Reading and Writing Letters in the Global Renaissance

The development of humanist letter-writing culture has long been considered a distinct trait and hallmark of the “European” Renaissance. Applying a globalizing approach, this issue aims to challenge this paradigm by proposing a scholarly exploration of European and non-European letter-writing practices from the 14th to the 17th century. Based on rich archival, printed, and manuscript evidence, the resulting studies bring to light commensurate contexts of state expansion, imperialism, paper bureaucracy, and new forms of self-expression as well as comparable strategies regarding the establishment, appropriation, and transformation of epistolary corpora. With contributions that range from England to Italy and from the Ottoman Empire to Korea, the issue focuses in particular on how individuals and groups throughout the period used letters to perform individual and collective identities. The contributions included in this issue hence argue for a widening of our understanding of the “Renaissance,” not only for comparative purposes, but also for a more profound study of the meaning of writing and reading at a critical moment of global transformations.