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7
Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters
Diana G. Barnes

A few of these lines are blurred by falling tears,

Tears which are as heavy as my words
—‘Briseis to Achilles’, in Ovid,
Heroides, ll. 3–4

In this couplet Ovid’s heroine Briseis describes the ink, the page, her tear-stained
script as emotional debris, that is, as material traces of the feelings that moved her to
write this letter to Achilles. Together the words and the damaged physical letter
represent her heavy heart: the material artefact gives testimony to its emotional birth.
Another way of putting this would be to say that the emotional debris that Briseis
claims is palpable is her emotional history, a history, at least, of the emotions felt
during the writing of the letter. Of course Briseis’ claim that the residue of her
emotion is tangible in her letter is a fictional device. She writes of an imaginary
materialization of her emotion. Only in our mind’s eye do we see Briseis’ handwrit-
ing on the page; we read it mediated through print. We imagine Briseis recording her
thoughts on the page naturally as they occur to her, but read them in finely wrought
verse. Yet Ovid does not let us forget the material features of her letter, indeed this is
something reiterated over and again in all the epistles that make up the Heroides. In
poetic terms the device is used to move the reader: Briseis’ insistence that the words
alone cannot adequately capture the extremity of her feelings heightens the emo-
tional impact of the poem. It also raises questions about the emotional residue in
material artefacts, specifically handwritten manuscript letters. As historians have
observed, even the most mundane of early modern manuscript letters can exhibit
distinctly literary qualities.1 In what follows I will employ literary critical analysis to
highlight the part literary devices play in the accretion of emotion in material letters.
We may detect emotional debris in the material qualities of any handwritten
document, but inevitably more so in familiar letters whose function is to stand in
for face-to-face conversation between friends and intimates. Letters are objects that
represent, facilitate, and ultimately document a dynamic historical relationship
between writer, reader, but also deliverer, archivist, and scholar.2 Emotion may be

1  This is the opening premise of Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their
Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 2.
2  I am thinking about the implications of Bill Brown’s argument that ‘The story of objects asserting
themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story

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Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 115

suggested by a tremor in an upright line, a blot of ink, a torn page, an abrupt

rupture or closure, a coded sign, an uncharacteristically hurried scrawl, the choice
of seal, the colour of the sealing wax, or a piece of coloured silk floss embedded
within the wax. Nevertheless when we move beyond the realms of poetry it is
difficult to pin these material signs to a manifest emotion with certainty. The
tremor in the hand, the ink blot, and the torn page, for example, may simply indi-
cate that the writer, reader, bearer, or archivist was bumped at an inopportune
moment. And yet we should not disregard these traces altogether; intentional or
not, they were features of an epistolary vocabulary familiar to early modern writers
and readers.3 Alan Stewart describes this pervasive cultural phenomenon as ‘a
grammar of letters’.4 Reading early modern letters transcribed and edited by
experienced scholars in modern published collections is certainly convenient, but,
as those of us lucky enough to have read manuscript letters in an archive know only
too well, there is a loss. The printed edition erases the trace of the hand, the
character of the script, the quality of the paper, how it was folded, a smudge, a
watermark, and so on. In this chapter I want to take seriously the connection
Briseis makes between her words and her tear-damaged lines to consider how the
terms and processes of the Ovidian verse epistle, as it circulated broadly in the early
modern period, illuminate the emotional traces captured in a selection of manu-
script letters. My focus is upon the texture of the material letter rather than the
narrative content, although this distinction is often blurred.5 Each of the letter-
writers selected for discussion wrote for a practical purpose: Arbella Stuart (August
1609) to thank a patron; Lady Margaret Longueville to complain of her sister to
her mother; Brilliana Harley to convey wartime news to her husband; Charles I
to maintain intimacy with his wife; Beata Pope, Countess of Downe, to commu-
nicate lovingly with her daughter; and Maria van Rensselaer to resist directions to
send her son far away. As we shall see, when these writers sought to convey emo-
tion in letters, they strained the resources of the available discourses, quotidian and
aesthetic, and this has left traces in the material letters they produced.
In a recent article on the letters of Madeleine de Scudéry, Joan DeJean coined
the intriguing phrase ‘postal emotions’, and more specifically she invoked the idea
of ‘conflicting postal emotions’. DeJean’s term describes the quality of emotional
exchange in letters of Scudéry’s circle following the introduction of a regular and
affordable intra-city postal service in Paris in 1653. She argues that over the three-
year period in which the service operated, epistolary discourse became more fluid
and natural in its representation of emotion. This, she proposes, was due to the

of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject–object relation’ for the emotional
history of letters. Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry 28.1 (2001): 1–16; 4.
3  See W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, Sewanee Review 54 (1946):
468–88; Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed.
David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988), 167–71; Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, in Modern
Criticism and Theory, ed. Lodge, 197–228; and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 119–21.
4  Alan Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5.
5  On emotional narrative in early modern letters see Gary Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity:
Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 2005), 109–42.

