Abstract
English women’s letters for the period 1540 to 1603 exhibit widely diverging levels of female scribal activity. While many letters are holograph, written by women in their own hands, others were penned by amanuenses, bearing only the signature of a female correspondent. This in some measure reflects variations in degrees of women’s literacy during the sixteenth century. Represented by a corpus of some 2300 letters surveyed are highly literate women, fluent correspondents, proficient at writing in several styles, hands and languages, including Latin. At the opposite end of the spectrum are women who were unable to write their own letters but who could perhaps read and scrawl a barely legible signature or only perform a mark. However, differences in women’s scribal ability provide but one part of the equation. Of the women who employed the services of a secretary for correspondence many did so out of choice and, at other times, themselves wrote. This points to a fundamental distinction between a woman’s ability to write and her propensity to do so. This chapter is therefore concerned as much with general attitudes to literacy and letter-writing as with actual literacy levels. It explores several issues related to epistolary composition: the range of women’s writing abilities, as well as the conventions and practices governing the actual penning of letters and utilisation of secretaries.1
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Notes
I would like to thank Ralph Houlbrooke and Roger Dahymple for their comments
Elsewhere I have dealt with methods of epistolary composition: James Daybell, ‘Women’s Letters and Letter-Writing, 1540–1603: an Introduction to the Issues of Authorship and Construction’, Shakespeare Studies, 27 (1999), 161–86.
For detailed discussion of the holograph status of women’s letters see James Daybell, ‘Women’s Letters and Letter-Writing in England, 1540–1603’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Reading, 1999), pp. 68–76, 104–7 [hereafter Daybell, Thesis]
HMC Report on the Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Rutland, Preserved at Belvoir Castle, 3 vols (HMSO, 1888), 1, p. 301: 24 July [1592].
Muriel St Clare Byrne, The Lisle Letters, 6 vols (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1, p. 32, plate 8j; idem 2, p. 700.
M.A.E. Wood, Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies from the Twelfth Century to the Close ofMary’s Reign, 3 vols. (Colburn, 1846), 3, p. 191. Wood’s translation reads, ‘Brother, I pray you to send me my niece Dorothy, because I know her conditions — she shall not lack as long as I live, an you would be heard by me at (all), or else I think you be own kin to false drab and cook; an not been (had it not been) I had had her to my comfort’. For the original document see BL Cott. MS Titus, B.I. f.162.
BL Harl. MS 4712 ff.412–3, 3 Oct. 1597.
Alison D. Wall, ed., Two Elizabethan Women: Correspondence of Joan and Maria Thynne 1575–1611 (Wiltshire Record Society, vol. 38, Devizes, 1983), pp. 33–5 (p. 34), letter 49, c.1605. [hereafter T.E.W.] For background to the relationship of these two women see Alison Wall, Chapter 6, this volume.
James Daybell, ‘Pies acsep thes my skrybled lynes: the Construction and Conventions of Women’s Letters in England, 1540–1603’, Quidditas: Journal of the Rocky Mountains Medieval and Renaissance Society, 20 (1999), 123–40.
Daybell, Thesis, chs 4, 5. See also Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship and Culture: the Seventeenth-Century Newdigates of Arbury and their World (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), p. 88.
The Lisle Letters, 4, pp. 229–30; Paul Hammer, ‘The Use of Scholarship: the Secretariat of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, c.1585–1601’, EHR, 109, 430 (Feb. 1994), 26–51; A.G.R. Smith, ‘The Secretariats of the Cecils, c.1580–1612’, EHR, 83 (1968), 481–504; H.S. Bennett, The Pastons and their England (Cambridge: CUP, 1922; reprinted 1991), pp. 115–17; Christine Carpenter, ed., Kingsford’s Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290–1483 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 74–5.
Giles Constable, Letters and Letter Collections (Typologie des Sources du Moyen Age Occidental, facs. xvii, 1976), p. 42.
Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter from the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 113.
Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in The Written Word: Literacy in Transition, Wolfson College Lectures 1985, ed. Gerd Baumann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 97–131 (p. 100).
Linda Pollock, With Faith and Physic: the Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay 1552–1620 (London: Collins and Brown, 1993), p. 26.
The personal nature of Tudor politics is outlined in W.T. MacCaffrey, ‘Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics’, in Elizabethan Government and Society, ed. S.T. Bindoff, Juel Hurstfield and C.H. Williams (London: Athlone Press, 1961), pp. 95–127 (p. 99); J.E. Neale, ‘The Elizabethan Political Scene’, in Essays in Elizabethan History, ed. J.E. Neale (Cape, 1958), pp. 59–84 (pp. 61–2).
A.S. Osley, Scribes and Sources: Handbook of the Chancery Hand in the Sixteenth Century: Texts from the Writing Masters (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 30.
Wood, Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies, 2, letter 53, pp. 119–24 (p. 122), 1534.
Martin Billingsley, The Pen’s Excellencie or the Secretaries Delighte (1618), pp. 35–35v.
CUL Hengrave MS 88/I f.10, 27 Dec. 1547. Also printed in John Gage, The History and Antiquities ofHengrave in Suffolk (Carpenter, 1822), pp. 121–3 (p. 121).
Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Muniments of Alleyn’s College of God’s Gift at Dulwich, ed. George F. Warner (Longmans, Green and Co., 1881), p. 24, note 5: Joan Alleyn to Edward Alleyn, 21 Oct. 1603.
Linda Pollock, ‘Living On the Stage of the World: the Concept of Privacy Among the Elite of Early Modern England’, in Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570–1920 and its Interpretation, ed. Adrian Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 78–96 (pp. 85, 87, 89–90).
For discussion of lack of privacy in the early modern period see Ralph Houlbrooke, The English Family, 1450–1700 (Harlow: Longman, 1984) p. 23; Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: CUP, 1987), p. 245; Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977), p. 102; Pollock, ‘Living On the Stage of the World’; Orest Ranum, ‘The Refuges of Intimacy’, in A History of Private Life: IIL The Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 207–63. 73. Longleat House, Seymour Papers, 5 f.182, n.d. Words between marks ( A ) were inserted above the line.
Jennifer Ward, English Noblewomen in the Later Middle Ages (Harlow: Longman, 1992) pp. 129–42; Eileen Power, Medieval Women (Cambridge: CUP, 1975; Canto edition, 1997), pp. 34–9; Barbara A. Hanawalt, ‘Lady Honor Lisle’s Networks of Influence’, in Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Maly Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 188–212; James Daybell, ‘The Political Role of Upper-Class Women in Early Tudor England as Evidenced by their Correspondence’ (Unpublished MA dissertation, University of Reading, 1996), pp. 2–6 and 28–47.
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Daybell, J. (2001). Female Literacy and the Social Conventions of Women’s Letter-Writing in England, 1540–1603. In: Daybell, J. (eds) Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598669_5
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