Letter collections
Correspondence has always provided a fruitful source for historians, biographers and editors. Their letters can illuminate where someone was and what they did on specific dates, what they thought about important and trivial issues, and who their friends, acquaintances and enemies were. Correspondence is also a complex and demanding source. Its significance for early modern manuscript studies was explored in a recent exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library Letterwriting in Renaissance England, co-curated by CELL's associate director Alan Stewart.
Alan is also working on a comprehensive edition of the Correspondence of Francis Bacon, for which a catalogue has been produced which raises important questions about identifying the corpus and dealing with multiple witnesses. Lisa Jardine's work on the letters of Erasmus is concerned with how editorial intervention can influence interpretation of a letter collection. While Robyn Adams' research on the letters of William Herle demonstrates the advantages of hypertext for navigating a complex, multi-layered and multi-themed collection. His extensive surviving correspondence is one of the main sources from which Jan Broadway will write the biography of William Dugdale.
The letter collections that interest researchers at CELL range from the small and focused, such as those sent to Elizabeth Hodges [new window] to large and amorphous, such as the Early Letters of the Royal Society. We are also concerned to address the general issues faced by editors attempting to catalogue a letter collection [new window].