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116 Diana G. Barnes

letter-writers’ ability to rely upon the regular and efficient dispatch and delivery of
letters afforded by the postal service. For writers in Scudéry’s circle the postal
service also represented new possibilities for fiction. During this period Madame
de Scudéry began to think about emotion differently, and she introduced the topic
of ‘une distinction entre ses nouveaux amis, ses particuliers amis et ses tendres amis’
as a topic for discussion at her weekly salon. She began to develop the ‘Carte de
Tendre’, or map of emotions, that is the centrepiece of her novel Clélie, histoire
romaine (1654–60). DeJean makes a compelling argument about how change in
an everyday communication technology effected change in the expression of
emotion in literary form, but I would like to challenge her assumption about
period. She posits that epistolary discourse became more pliant to representing
emotion from the mid-seventeenth century, and that, prior to that time, letters
were formal and constrained. In a footnote towards the end of her article she writes
of ‘the scarcity of surviving early modern letters that are truly private, that is, that
display any type of personal emotion’.6 I recognize that we are all guilty of glib
sleights of hand as we spotlight one set of issues and texts in favour of another, but
DeJean’s assumption made me think about why the representation of emotion in
early modern letters was unreadable to a sophisticated critic of seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century literature.
In brief, most formal accounts of early modern letters identify the letters of
Cicero as the locus classicus of the genre. They recount the renaissance of familiar
epistolary form that followed Petrarch’s recovery of Cicero’s Ad Atticus in 1345.7
They sideline the influence of Ovid’s verse letters, due to their poetic form.
Although early modern letter-writing manuals support this, insofar as they do not
include verse epistles in their copious taxonomies of the form, this account tells
only half the story. Cicero’s epistolary oeuvre provided a model for letters between
friends, where friendship is defined as an affective bond between equals. Ciceronian
epistolary language binds letter-writers and their addressees by establishing mutual
sympathy, shared interests, trust, reason, justice, and parity of emotional invest-
ment.8 In this sense Ciceronian epistolary emotions are bridled by known and
mutually respected limits and guarantees. By contrast the Ovidian model entails
affective bonds between unequal pairs who differ in every respect—male/female,
sovereign/subject, free/captive, powerful/disempowered, etc.—and whose invest-
ments in the bond differ.9 Ovidian emotions are always excessive and never under
control. Whereas the writer of a Ciceronian letter anticipates a sympathetic and

6  Joan DeJean, ‘(Love) Letters: Madeleine de Scudéry and the Epistolary Impulse’, Eighteenth-
Century Fiction 22.3 (2010): 399–414; 413 n. 26.
7  Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early
Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 211–40; Lisa Jardine, Erasmus, Man
of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993),
3–26.
8  Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1990), 180–2.
9  Danielle Clarke, ‘“Formed into words by your divided lips”: Women, Rhetoric and the Ovidian
Tradition’, in ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England, ed. Danielle Clarke and
Elizabeth Clarke (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 61–87.

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Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 117

just reader, the writer of an Ovidian epistle has no such guarantee, indeed she
recognizes that her letter may be torn, disregarded, lost in transit, or received
unsympathetically.
The influence of Ovidianism on early modern English poetry was pervasive.10
Early modern poets found in the Heroides a compelling model for poetry, but most
adaptations do not take epistolary form. This is true of the extremely popular and
widely imitated historical complaints collected in The Mirror of Magistrates (1559)
and William Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece (1594), for example.11 Following
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Legende of the Good Women (c.1386), these Ovidian adapta-
tions feature the moving eloquence and tragic dignity of the violated heroine but
represent it as speech rather than writing, as monologue rather than dialogue.12
This shrouds a radical dimension of the original. For Ovid the letter is a weapon of
the weak, a form that allows the raped, abandoned, imprisoned, and traded women
to mount an emotionally compelling intervention on the Homeric account of the
Trojan wars that sidelined them.13 In the Iliad Briseis is an item of exchange
between men, a battle spoil taken by Achilles as his concubine, and then traded to
pacify Agamemnon. In the Heroides Briseis accuses her captor-lover, Achilles, of
too readily relinquishing her to Agamemnon, and of being too slow in securing her
return. Thus Ovid’s Briseis exhibits agency, eloquence, dignity, and a cogent counter-
argument—in the face of tragedy and humiliation—that she lacks in the Iliad. As
a rhetorical form modelled upon oratory, the letter afforded Ovid’s violated women
a means of claiming a discourse imbued with heroic authority. The complaints of
Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Mirror capture this heroic dimension, but they
downplay features that are represented more effectively in epistolary adaptations.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England letter-writing was a quotidian form
available to the literate.14 Letters document, or materialize, the transit of emotion

10  For an overview see Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993);
John F. Miller and Carole E. Newlands, eds., A Handbook to the Reception of Ovid (Chichester:
Wiley, 2014); Georgia Brown, Redefining Elizabethan Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004); Susan Wiseman, ‘The Rhetoric of Complaint: Ovid’s Heroides in the Renaissance and
Restoration’, Introduction to Special Issue of Renaissance Studies 22.3 (2008): 295–433. Raphael
Lyne, ‘Love and Exile after Ovid’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 288–300.
11  See Richard Helgerson, ‘Writing Empire and Nation’, in The Cambridge Companion to English
Literature, 1500, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 310–29, esp.
322–3; and Huw Griffith, ‘Letter Writing Lucrece: Shakespeare in the 1590s’, in Rhetoric, Women and
Politics in Early Modern England, ed. Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (Abingdon: Routledge,
2007), 89–110.
12  See John M. Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
13  On the pen as weapon see Margaret W. Ferguson, ‘Renaissance Concepts of the Woman Writer’,
in Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press), 152–3; and for illustrations see Marie-Hélène Tesnière and Prosser Gifford, eds., Creating
French Culture: Treasures from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press in association with the Library of Congress, Washington, DC and the Bibliothèque nationale de
France, 1995), 173–5.
14 See Katherine Gee Hornbeak, ‘The Complete Letter Writer in English 1568–1800’, Smith
College Studies in Modern Languages 15.3–4 (1934); and Jean Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing: An
Essay on the Handbooks Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London:
University Press of Liverpool/Hodder, 1942).

