Print Letters in Seventeenth‐Century England

<p><em>Print Letters in Seventeenth-Century England</em> investigates how and why letters were printed in the interrelated spheres of political contestation religious controversy and news culture—those published as pamphlets as broadsides and in newsbooks in the interests of ideological disputes and as political and religious propaganda. The epistolary texts examined in this book be they fictional satirical collected or authentic were written for or framed to have a specific persuasive purpose typically an ideological or propagandistic one. This volume offers a unique exploration into the crucial interface of manuscript culture and print culture where tremendous transformations occur when for instance at its most basic level a handwritten letter composed by a single individual and meant for another individual alone comes either intentionally or not into the purview of hundreds or even thousands of people. This essential context a solitary exchange transmuted via print into an interaction consumed by many serves to highlight the manner in which letters were exploited as propaganda and operated as vehicles of cultural narrative.</p>