Social Negotiations in Correspondence between Mothers and Daughters in Tudor and Early Stuart England

Abstract

This article examines correspondence between mothers and daughters in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England, as a way of investigating the distinct nature of mother-daughter relationships during this period, and of studying the ways in which such relationships were negotiated through the epistolary medium. Based on approximately 100 letters extant for the period 1530 to 1620, it applies recent innovations in the field of Renaissance letter-writing to the social-cultural history of early modern women and the family. Rhetorical and material reading strategies, it argues, shed important new light on letters as evidence of mother-daughter relationships, and such interpretive methodologies are useful in reading, situating and understanding broader social relationships inscribed within correspondence.