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118 Diana G. Barnes

from the heart to the hand to the page, and letter-writing manuals demonstrate
step-by-step just how the claim to heroic authority can be made. Letters could be
dispatched to overcome the tyrannies of distance and captivity. When Ovid
insists upon the materiality of Briseis’ letter, he challenges assumed-as-given dis-
tinctions between aesthetic and prosaic artefacts, and the heroism and eloquence
of victor and victim, thereby spotlighting emotional histories manifest in material
letters real and imagined.
But what did the Ovidian poetic legacy mean for seventeenth-century letter-
writers and readers? They may well have been aware of Michael Drayton’s England’s
Heroical Epistles, an enormously popular adaptation of the Heroides first published
in 1597 and republished regularly over the following century. It insists upon the
material letter at every turn. The influence of Ovid’s Heroides was not confined to
poetry, however. Typically early modern letter-writing manuals laid out how the
art of letter-writing devolved from classical oratory and drew liberally from Cicero’s
letters to his friends. Ovid’s verse epistles were mentioned briefly: Erasmus cursor-
ily directs readers to Ovid for love letters without detailing the model (in stark
contrast to his copious style); and Juan Luis Vives cites Ovid in a mundane discus-
sion of whether the address is integral to a letter itself, or merely a guide to the
bearer.15 Letter-writing manuals of the late sixteenth century, such as Angel Day’s
The English Secretary (1586) or William Fulwood’s The Enemy for Idleness (1568),
show traces of Ovid’s influence where they treat love letters, but they neither
acknowledge nor thematize the debt.16 Nevertheless since medieval times both
Ovid’s Heroides and letter-writing had been employed in the teaching of rhetoric.
Writing letters in the style of Heroides was a common exercise in the Elizabethan
grammar school classroom.17 Typically the process involved double translation
exercises, that is, translation from Latin to English and then back again. This activ-
ity was geared to familiarize the student with a classical writer’s rhetorical style and
thereby prepare the student to adapt it to his own purpose, but repeated over and
over, the exercise served to inculcate the values and sentiment of the text. In The
Scholemaster (1570) Roger Ascham makes it clear that the double translation of
Cicero’s letters should encourage a kind of sympathetic emotional flow between
the student, the classical master, and the teacher.18 Writing a generation later John
Brinsley adapted Ascham’s method and recommended the double translation of
Ovid’s verse letters as a means of encouraging a ‘facility for getting the phrase and
vein of the Poet’.19 Brinsley’s idea of ‘the phrase and vein of the poet’ effectively

15 Erasmus, De conscribendis epistolis (1522), in Literary and Educational Writings 3, De conscriben-

dis epistolis, De civilitate, in The Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. XXV, ed. J. K. Sowards (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1985), 204; Juan Luis Vives, De conscribendis epistolis (1534), intro. and
trans. Charles Fantazzi (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 79.
16  On Angel Day see my Epistolary Community in Print, 1580–1664 (London: Ashgate, 2013); on
Fulwood see W. Webster Newbold, ‘Traditional, Practical, Entertaining: Two Early English Letter
Writing Manuals’, Rhetorica 26.3 (2008): 267–301.
17 Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid; Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, and
Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
18  Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, ed. Edward Arber (London: Constable, 1935), 25–7.
19 John Brinsley cited in Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 165.

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Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 119

naturalizes the absorption of verse-epistle techniques into quotidian and utilitarian

writing practices.20
As the pulse is maintained by the heart, the figurative locus of emotion, then
imitating the ‘phrase and vein’ coursing through an Ovidian letter is an inherently
emotional business. For the early moderns such imitative processes were not confined
decorously to the pedagogical scene. As Wye Saltonstall intimated in the letter to
the reader appended to his 1637 translation of Heroides:
Ladies and Gentlewomen, since this book of Ovids, which most Gentlemen could
reade before in Latine, is for your sakes come forth in English, it doth at first address
it selfe as a Suiter, to wooe your acceptance, that it may kisse your hands, and after-
ward have the lines thereof in reading sweetned by the odour of your breath, while the
dead letters form’d into words by your divided lips, may receive new life by your
passionate expression, and the words marryed in that Ruby coloured Temple, may
thus happily united, multiply your contentment.21
Saltonstall asserts that reading ‘dead letters’ was a somatic process; and that absorbing
the words of Ovid’s letters into the pulse could trigger a chain of emotional
reactions in the reader, ones that then shaped his or her own writing of letters.
Not all the letter-writers cited in this chapter had access to the kind of humanist
education laid down by Ascham and Brinsley, and I have unearthed no hard
evidence that they read Ovid, but I will proceed with the assumption that because
Ovid’s Heroides and its derivatives circulated broadly, they provided ready tools for
writerly expression, and readerly interpretation.

I N K B L OT S

Early modern poets and translators associated the ink blot with Ovid. It is a key
term in George Turberville’s 1567 translation Ovid’s Heroical Epistles (1567), as the
following extract from his version of ‘Breseis to Achilles’, shows:
My flushing teares did cause
The blots and blurres you see:
Yet in these dreerie droppes I know
The weight of wordes to bee.
In turn Drayton signals his debt to Ovid by working the teary ink blot into his
poetic adaptation of Ovid’s Heroides to English history, as for example in this coup-
let from his epistle ‘Queen Margaret to William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk’ which
reads ‘Farewell, sweet Pole, faine more I would endite, / But that my teares doe blot
what I doe write’ (England’s Heroical Epistles, 1597). Clearly the ink blot is not
simply a literary device but an inevitable feature of manuscript letter-writing.

20  Brinsley was not alone in theorizing the pedagogical utility of aesthetic exemplars (e.g. Abraham
Fraunce, Arcadian rhetoric, 1588, and John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, c.1599, did so in
relation to Sidney’s oeuvre). See my Epistolary Community in Print, 65, 70–1.
21  Ovid’s Heroicall Epistles, trans. Wye Saltonstall (1636): sig. A4v.

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120 Diana G. Barnes

Fig. 7.1.  Beata Pope, Countess of Downe, to Lady Frances North, 1679. HM 52405, The
Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

The North Family Correspondence held at the Huntington Library includes an

autograph letter written by Beata Pope, Countess of Downe, to her daughter, Lady
Frances North, in 1679, which is covered in ink blots (Fig. 7.1). Each blot seems
to heighten the emotional impact of what Pope writes. In this chatty letter Pope
conveys love for her daughter and her family, and relays local news. She blots on
opening as she expresses her concern over the health of her sick grandchild. The
inky stain makes it difficult to decipher precisely what she writes, but give or take
a word, it reads:
Dear harte,
I cannot [express?] how greatful I am that you fonde my Deere childe so well,
and came safle to yor owne hows, my affectinate services to my sonne I have sent
him to [2] cheas, wch I hope he will except from his most feaithful servant[.]
Pope blots again when she recounts the ‘great Joy and Ringinge of Bells’ for Lady
Falkland’s marriage, and once again when she reports the ‘sad relacion, of Poore Sr
Edward Poole how dide suddenly as hee was riding abroad [BLOT] carried dead
to his owne hous, wch was [BLOT] affliction to his Lady and his poor [BLOT]-ren’.
At each of these points she expresses emotion—gratitude, joy, and grief—all of
which is underwritten by her overwhelming desire to maintain intimate dialogue
with her daughter. My reading of the Huntington Library’s holdings of this letter-
writer leads me to conclude that Beata Pope was a messy writer who regularly, and
probably inadvertently, daubed her correspondence with excess ink from an

