Date/Time
Date(s) - 28 Jan 2013
5:15 PM - 6:30 PM
Location
Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, 2nd floor Van Pelt Library
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join us this Monday, January 28, for the next meeting of the weekly Workshop in the History of Material Texts. We will convene, as usual, at 5:15pm in the Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Room, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevators.
This week, we welcome Robbie Glen and Peter Stallybrass, whose joint talk is entitled “What is a Letter?” They write:
“From the late nineteenth century on, there has been a chorus of complaints about the decline of letter-writing as it lost out first to postcards and, finally, to email. We will try to show that for the great majority of letter-writers, from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, the art of letter-writing has been the art of creating as much blank space as possible so as to write as little as possible.
“What we hope to show is that the great majority of surviving letters written in England between 1540 and 1910 were short, consisting of a single sheet of paper, prefolded to make four pages. A large majority of these letters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were written on only one of the four available pages. At the same time, we will track the systematic reduction in the size of paper for letters from the prefolded folio sheets that were the norm for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the prefolded octavo sheets that were the norm by the 1840s. Although, given the reduction in size of paper, letter-writers increasingly filled more than a single page, the single sheet letter remained the norm until the twentieth century.
“We will also argue that an over-emphasis on ‘men and women of letters’ has radically skewed a more general understanding of the history of letter-writing – and has also led to a series of myths, including the myth that paper was so exorbitant that writers wanted to make use of every available scrap. We argue the opposite: that the art of letter-writing developed as an art of leaving as much blank space as possible, while developing polite strategies to make it seem as if one was using up a significant amount of that space.
“While we will be providing some statistics to support our claims, the seminar will be mainly devoted to looking at an interpreting the details of four specific letters, which will be distributed to the seminar in high resolution facsimiles.”
Robbie Glen is an independent scholar, whose Ph.D. at Penn, completed in 2007, was entitled Lines of Affection: Dorothy Osborne and Women’s Letters in the Seventeenth Century. In it, she focused upon both the mechanics of writing, posting, and receiving letters; on the formal features of the salutation, the subscription and the superscription; and on the methods of folding and sealing. The present project is part of an essay that she and Peter will be submitting to PMLA.
Peter Stallybrass, who has been directing the History of Material Texts workshop at Penn since 1993, spent 2011-12 as the Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow at the Huntington Library, where he focused on the library’s collection of over 60,000 early letters. He is at present working with Roger Chartier on a history of the book from wax tablets to e-books.