This project examines how emotional meanings were made, modified and misunderstood in epistolary exchange in early modern England. It considers what The Lisle Letters reveal about their correspondents’ perceptions of self, place and other, and the nature of gender and culture in shaping modes of meaning and expression that could disclose and displace the writer’s intent.
‘Tudormania’, as Tim Martin of The Times has described the recent deluge of media and textual products about the early modern period, has kept a 21st century audience on the emotional edge of its seat. It is arguable that for the modern audience the early modern historical world has been understood, accessed and felt through the imagined emotional landscape and the intentional uses of modern emotional expression to create meanings and connections between the present and the past. The Lisle Letters, too, as a key source for the early modern English period, have been read as easily emotionally accessible to the modern historian. Yet the lived experience of emotional connection and expression has changed over time, and the nature of gender and culture in shaping and codifying that experience has also changed. While emotions in cultural products both contemporary and modern may superficially offer a window to the past, this project invites analysis of both pre- and post-modern understandings of what emotions were, how they were expressed, and how they were understood by writers, readers, amanuenses and interpolators who were at significant literal and figurative distance from each other.
This project examines the relationship between emotions and the expression of emotions through the letters of Lord and Lady Lisle with their agent in London, John Husee, in order to understand how meanings were created and recreated though epistolary exchange. The Letters reveal correspondents’ varied ways of engaging in affective exchange through a range of registers, topics, discourses and strategies. Through recoding emotional outputs, writers and readers in this early modern courtly correspondence could interpret and recast emotional meaning for their correspondents. Husee’s letters, in particular, reveal both a didacticism and supplication that sought to contain and correct emotions and their performativity that reveal more disruptions than elisions. This slipping of understanding, of individuals out of touch, out of temper and out of time with each other forms the basis of an investigation that uses discursive and textual analysis to explore modes of meaning for early modern men and women and how the emotional structures of Henrician England were read, reflected and refracted through disclosing and displacing the writer’s intent through different rhetorical and functional conceits.
Image credit: George Rolle (d.1552) of Stevenstone, Devon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons from Wikimedia Commons