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Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 121

Fig. 7.2.  Beata Pope, Countess of Downe, to Lady Frances North, 1679, verso. HM 52405,
The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

unblotted pen. Meaning is not entirely determined by the intentions of the author,
however. In this case the broader context confers meaning. Let us consider the con-
clusion of Beata Pope’s letter where the ink blot has leached through the page cast-
ing a dark hue over her subscription (Fig. 7.2). Surely when Lady North read her
mother’s subscription—‘It is the Dayly prayrs of her that is unfanedly yor moste
affectionate mother, whiles I Breath’—she must have felt a prick in her heart,
intensified by the well-placed characteristic blemishes of her mother’s fair copy.
This effect is heightened by the desire Pope expresses in her postscript for a white
hood with black spots ‘if they be woren’. Any handwritten line is vulnerable to the
meaning-changing effect of a blot of ink; ‘But what’s so blessed-fair that fears no
blot?’ (l. 13), Shakespeare asks in Sonnet 92.22
Beata Pope’s inadvertent blot, however, should be distinguished from other
intentional blots. Let us briefly consider an autograph letter Sir John Ferres wrote
to his cousin, Sir Walter Ferres, in 1604, held at the Folger Shakespeare Library.23
Joking about Walter Ferres’ propensity to blot the account books, John Ferres
wrote ‘my boke is now perfecte, although in yours you had made many [fingerprint]
blottes’. Ferres’s inky fingerprint is an intentional mark made to tease his cousin; it

22  William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stanley Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1985), 106.
23 Sir John Ferrers (c.1580–1633?), an autograph letter to his cousin Sir Walter Ferrers, from
Warwick, dated 30 July 1604. Folger MS Le.675, repr. in Alan Stewart and Heather Wolfe, Letter
Writing in Renaissance England (Washington, DC: Folger, 2004), 83–5.

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122 Diana G. Barnes

is not evidence of unbound emotion in Ovidian style and yet it too has an emo-
tional quality. Striving to guide his cousin to interpret his blot correctly as a familiar
jest, John Ferres continues: ‘I hope you will geve your poore frend leve to be merry
with you, who is much devoted to your loves.’ John Ferres recognized the ink blot
as a sign available for epistolary communication but that it was a dangerously
unstable signifier whose meaning was not easily harnessed to express his familiar
affection for his cousin: in blotting he risked offending his reader.

THE HAND

In the Ovidian tradition much emphasis is given to the hand of the author that
guides the pen that marks the page. The hand was also shorthand for handwriting,
or script. Typically the hand represents the immediacy of the writing, tying the
author’s concerns firmly to present circumstances. Turberville underscores this in
his translation of Canace’s epistle to Machareus: ‘My right hande holdes the pen,
the left a sword, / And in my carefull lappe the paper lyes’ (‘Canace to Machareus’,
Ovid’s Heroical Epistles, ll. 2–4). Likewise in a later translation, Hypermnestra
recalls her refusal to murder her husband, Linus, as her father, Danaus, King of
Argos, had commanded, in the lines: ‘The frightful memory of that dire night /
Enervates so my hand, I scarce can write’. In closing she reminds the reader that
her script is impaired by the manacles that bind her hands ‘Here I must rest my
hand, tho much remains, / ’Tis quite disabled with the weight of Chains’
(‘Hypermnestra to Linus’, trans. ‘Mr Wright’, Ovid’s Epistles Translated by Several
Hands, 1680). These Ovidian tropes were popularized and adapted into English
poetics. Over and again Drayton emphasizes the slippage between the hand and
handwriting, as for example:
If yet thine eyes (great Henry) may endure
These tainted lynes, drawn with a hand impure
Which faine would blush, but feare keep blushes back,
And therefore suted in dispayring blacke
(‘Rosamond to King Henry II’,
England’s Heroical Epistles, ll. 1–4)
In the Ovidian tradition, handwriting captures the letter-writer’s psychological
state. The blackness of the ink on the page testifies to her mood. In translating the
Ovidian verse epistle into contemporary idiom, Turberville, Wright, and Drayton
draw upon the terms of contemporary epistolary culture and humoral theory to
describe handwriting. They invoke a familiar slippage between the ‘gall’ of the oak
tree used in making the ink and the gall or black bile of melancholy.24 Ink is not
the only material quality that gives emotional colour to a letter-writer’s hand.

24 Stewart, Shakespeare’s Letters, 48. See also Michael Bristol, ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the
Publication of Melancholy’, in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things and Forms of
Knowledge, ed. Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (London: Routledge, 2008), 193–211; 204. On
the making of ink see James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters

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Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 123

