James Daybell and Andrew Gordon , eds. Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain. Material Texts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 336. $69.95 (cloth).
James Daybell and Andrew Gordon , eds. Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain. Material Texts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. 336. $69.95 (cloth).
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詹姆斯·戴贝尔和安德鲁·戈登编辑。
DOI：
10.1017/jbr.2016.128
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发表时间：
2017
影响因子：
1
通讯作者：
Bannet E
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文献类型：
--
作者：
Bannet E
詹姆斯·戴贝尔（James Daybell）和安德鲁·戈登（Andrew Gordon）在《近代早期英国的通信文化》（Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain）一书中编撰了一本非常有用的书，正是因为这本书关注的是近代早期信件的物质、社会和文化层面，并不像他们所暗示的那样新颖。现代早期的学者们早已发现，手写信件通常是在各种公共和家庭环境中，由除收信人之外的任何人共同撰写和阅读的;书写和口述仍然是紧密联系的;信件形式用于各种法律的、政治的、机构的和商业的，以及个人和文学的目的;信件的发送方法，以及信件传递过程中的延误、拦截或失败，是人们关注的中心问题。学者们还证实，部分文盲（在文书和当地理发师的帮助下）和学者都使用字母;写信是在学校和手册中教授的;尽管这种类型有许多固定的修辞、社会和物质惯例，但作家们仍努力追求自发性;他们诉诸密码和代码;信件只是有选择性地保留下来。这本文集的巨大价值在于它汇集了一流的论文，这些论文总结并建立在戴贝尔本人等学者以前的工作基础上。因此，它为学生寻求介绍早期现代书信写作实践，以及学者寻找有趣的新研究。该系列分为四个部分：“材料实践”，“技术和设计”，“体裁和修辞”和“信件的来世”。手写是一种重要的物质实践，因为早期现代人使用不同的脚本和变体来表示信件的主题，其相对正式或非正式，作者的级别，性别和年龄，以及是否部分或全部写作已委托给秘书或代书人。但是，正如乔纳森吉布森在第一篇文章中所证明的那样，在一个长时间的手稿中识别一个主要的变化比在特定的手稿中定位这个变化更容易，或者确定字母变体在其中传递了什么信息。
With Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain James Daybell and Andrew Gordon have compiled a very useful book precisely because its focus on the material, social, and cultural dimensions of early modern letters is not as new as they suggest. Early modern scholars have long since discovered that manuscript letters were often written collaboratively and read by any number of persons besides their addressees, in a wide range of public and domestic settings; that writing and orality were still closely aligned; that the letter form was used for a variety of legal, political, institutional, and commercial, as well as personal and literary, purposes; and that the method by which a letter was sent, and delays, interceptions or failures in its transmission, were central concerns. Scholars have also established that letters were used by the partly illiterate (with the aid of amanuenses and local barber-readers) as well as by the learned; that letter writing was taught in schools and through manuals; that writers strove for spontaneity despite the genre’s many fixed rhetorical, social and material conventions; that they resorted to ciphers and codes; and that letters were only very selectively preserved. The great value of this collection lies in its bringing together first-rate essays that summarize and build on this previous work by scholars such as Daybell himself. It thus serves students seeking an introduction to early modern letter-writing practices, as well as scholars looking for interesting new research. The collection is organized into four sections:“Material Practices,”“Technologies and Designs,”“Genres and Rhetorics,” and the “Afterlives of Letters.” Handwriting was an important material practice because early moderns used different scripts and variants on them to signal a letter’s subject, its relative formality or informality, its writer’s rank, gender and age, and whether some or all of the writing had been delegated to a secretary or scrivener. But, as Jonathan Gibson demonstrates in the first essay, it can be easier to identify a major change in a script over the longue duree than it is to locate that change in particular manuscripts, or decide what information letter-variants signaled in