As we move from examining the social body to the individual body, we will be
increasingly relying on personal documents such as letters, journals, and diaries
for our information. Using personal sources requires understanding the contexts
in which they were produced, exchanged, and read. In the medieval period, letters
were sent through all sorts of channels – traveling acquaintances who passed them
along to other travelers, merchants going to fairs, people on pilgrimages, and (for
the wealthy and powerful) privately hired messengers. At the beginning of the sixteenth
century, the Taxis (or Tassis) family, who had served as couriers for the pope
and other Italian rulers, was commissioned to set up a communication system in all
the lands under Habsburg rule. This territory stretched from Spain to Bohemia, and
slowly regular postal routes were established, which were open to anyone who paid
the fee, not simply to specifi c business or government clients. The postal service
was a private enterprise, not a branch of the government, and the Taxis company
made contracts with rulers beyond the Habsburg lands as well. Postal systems and
post offi ces were set up in France, England, and Scandinavia in the fi rst half of the
seventeenth century, with mail coaches instead of individual riders handling the
increased volume. Postal maps existed for all of Europe by 1700, showing roads,
bridges, and post offi ces.
The regular delivery of mail is such a normal part of daily life today that we notice
only when it is interrupted, but it was a major innovation in early modern Europe.
People who could write did not have to rely on private contacts or the whims of travelers
to correspond directly with one another, and began to use the post for regular communication.
Though most letters from any era have long since disintegrated, so that it
is diffi cult to arrive at exact fi gures, the volume of written personal communications
increased signifi cantly with the regular postal service. Paper provided letter-writers as
well as printers with a cheap surface, and writing letters became a large part of many
people’s daily activities.
We know that people spent time each day writing letters not only from the letters
themselves, but also from journals and diaries that describe this, along with
their other activities. Personal journals have survived in numbers that steadily increase
throughout the early modern period, mostly from people at the upper end of
the social scale, but quite a few from middle-class individuals, such as the German
merchant Mattheus Miller, and a few from the laboring classes, such as the English
lace-maker’s apprentice Mary Hurll. Explorers such as Columbus, Vespucci, and
Pigafetta wrote open letters and kept journals describing their voyages. Men, and a
few women, in various occupations kept daily records of their professional activities;
the English scientist Robert Boyle (1627–91), for example, kept a diary of his
experiments and observations, while the Dutch midwife Catharina van Schrader
(1656–1746) kept notebooks of every one of the more than 3,000 births she attended
over her long career. Such journals vary from terse and businesslike to rambling
and thoughtful. Protestants, especially Calvinists and Quakers, were encouraged
to engage in spiritual self-refl ection on a regular basis, and in England and other
places where literacy rates were relatively high, many people kept spiritual journals.
Catholics were more likely to discuss spiritual matters orally with their priest, but
in certain cases they, too, were encouraged to write them down. The confessors of
several Spanish holy women (termed beatas ) ordered them to dictate or write about
their devotional practices and mystical visions. The most famous of these, Teresa of
Avila, edited and refi ned her work over many years, turning it into a full spiritual
autobiography.
Some writers combined business, religious, and family matters with introspection
in ways that reveal a great deal about their personal qualities as well as the society in
which they lived. Glickl bas Judah Leib, traditionally known as “Glückel of Hameln”
(1646?–1724), was a Jewish woman born in Hamburg who assisted her husband in his
growing trade in gold, pearls, jewels, and money. When she was in her early forties,
her husband died accidentally, and she continued his business, traveling widely. To
help her get over her sorrow, she also began to write her memoirs, which contain
much about her family and business life, but also stories drawn from history and
tradition through which she sought to understand and explain the events of her life.
“In my great grief and for my heart’s ease,” she wrote, “I begin this book … upon the
death of your good father, in the hope of distracting my soul from the burdens laid
upon it.” Her book would be a long endeavor written over many years, eventually
describing the death of her second husband as well as her fi rst. The text survived in
two family copies to the nineteenth century, when it was published, fi rst in the Yiddish
in which it was written, and then in translation. Glickl’s text provides a detailed
look at the economic and social life of central European Jews as a group, as well as
information about how one seventeenth-century woman responded to a son and a
second husband who disappointed her and to a God who sometimes seemed distant;
in recent translations, her memoirs have served as a source of spiritual inspiration as
well as historical information.
Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) was an English civil servant who worked in several
branches of government. He eventually became the top administrator of the navy, a
member of the House of Commons, and president of the Royal Society. He kept an
extensive diary covering the years 1660 to 1669, including a discussion of the dramatic
political events of those years and of the many theatrical and musical performances
he attended. He also recorded in great detail his rather fumbling sexual encounters
with a number of women – one of which his wife walked in on – coding these in
French, Italian, or Spanish words so that they were even more secret than the shorthand
he used for the rest of the diary. This shorthand made transcription diffi cult,
and the diary was not published until the nineteenth century, when a bowdlerized
version omitting anything even vaguely sexual appeared; the full diary was not published
until the 1970s, though it is now available in several versions on the web. The
diary provides historians of music and drama with information about actors and
audiences, and social historians with information about aspects of daily life, such as
lice in wigs or excrement piling up in streets and cellars. Pepys also turned his talent
for close observation inward, recording his strengths and weaknesses, thoughts and
emotions, in what Claire Tomalin, a recent biographer, has termed his contemplation
of the “unequalled self.”
Both Glickl’s and Pepys’s works are unusual in their personal insights, but they are
also unusual in that they seem to have been written only for private or family reading.
Today we draw a fairly sharp line between a private diary or letter and a published
book of memoirs, but in the early modern period this line was not as clear. Members
of the nobility and the educated elite sent letters to friends or colleagues knowing (and
indeed, often hoping) that these would be copied, circulated in manuscript, and eventually
published. The French noblewoman Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de
Sévigné (1626–96), for example, wrote regularly to her friends and relatives, providing
court news, Parisian gossip, and witty commentary; over 1,100 letters have survived.
She quickly learned that her letters were being copied and read widely, and so crafted
them with this in mind, though she still included her personal feelings. Daily journals,
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