Early modern readers were acutely aware of the socio-political implications of

script, or handwriting style. As the names imply, secretarial, italic, and court
hands were social practices.25 At first glance, and if we consider only the words,
then Arbella Stuart’s August 1609 letter to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, High
Treasurer of England, is perfunctory, formal, and entirely unemotional. It opens
as follows:
My honorable good Lord, I yeild you humble thanckes for the honorable care it hath
pleased you to have of me both in the election and effecting of this suite; which shall
ever binde me to humble thanckfulnesse towards your Lordship[.] For whose long life,
and happinesse I pray to the Almighty and rest
Your Lordships much bounden and assured frend
Arbella Stuart.26
As Sara Jayne Steen, Stuart’s first editor observes, Stuart was a skilled letter-writer
who knew how to manipulate the visual rhetoric of her letter for emotional effect.27
Steen’s print edition, however, had a limited capacity to demonstrate this.28 The
first thing to note of Stuart’s material letter is the fact that the letter is in her hand,
and that together the formality of her even italic hand and her courteous expres-
sion convey her gratitude. James Daybell points out that such features of material
letters were readily discernible social signals. Increasingly over the period the auto-
graph letter was viewed as more intimate and familiar than one produced with the
assistance of a secretary. Daybell observes that ‘The act of writing oneself, although
often practical, conveyed emotion, politeness and respect. An autograph hand,
therefore, might be interpreted as a marker of affect, duty and obligation.’29 By
writing in her own hand, Stuart signals that she is writing to a superior. She
enhances this effect by writing in the italic, a hand originally associated with
humanism, but from the early seventeenth century, viewed as an easy hand par-
ticularly suited to women.30 At the time of writing Stuart was fourth in line to the
throne, James I was blocking her marriage, and the recent death of her powerful
grandmother and agent, Bess of Hardwick (January 1608), had left her in need of
influential allies such as Salisbury. The appropriately feminine italic hand in which
Stuart’s letter is written emphasizes her deference to social mores. This is reinforced
by the use of blank space in the letter. At least half a page separates the text of
her letter from her signature. By contrast in a letter she had her secretary write for

and the Culture and Practices of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012),
37–41.
25  On handwriting as social discipline see Goldberg, Writing Matter.
26  Arbella Stuart to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, §72, in The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, ed.
Sara Jayne Steen, Women Writers in English 1350–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
232. Arbella Stuart to the Earl of Salisbury August 1609. SP 14/47 f. 254, National Archives of the
UK, repr. in State Papers Online.
27  Sara Jayne Steen, ‘Introduction’, in The Letters of Lady Arbella Stuart, 35–8. See also Sara Jayne
Steen, ‘Fashioning an Acceptable Self: Arbella Stuart’, English Literary Renaissance 18.1 (1988): 78–95.
28  Digital editing facilitates comparison of manuscript and transcription. The State Papers Online
database provides a multi-format edition of this letter.
29 Daybell, The Material Letter, 86–7.
30  Laetitia Kennedy-Skipton, Elizabethan Handwriting 1500–1650 (New York: Norton, 1966), 66.

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124 Diana G. Barnes

her to Sir Robert Wilbraham a few months earlier (3 November 1607, SP 14/28 f.
150, PRO), her signature is placed much closer to the body of the letter.31 Stuart
shows greater respect to Salisbury than to Wilbraham. Thus, contra to DeJean,
even formal, public letters, such as Stuart’s, have an emotional dimension; it is
heightened by the materialization of the hand on the page.
The hand can give away an emotional quality irrespective of the writer’s prose or
intent. Consider the following example of a letter written by Brilliana Harley to
her husband, Robert Harley, in April 1643 (British Library Add. 70110, f. 80).
The context tells us that she wrote under some pressure, and the physical letter
itself confirms this. During this period the couple was separated by the unfolding
drama of the English Civil War. Brilliana Harley was managing the family estate
Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire while Robert Harley was involved in parliamen-
tary politics in London. Royalists were threateningly camped nearby, and she
sought advice over the management of the estate. Her letter is written on a tiny
scrap of paper. Harley’s hand is usually very clear but in this letter it is cramped and
difficult to make out. It gives the impression of having been hastily written, as
though strong feelings impelled her to abandon her usual composure of script.
This is supported by the content. The letter opens with her conventional fond
wishes for her husband’s well-being, which ‘hope’, she writes, ‘gives [her] some
comfort in the midst of many trubells’. She assures him that she is resigned to
‘what it pleasis my gratious God to Exercis me with’ but prays for the ‘strength’ to
face what lies ahead. She explains: ‘the rison why I send this bearer is to desire you
to write me, two or three words what I had best doo for the suply of the Provisions
of my ^the^ howes’. Worrying about his reaction she continues: ‘deare Sr be not
displeased that I have so offten rwit to you a bout this for I am very unwilling to
doo any thinge that you doo not a prouve of ’. Then she makes a final request ‘but
if you pleas to write me word wheather I should stay at Brompton or no’. She
closes ‘I beceach the lord to preserve you and to give you a happy meeting with her
that beggs your love and prayers as your most affectionat wife Brilliana Harley’.
This is a variation on a conventional subscription fitting a letter from wife to
husband, but its emotional impact is heightened by the material features of the
text, the hand, the paper, the context of war, and the bearer.

T H E C A R R I E R , B E A R E R O R P O S T B OY

Ovid’s Heroides do not specify carriers, bearers, or postboys, but in the spirit of the
Heroides, writers do so to invite readers to consider the semantic implications of
the means of delivery of a material letter. Transportation and delivery represent
another chapter in what we might call, after Igor Kopytoff, the emotional biography

31  On space in manuscript letters see Jonathan Gibson, ‘Significant Space in Manuscript Letters’,
The Seventeenth Century 12.1 (1997): 1–10. Gibson specifically complains that Steen’s otherwise
meticulous edition does not account for the use of blank space.

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Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 125

