{"id":8228,"date":"2017-02-27T23:13:29","date_gmt":"2017-02-27T23:13:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=8228"},"modified":"2017-03-01T11:56:25","modified_gmt":"2017-03-01T11:56:25","slug":"reading-the-folds-students-of-letter-locking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=8228","title":{"rendered":"Reading the folds: students of letter-locking"},"content":{"rendered":"

The fourth Bodleian Libraries Manuscript and Textual Editing Workshops is scheduled to take place this week, and I\u2019m thrilled to announce that the metadata and transcriptions generated during the three previous sessions may all be consulted now in EMLO within the Bodleian Student Editions catalogue<\/a>. As a project, we are delighted also to have been able to bring together in the Weston Library a number of our esteemed\u00a0contributors and colleagues in a fascinating hands-on demonstration of letterlocking. The extraordinary workshop was led by Jana Dambrogio <\/a>(Thomas F. Peterson Conservator for Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s Library in Cambridge, Mass.) and Daniel Starza Smith<\/a> (Lecturer in Early Modern English at KCL), and places were made available to students who had signed up for the Bodleian Student Editions\u2019 manuscript and editing workshops and to a group of second year students from the \u2018Writing in the Early Modern Period, 1550\u20131750\u2019 Further Subject headed by Professor Giora Sternberg, as well as to staff from the\u00a0Bodleian, CofK, and EMLO.<\/p>\n

\"letter_thread_closed_SMALL\"Letterlocking<\/a>, the term coined by this dynamic and eloquent duo, who constitute\u00a0an integral and invaluable part of the Signed, Sealed, & Undelivered<\/a> project team, is the process of folding and securing a letter that was used before mass-produced ready gummed envelopes became de rigueur<\/em> in the nineteenth century. If, when your letter was ready for dispatch, you did not employ a combination of these time-honoured techniques of folding, cutting, tying, stitching, and\/or sealing, what you had written would not have remained private. As Dan explained, sending an unlocked letter four centuries ago would be like pressing the button today on emails without encryption and using accounts with no\u00a0password.<\/p>\n

Jana and Dan\u00a0taught the assembled company how to complete a staggering variety of different folding and securing techniques, none as straightforward a process as you might imagine. In fact, many of the formats were personalized and extremely elaborate. As Jana demonstrated with a selection of the Bodleian\u2019s early modern manuscript letters which were displayed (and re-boxed by their curator, Mike Webb, and removed to a sensible distance from the \u2018wax table\u2019 when participants queued to have their folded letters sealed) the evidence of this essential practice may still be pieced together from such tell-tale signs as the tears found in the paper, the slits, the holes, and the seals. John Donne devised\u00a0with his own unique lock that involved a\u00a0paper hook (yes, said Dan, this turned out to be\u00a0just like Donne: ‘over the top, witty, and kind of sexy’); and Elizabeth of Bohemia was shown to have tied\u00a0her letters with exquisite silk thread (just look at this gorgeous replica which\u00a0was given to me).<\/p>\n

\"Letter_openSMALL\"We were warned beforehand we would never look at a manuscript letter in the same way again, and the emails of thanks that have flooded in over the ensuing days confirmed this:\u00a0\u2018transfixing\u2019; \u2018absolutely bowled over\u2019; \u2018I will indeed see them so differently\u2019; and \u2018I can\u2019t wait to visit the Reading Room again!\u2019 If you wish to experience a little of letterlocking, it’s well worth setting aside time to watch\u00a0Jan and Dan\u2019s videos<\/a>, and\u00a0to recreate yourself some of these complex and beautiful locking types and their formats. Jana and Dan’s work emerges as a clarion call\u00a0for letters \u2014 so often valued by scholars above all for the information contained in their text \u2014 to be considered also as objects.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The fourth Bodleian Libraries Manuscript and Textual Editing Workshops is scheduled to take place this week, and I\u2019m thrilled to announce that the metadata and transcriptions generated during the three previous sessions may all be consulted now in EMLO within the Bodleian Student Editions catalogue. As a project, we are delighted also to have been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8228","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8228","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8228"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8228\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}