European Women's Letter-Writing from the Eleventh to the Twentieth Centuries

This book reveals the importance of personal letters in the history of European women between 1000CE and the advent of the telephone. It explores the changing ways that women used correspondence for self-expression and political mobilisation over this period, enabling them to navigate the myriad gendered restrictions that limited women's engagement in the world. Whether written from the medieval cloister, the renaissance court, the artisan's workshop, or the drawing room, letters crossed geographical and social distance and were mobile in ways that women themselves could not always be.