of a letter.32 It is a recurrent theme in early modern manuscript and fictional

letters, especially those concerning love. Nicolas Breton’s regularly reprinted
epistolary collection A Post with a Mad Packet of Letters (1602) is presented as the
miscellaneous contents of a postboy’s packet. The frontispiece woodcut illustration
of the postboy on horseback galloping across mountainous terrain with his packet
over his shoulder, his bugle to his lips, and the floating caption ‘For Love, For Life’
underscores the Ovidian device unifying the collection.33 Manuscript letter-
writers also frequently refer to the bearer and how letters were transported. Some
of this information could be recorded on the outside of the folded letter. When
Brilliana Harley writes: ‘the rison why I send this bearer is to desire you to write
me, two or three words what I had best doo for the suply of the Provisions of my
^the^ howes’ she acknowledges that she has used either a bearer who is not tried
and proven, or a known bearer out of schedule. As she realizes, her husband would
note this prior to opening and reading her letter, and this information would
flavour his reading of its contents. The carrier of a manuscript letter was preferably
a person known and trusted by sender and recipient. He represented an important
part of epistolary communication.34 Harley also writes, in the 1643 letter cited
above, that ‘our God has bine mightily seen at Gloster the relation of which this
bearer will tell you’ alerting her husband to the fact that supplementary informa-
tion will be conveyed by the bearer.35 This was not uncommon. Indeed the bearer
was another figure in the communicative act of epistolary exchange. Frequently, as
the Harley example shows, the bearer would be trusted to convey information that
could not be committed to paper. Here a gap in the text—the writer’s omission of
certain information—points to the emotional and material conditions under
which the letter was written, dispatched, and read. Trust in the bearer, anxiety
about conveying politically sensitive information, and desire to communicate
more directly, are threads in the emotional fabric of the material letter.
Anxiety about bearers was heightened during the English Civil War when letter-
writing was a crucial means of conveying politically sensitive information and
holding together political and religious communities under siege. In 1645, Charles
I wrote to his wife, Henrietta Maria, that owing to the bearer (and his projected
route), he would only engage in an exchange of emotions and cover no topical
issues. He writes:
My Dear heart, though it be an uncomfortable thing to write by a slow Messenger, yet
all occasions, of this (which is now the only) way of conversing with thee, is so welcome
to me as I shall be loath to loose any, but expect neither new or publick business, from
me, by this way of conveyance; yet judging thee by my self even these nothings will
now be unwelcome to thee.36

32  Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social
Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 64–91.
33  The postboy also appears on the frontispieces of other published collections of letters as for
example The Prompter’s Packet (1633) and The Secretary of Ladies (1638). See Barnes, Epistolary
Community in Print, 75–6.
34 Daybell, The Material Letter, 128–40.    35  British Library, Add. 70110, f. 80.
36  §9 Charles I to Henrietta Maria, The King’s Cabinet Open’d (1645), 8.

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126 Diana G. Barnes

The royal couple had already had a number of their letters intercepted. As it was
necessary to use a slow messenger thereby increasing the risk of interception, he
determines to bracket news of political events, and represent only his emotions. He
assumes that she will welcome such sweet nothings as he would himself. In spite of
his intentions, Charles I is unable to cordon off an emotional space distinct from
the political backdrop. In the same letter he details how much he adores his wife
by listing in cypher those loyal friends and followers whose company is inferior to
hers, making it obvious that his emotions are interpolated through all dimensions
of his life experience. His closing line ‘Believe me, sweet heart, thy kindnesse is as
necessary to comfort my heart, as thy assistance is for my affairs’ underscores his
inability to separate his emotion from the events that generate and fuel it. The
emotional residue of these conditions is palpable in his letter.

THE DRAFTS

Drafting and redrafting are common devices in Ovidian epistolary discourse used
to convey the letter-writer’s distress and uncertainty. Drayton captures this effect-
ively in the following lines from Matilda’s epistle to King John:

I set me downe, at large to write my mind,

But now nor Pen, nor Paper can I find;
For still my passion is so powerful o’r me,
That I discerne not things that stand before me:
Finding the Pen, the Paper, and the Waxe,
These at command, and now Invention lacks;
This sentence serves, and That my hand out-strikes;
That pleaseth well, and This as much mislikes,
I write, indite, I point, I raze, I quote,
I enterline, I blot, correct, I note,
I hope despaire, take courage, faint, disdaine,
I make, alledge, I imitate, I faine:
Now thus it must be, and now thus, and thus,
Bold, shame-fac’d, fearless, doubtfull, timorous;
My faint Hand writing, when my full Eye reads,
From ev’ry word strange Passion still proceeds
(‘Matilda to King John’, England’s
Heroical Epistles ll. 27–42, my italics)

In epistolary poetry then, drafting and redrafting signal emotional equivocation,

but this emotional effect is not confined to literary letters.
Around January 1683, Maria van Rensselaer drafted and redrafted a letter to her
brother-in-law, Reygart van Rensselaer. At that time she was acting patroon of the
Dutch patroonship of Rensselaerwyck in New Netherland, as her husband, Kiliaen
van Rensselaer, had died a few years earlier. Reygart van Rensselaer was then head
of the family business and based in the Netherlands. Evidently he had written to
ask van Rensselaer to send her son, also Kiliaen van Rensselaer, to Amsterdam to

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Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 127

learn the family business. Maria van Rensselaer was reluctant. Aside from a natural
maternal concern about sending a child to the other side of the earth, by this stage
she was disabled by a degenerative and painful condition of the hip, and she relied
upon the help of her sons. Following the conventions for mercantile correspond-
ence, Maria van Rensselaer opens one of the extant drafts with a perfunctory greeting
and acknowledgement of Reygart’s letter. Next she responds to his suggestion
about Kiliaen, then acknowledges Reygart’s own struggles, and offers her sympathy
and prayers.37 It reads as follows:
Dear Brother: Yours dated the 14th of May I received in reasonable health, together with
the enclosed [letter] to Secretary Livingston, which I copied, sealed and sent to him.
I see from your letter that you would like to have my [son] Kiliaen come over to
assist you and in time to get acquainted with his father’s house. I should be heartily
pleased if it were possible to send him over, but as Hendrick lives with Momville and
Johannis is still too young to take charge of anything, Kiliaen must remain with me, in
order to have better supervision here. He is at present at Baston. I hope that he will
soon be home, for I need him badly. I can well believe that you have much to do in [set-
tling] the estates of father and mother, deceased, brother Jan Baptist, deceased, and uncle,
deceased, and that it all comes down on you. May God Almighty give you strength and
health, so that things may come to an end there, for here they are going from bad to
worse and while there is no governor here things drift along and every one does what
seems best in his eyes.38
Maria van Rensselaer’s other draft also opens by acknowledging Reygart’s letter but
moves quickly into a lengthy description of her life and an assertion of the Christian
principles she wants Reygart to understand she honours. In the second paragraph
she tackles the matter of young Kiliaen going to Amsterdam, writing in the passive
voice that ‘it seems this cannot be’ and ‘It seems that it pleases God to send me
more feebleness’. The draft reads as follows:
Sr Reygart van Rensselaer
Dear Brother: Your letter of May 14, 1682, came duly to hand. Brother will please
not think it strange that I was surprised not to get any letter, for I am here alone and like
to hear that you and our friends are well. Be pleased, therefore, not to take it ill that
I wrote so, and also, how I was to proceed with the farmers. I am very sorry to hear of
your long illness and of all the misfortune and sadness that has befallen you. The good
Lord himself said to His disciples: ‘In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of
good cheer; I  have overcome the world.’ Only let us always keep our leader, Jesus
Christ, before our eyes and firmly trust that nothing happens without His will.
You write about my son Kiliaen’s [coming over] to help you and be of some service to
you. I hope, please God, that this may take place soon. I heartily wish that my son Kiliaen were

