This book represents the most comprehensive study of women's letters and letter-writing during the early modern period so far undertaken, and acts as an important corrective to traditional ways of reading and discussing letters as private, elite, male, and non-political. Based on over 3,000 manuscript letters, it shows that letter-writing was a larger and more socially diversified area of female activity than has been hitherto assumed. In that letters constitute the largest body of extant sixteenth-century women's writing, the book initiates a reassessment of women's education and literacy in the period. As indicators of literacy, letters yield physical evidence of rudimentary writing activity and abilities, document 'higher' forms of female literacy, and highlight women's mastery of formal rhetorical and epistolary conventions. The book also stresses that letters are unparalleled as intimate and immediate records of family relationships, and as media for personal and self-reflective forms of female expression. Read as documents that inscribe social and gender relations, letters shed light on the complex range of women's personal relationships, as female power and authority fluctuated, negotiated on an individual basis. Furthermore, correspondence highlights the important political roles played by early modern women. Female letter-writers were integral in cultivating and maintaining patronage and kinship networks; they were active as suitors for crown favour, and operated as political intermediaries and patrons in their own right, using letters to elicit influence. Letters thus help to locate differing forms of female power within the family, locality and occasionally on the wider political stage, and offer invaluable primary evidence from which to reconstruct the lives of early modern women.

Readership: Scholars and students of early modern British history; especially social historians and cultural, historians of women, and scholars of Renaissance literature.

James Daybell, Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Plymouth

"...engages with some of the key concepts in literary studies." - Journal of the Historical Association

"A fine analytical survey and an invaluable manual for the historian" - Bernard Capp, History

"an overdue and brilliant tool for students of this crucial emerging field of scholarship...the depth of material covered and insight into the contextual functions of the genre make it just as invaluable to literary, sociocultural, and feminist scholarship." - Johanna Harris, Notes and Queries, Volume 252, Number 3

"Daybell's book has an impressive research base and many apt and sometimes entertaining examples... a welcome introduction to the study of women's letters, and of early-modern society." - Alison Wall, English Historical Review

1: Introduction
2: Letters and Letter-Writers
3: The Composition of Letters
4: Female Literacy and the Conventions of Letter-Writing
5: Delivery, Reception, and Reading
6: The Functions of Letter-Writing
7: Social Relations Inscribed in Correspondence: Authority and Affection
8: Marital Correspondence
9: Letters of Petition
10: Conclusion
Bibliography
Index