Studies in the Cultural History of Letter Writing

This collection of essays shows how letters nimbly traverse the boundaries between the public and the private and examines the many roles of correspondence, from the domestic to the global. Contributors discuss a variety of engrossing subjects: documents of early exploration and diplomacy, including Columbus's texts and Amerigo Vespucci's reports of his experiences in America; the surprisingly large role that letters played in the success of the Jesuit order in the seventeenth century; English letter-writing manuals that provide model letters to be imitated while offering a vivid view into a cross section of lived experience; epistolary travel writings; and letter-writing instruction in nineteenth-century America, among other topics.