37  On mercantile letter-writing see Donna Merwick’s study of Maria van Rensselaer’s father-
in-law’s letter-writing practices in ‘A Genre of their Own: Kiliaen van Rensselaer as Guide to the
Reading and Writing Practices of Early Modern Businessmen’, The William and Mary Quarterly 65.4
(2008): 669–712; and of Dutch merchants more generally, see Suze Zijlstra, ‘To Build and Sustain
Trust: Long Distance Correspondence of Dutch Seventeenth-Century Merchants’, Dutch Crossing
36.2 (2012): 114–31.
38  Maria van Rensselaer to Richard van Rensselaer [January?] 1683, in Correspondence of Maria van
Rensselaer 1669–1689, trans. and ed. A. J. F. van Laer (Albany: University of the State of New York,
1935), 84.

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128 Diana G. Barnes

with you, but it seems that this cannot well be, for I shall need him very much. It seems that
it pleases God to send me more feebleness, for I have had a severe fainting spell, and I can
not miss him. He is at present at Baston to see how it is there with the silverware business,
but if it please God he will soon be home and write to you himself.  (My italics)39
There is no internal evidence for which draft was penned first, but it is tempting to
assume that the example cited second was written after the first. Whereas the
bluntness and directness of the former seem to represent a raw emotional response
to an abhorrent suggestion from the head of the family, the latter shows evidence
of recasting to make her position more persuasive. There is some strategy here but
it is hardly literary. Maria van Rensselaer understood that an effective letter was a
crafted persuasive argument that harnessed and shaped emotion and not an
unedited natural outpouring of thoughts onto the page. The existence of the drafts
represents a material history of the emotional work that went into producing a
letter under difficult circumstances. This effect, however, was not one she intended
to convey to Reygart van Rensselaer, but rather a cross-temporal effect the archive
makes available to modern readers.

A G R I P I N G TO N E

Early modern writers particularly admired the emotional tone of Ovid’s Heroides.
This quality was established by the letter-writer’s copious description of the heart-
felt passions motivating her writing. In other words the tone makes a claim about
the material conditions that produced the letter. Ovid’s heroines draw attention to the
material features of the epistolary discourse to create the impression that the reader
is experiencing the letter as it is being written. Neither Ovid, nor the early mod-
erns, viewed passionate effusion as either the antithesis of reason or as a sign of
weakness. Ovidian heroism entails a passionate logic capable of undermining
hegemonic ideals. Linda Kauffman writes that in the Heroides ‘Ovid challenges the
values of Augustan Rome [and] conventional notions of origins, of fathers, of
paternity, of authority, of identity [offering] Instead […] amorous epistolary
discourse—with all its erotic, emotional, and sensuous intensity’.40 In the sixteenth
and early seventeenth century, poetry that strove to capture this powerful e­ motional
and iconoclastic quality was described as ‘complaint’. The Mirror for Magistrates,
the title of the popular collection of English historical complaints edited by
William Baldwin, underscores the recognition that passionate poetic suasoria had
a legalistic quality. And the title of Drayton’s adaptation England’s Heroical Epistles
emphasizes the heroic quality of verse written in this mode. Following Mme de
Scudéry’s adaptation of the Heroides, Les femmes illustres, ou Les harangues héroïques
(1644), the style was also known as a ‘heroic harangue’, acknowledging the

39  Maria van Rensselaer to Richard van Rensselaer [January?] 1683, in Correspondence of Maria van
Rensselaer 1669–1689, 87–8.
40 Linda S. Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fiction (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1986), 61.

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Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 129

c­ onnection between heroism and argument.41 This passionate language of feminine

heroism associated with letter-writing was not confined purely to poetry. It was an
expressive resource available to the writers of ‘real’ letters.
A letter Lady Margaret Longueville wrote to her mother Hester Sandys, Lady
Temple in the 1630s, held in the Huntington Library, conveys a griping tone,
heightened by emotional copia. It opens:
Dere mother givee mee leue to trobble you a littell, with that wich hath trobbled mee
so much: wich is the bakebiting of my sister: ^Millysent^ she thanks god you haue
called her bake from gooing astray: I pray god you may call her from this falte: wich
in my apinyon: is wors then the other: for that is an imperfecksion: of too much
love[, and] this of too much hatred: I beleve no tails: but what I hard with my yeres . . . 

Then Longueville just goes on and on:

she sayd share ther was something lakeing that I came to your: chamber: as if I neuer
hade come to you but for my ends: I wish my fortune hade bine such that I might not
haue hade cares to haue axt: and I shuld haue bine more proud of that, then euer
Allexsander was of concering the world: and then she said if she mared, she hopt you
wolde leue with hor: and she wolde not sit sollinly, by you, as I did
Let hor knoe that: that fort[une]: that shee bilds apone anothers ruens shall neuer
bee blest to hor, in the end: and for my sollinnes: it may bee I was in some trobble and
came to my frinds to haue found comefort: therfore she might haue jouged charitably
on mee: then she is angery att any thing that my brother Tho:[mas] and I haue[.]42

Longueville’s letter has immediacy; her carelessness of composition, and the

stream-of-consciousness effect of her thoughts tumbling out onto the page one on
top of the next, heighten the impression that she writes to unburden herself of an
overwhelming distress. But we cannot be absolutely sure that this is not a studied
effect. Copia, metaphorical iteration and repetition, were recognized rhetorical
devices employed to heighten emotional impact. Adapting the principle from
Cicero’s De oratore Erasmus recommended the letter-writer should affect diligent
negligence, to give the impression of immediacy.43 Writing to persuade her mother
to side with her against her sister, Longueville has every motivation to employ
available rhetorical devices. She seems ‘scarce certain of [her] owne conceipts’, that
is, so overwhelmed by emotions that she cannot think straight, as Angel Day
described writing a love letter in his letter-writing manual The English Secretary
(1586).44 Longueville achieves this impression effectively, although she is not
writing a love letter.

