As challenging as it is to imagine how an educated cleric or wealthy lay person in the early Middle Ages would have understood a letter (especially one from God), it is even harder to understand why letters would have so captured the imagination of people who might never have produced, sent, or received letters themselves. In Epistolary Acts, Jordan Zweck examines the presentation of letters in early medieval vernacular literature, including hagiography, prose romance, poetry, and sermons on letters from heaven, moving beyond traditional genre study to offer a radically new way of conceptualizing Anglo-Saxon epistolarity. Zweck argues that what makes early medieval English epistolarity unique is the performance of what she calls “epistolary acts,” the moments when authors represent or embed letters within vernacular texts. The book contributes to a growing interest in the intersections between medieval studies and media studies, blending traditional book history and manuscript studies with affect theory, media studies, and archive studies.

This research monograph examines familiar letters in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English to provide a pragmatic reading of the meanings that writers make and readers infer. The first part of the book presents a method of analyzing historical texts. The second part seeks to validate this method through case studies that illuminate how modern pragmatic theory may be applied to distant speech communities in both history and culture in order to reveal how speakers understand one another and how they exploit intended and unintended meanings for their own communicative ends. The analysis demonstrates the application of pragmatic theory (including speech act theory, deixis, politeness, implicature, and relevance theory) to the study of historical, literary and fictional letters from extended correspondences, producing an historically informed, richly situated account of the meanings and interpretations of those letters that a close reading affords. This book will be of interest to scholars of the history of the English language, historical pragmatics, discourse analysis, as well as to social and cultural historians, and literary critics.

Letters - a most traditional and old-fashioned form of discourse - continue to offer special opportunities for writers and readers in the postmodern era. Bower explores the way letters shape the act of writing and writing as act.

Letters from prison testifying to deeply felt ethical principles have a long history, extending from antiquity to the present day. In the early modern era, the rise of printing houses helped turn these letters into a powerful form of political and religious resistance. W. Clark Gilpin’s fascinating book examines how letter writers in England—ranging from archbishops to Quaker women—consolidated the prison letter as a literary form. Drawing from a large collection of printed prison letters written from the reign of Henry VIII to the closing decades of the seventeenth century, Gilpin explores the genre's many facets within evolving contexts of reformation and revolution. The writers of these letters portrayed the prisoner of conscience as a distinct persona and the prison as a place of redemptive suffering where bearing witness had the power to change society. The Letter from Prison features a diverse cast of characters and a literary genre that combines drama and inspiration. It is sure to appeal to those interested in early modern England, prison literature, and cultural forms of resistance.