employment of letters in biographical writings from the sixteenth century to the present day, using relevant case studies.
The reading for this course will be made available on a week-by-week basis. If you would like to get ahead, you could begin by reading the first chapter of Alan Stewart, Shakespeare's Letters and Angel Day, The English Secretorie (1586), which is available in libraries in a Scholar Press facsimile.
This course is assessed by a 4000 word essay, or equivalent.
Week 1 INTRODUCTION
This first session is designed to raise the issues that we will be covering in the rest of the course. How do archival letters contribute towards shaping the structure and detail of the biography? Where do they stand in relation to other kinds of archival sources? In general, what kind of sources are valuable for life-based writing? — books, articles, original documents, letters, diaries, wills etc. How are they discussed and/or not discussed in the text? How are they referenced? What kind of archives are used?
Each of you will be asked to choose a recent scholarly or near-scholarly biography of someone from the early modern period, and to be prepared to contribute to the class next week by analysing how it makes use of its archival sources, especially letters. Obviously in choosing a book to analyse you’ll need to be sure that it is going to be helpful in asking these questions so it really does need proper scholarly apparatus.
Week 2 USING LETTERS AS HISTORICAL EVIDENCE
Our discussion will be based on some of the historical biographical material you have chosen to bring in.
Week 3 HOW RENAISSANCE LETTER-WRITERS LEARNED TO WRITE
Extracts from Angel Day, The English Secretary
Lynne Magnusson, ‘Scripting social relations in Erasmus and Day’ in Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
Claudio Guillén, ‘Notes towards the study of the Renaissance Letter’, in B. K. Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 70-110
Week 4 PROFESSIONAL LETTER-WRITERS: THE INTERVENTION OF SECRETARIES
Angel Day, The English Secretary
Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford University Press, 1990)
Alan Stewart, ‘The Early Modern Closet Discovered’, Representations 50 (1995), 76-100
link to article
P. E. J. Hammer, ‘The use of scholarship: The secretariat of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, c. 1585-1601’, English Historical Review 109 (1994), 26-51
link to article
Week 5 SO WHAT CLUES DO LETTERS OFFER US NOW?
E. H. Hageman, ‘Making a good impression: early texts of poems and letters by Katherine Philips, the “Matchless Orinda”’, South Central Review 11 (1994), 39-65
link to article
Richared Rambuss, ‘The Secretary’s Study: The secret designs of the Shepheardes Calender’, ELH 59 (1992), 313-335
link to article
Week 6 REAL LETTERS
Contantijn Huygens to Margaret Cavendish correspondence 1657; More to Erasmus; Amerbach correspondence; Queen Elizabeth I; Oxford to Burghley.
Manuscript examples to be provided for the class.
Weeks 7 & 8 PRINTED LETTER COLLECTIONS – REAL OR IMAGINED?
Case study: Desiderius Erasmus’s letters
Erasmus of Rotterdam, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami ed. P.S. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906-1958) and Correspondence of Erasmus, Toronto edition.
Lisa Jardine, Erasmus Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton UP, 1993)
Lisa Jardine, ‘Defamiliarising Erasmus: Unstitching P.S. Allen’s edition of the letters’ (paper given at the unFamiliar Letters conference, July 2002: link to paper)
Week 9 WOMEN’S LETTERS
Case studies: Sara Jayne Steen ed., The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart (Oxford University Press, 1994); Margaret Cavendish; Queen Elizabeth I
James Daybell, ‘Women’s letters and letter-writing in England 1540-1603: an introduction to the issues of authorship and construction’, Shakespeare Studies 27 (1999), 161-86
Weeks 10& 11
To be decided by the class, on the basis of their chosen topics for their assignments (relevant topics to enhance the associated research)
Further reading
Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth Century England (Clarendon Press, 1998)
James Daybell ed., Women’s Letters and Letter Writing in England 1450-1700 (Palgrave, 2000)
Jonathan Gibson, ‘Letters’, in A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, ed. M. Hattaway (Ashgate, 2000)
Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford University Press, 1990)
Judith Rice Henderson, ‘Erasmus on the art of letter-writing’ in Renaissance Eloquence: studies in the theory and practice of Renaissance rhetoric ed. James J. Murphy (University of California Press, 1983), 331-55
Judith Rice Henderson, ‘Defining the genre of the letter: Juan Luis Vives’ De conscribendis epistolis’, Renaissance and Reformation n.s. 7 (1983), 89-105
Judith Rice Henderson, ‘On reading the rhetoric of the Renaissance letter’ in Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Walter de Gruyer, 1993), 143-62
Katherine Gee Hornbeak, ‘The Complete Letter-Writer in English, 1568-1800’, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages 15 (1934), 1-150
James M. Murphy, ‘Ars dictaminis: the art of letter-writing’, in Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (University of California Press, 1974), 194-268
Jean Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (University Press of Liverpool, 1942)
Erika Rummel, ‘Erasmus’ manual of letter-writing: tradition and innovation’, Renaissance and Reformation n.s. 13 (1989), 299-312
Alan Stewart, Shakespeare's Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)
Frank Whigham, ‘The Rhetoric of Elizabethan suitors’ letters’, PMLA 96 (1981), 864-92
Semester 2
CELL seminar room