41  This was translated into English as Les Femmes Illustres, or, Twenty Heroick Harangues of the most
Illustrious Women of Antiquity (1693). On the heroic emotion in Ovid see Clarke and Clarke, eds.,
‘This Double Voice’.
42 Lady M[argaret (Temple) Longueville] to Hester (Sandys), Lady Temple, [1631 <> 1637],
Huntington Library STT 1411.
43 Erasmus, Confisciendarum epistolarum formula (1520), in Literary and Educational Writings, 258.
44  Angel Day, The English Secretary (1586), 232.

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130 Diana G. Barnes

T H E A RC H I V E

The process of archiving of letters can also leave an emotional residue palpable in
the material text. Charles I’s letters to his wife and friends were captured by
Parliament and published in The King’s Cabinet Open’d (1645). Parliamentary
propagandists recognized that epistolary intimacies take on entirely different
meanings when circulated publicly in print: Charles I’s loving assertions to his wife
were presented as evidence of his betrayal of loyal followers. Beneath each pub-
lished letter the editors noted that ‘This is a true copy examined by Miles Corbet’,
or one of the other editors. This annotation nicely documents the mediation,
agency, and emotional investments of those who capture and preserve dead letters
so that they ‘may receive new life by [the] passionate expression’ of future gener-
ations of readers.
Once archived, letters continue to absorb emotional traces. Consider the
image of Maria van Rensselaer’s damaged letter in Fig. 7.3. It was damaged by
the fire that ravaged the New York State Library in March 1911. Looking at its
singed edges must bring a pang of loss to any scholar of early modern culture.
Arnold J. F. van Laer devoted his career to translating seventeenth-century
Dutch documents in the New York State Archives including the letters of Maria
van Rensselaer and her husband, Jeremias. Although many of the Dutch papers
survived the fire, because they were stored in lower shelves, the collection on
van Laer’s desk and his handwritten translation was lost. Van Laer worked tire-
lessly to retrieve smoking documents from the debris; he recalled that ‘some of
the volumes were so hot that they could hardly be touched with the hand’.45
Charles T. Gehring, his successor, reported that afterwards van Laer ‘came close
to a nervous breakdown’ from which he never fully recovered, and that he
stopped translating for a decade.46 He did continue his work, however, as cap-
tured in a moving photograph of him working on a fire-damaged manuscript
published in the Albany Evening News in 1932.47 Knowing the background
events, for Gehring the fire-damaged pages of the surviving letters give testi-
mony not only to van Laer’s personal trauma but also to his public-spirited
heroic service to archival history. The singed letter documents neither the writer’s
nor addressee’s emotion but a disappointment and loss we would-be readers
share when faced with the disintegration of fragile epistolary manuscripts and
the emotional histories they document.

45  A. J. F. van Laer cited in Paul Mercer and Vicki Weiss, The New York State Capitol and the Great
Fire of 1911 (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2011), 74.
46  Charles T. Gehring cited in Russell Shorto, ‘Three Conversations’, in Explorers, Fortunes and
Love Letters: A Window on New Netherland, ed. Martha Dickinson Shattuck (Albany, NY: New
Netherlands Institute & Mount Ida Press, 2009), 4–5.
47 John Mooney, ‘State Archivist Lives in Past During Days of Tedious Translating of Dutch
Letters: A. J. F. Van Lear [sic] Works on Damaged Van Rensselaer Manuscripts’, Albany Evening News
(1932), repr. in Mercer and Weiss, New York State Capitol, 72.

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Emotional Debris in Early Modern Letters 131

Fig. 7.3. Maria van Rensselaer, to Jan van Wely and Jan Baptist van Rensselaer,
[November 1675?], page 3, Van Rensselaer Manor Papers, Correspondence of Maria van
Rensselaer, 1669–1689 SC7079 box 6, folder 5. The New York State Library, Albany,
New York.

C O N C LU S I O N

A blot appears on the verso of a letter Charles II drafted to his mother in 1649 after
receiving news of the execution of his father, Charles I. This manuscript letter is
held at the Bodleian Library amongst the Clarendon state papers, a collection of
documents Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon collected in his capacity as Secretary
of State to Charles II during the Interregnum, and supplemented by papers people
donated to aid his writing of The History of the Rebellion (1702). In this case the
blot does not obscure the author’s words but the first collector’s. A note in another
hand which reads ‘under the above Blot is written in Lord Clarendon’s Hand “not
sent”’ seems to convey the distress of a later archivist.
The material qualities of manuscript letters provide crucial documents for a
history of emotions, but we must step back from our post-Romantic assumptions
about the truth of emotional discourse as transparently representing a writer’s feel-
ings. We need to read these artefacts in their own discursive and material terms.
Attending to the literary qualities of these letters aids in this endeavour. By reading

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132 Diana G. Barnes

a selection of early modern manuscript letters alongside the Ovidian poetic

epistolary tradition in vogue at the time, I do not mean to make the causal claim
that one directly shaped the other but rather to suggest that the pervasive and
contiguous literary epistolary tradition associated with Ovid’s Heroides provides
useful clues to better understanding how the non-verbal material qualities of a
manuscript letter capture emotional debris of the author, reader, archivist, copyist,
postboy, and publisher.

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