Women's Epistolary Networks, 1600-1700: Ireland and Beyond

Project Information

WEN

Grant agreement ID: 897531

DOI

10.3030/897531

Project closed

EC signature date 7 May 2020

Start date 28 September 2020

End date 27 September 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 212 933,76

EU contribution

€ 212 933,76

Coordinated by

THE QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY OF BELFAST
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WEN (Women's Epistolary Networks, 1600-1700: Ireland and Beyond)

Reporting period: 2020-09-28 to 2022-09-27

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The Boyle women were members of a large, hugely successful, noble Protestant family with vast lands and powerful connections stretching across Ireland, Britain and Europe. Up to now scholarship has failed to recognize the existence of a large archive of these women’s letters which present a rare female perspective on a period of enormous change and upheaval. The letters provide a mine of information about gendered praxes, cultural trends, and how the experiences of civil war, displacement and the plague impacted on seventeenth-century life, both in Ireland and elsewhere. By retrieving, preserving and studying the Boyle women’s letters, the project addresses how and to what effect the female members in this family used their correspondence network to stay connected across vast distances and to navigate the multiple crises which they encountered during the course of their lives.
At the outside of the project, it was estimated that approximately 350 of the women’s outgoing letters may have survived. However, due to cataloguing practices and the wide dispersal of the letters, no one had previously attempted to locate and record the details of these letters, nor consider their wider implications. The project’s main objective was to find all of the Boyle women’s letters and to prepare them for publication as a scholarly edition with the Irish Manuscripts Commission [IMC]. The edition will ensure that these primary historical sources are preserved and made accessible to a wide readership and to scholars working in the areas of women’s writing, aristocratic families, socio linguistics, and the social history of early modern Ireland and Britain. The edition will thus fill a significant gap in the scholarship for the seventeenth century, but more broadly it will help to transform understandings of the relationship between literature, history and women’s writing.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The impact of Covid-19 meant that access to libraries and archives was severely restricted for at least the first twelve-months of the fellowship, and in some cases for even longer. Arrangements for a placement were also amended, and AMW spent three weeks in June 2021 at the Dublin Diocesan Archives Centre where she learned about cataloguing, conservation, and record protection. This practical grounding in archival practices helped inform AMW’s search strategies which initially were reliant on online catalogues and calendars. Once the women’s letters were located, images were requested from the various repositories so that the work of cataloguing could begin. The main details of each letter were uploaded onto EXCEL spreadsheets which were designed for every repository. Fourteen visits were arranged to national and institutional libraries and to private archives, situated across Ireland and Britain. The purpose of those visits was to carry out physical searches of the manuscript holdings in order to locate, document and photograph all of the Boyle women's extant letters. Return visits were arranged to those repositories with large holdings to facilitate the resolution of transcription queries.
Three hundred and eighty-five letters have been identified and photographed to date, and of that number three-hundred and fifty-four letters have been fully transcribed and annotated. The extant letters can be found in twenty-three different repositories located across Ireland, Britain and America. The letters span three generations and represent twenty-five different female correspondents. A transcription policy had to be devised and established at an early point in the editorial process so that each letter could be treated in a similar manner and a consistent approach adopted in regard to spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, annotation, lay-out, and the use of headnotes and footnotes. The edited letters are arranged in chronological order, and while the publisher [IMC] has a minimal footnote policy, readers will have access to supplementary materials including a glossary of archaic terms, a genealogical tree, a biographical register, and a comprehensive index.
A website was designed and published on 20th of April 2021, https://www.qub.ac.uk/sites/WomensEpistolaryNetworks/. The website showcases examples of the letters which are presented in their transcribed form, accompanied by a photograph of the original manuscript. The letters are introduced and sorted under different thematic categories: Stages of Womanhood; Women and War; Women and Religion; Women, Medicine, and Health; Women and Politics. A link to the website was circulated for inclusion on the host websites at both Chatsworth House and Petworth House, repositories where the majority of the women’s letters are currently located. Conference papers, lectures, and out-reach events, totaling eight in all, have directed potential users to the website while also enabling the dissemination of the latest research findings. The publication of a monograph and two essays, in addition to three forthcoming biographical entries, has created further opportunities to draw attention to the project and the Boyle women’s letters. The organization of a symposium at Queen’s University Belfast on the 10 June 2022 brought together a range of interdisciplinary experts to present papers and exchange ideas about the latest gendered methodologies and practices which are being used to edit early modern women’s letters. Those conference papers have since been written up, reviewed, and submitted for inclusion in a special journal edition, “Editing Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1500-1800”, which is co-edited by AMW and RW on behalf of, Women’s Writing, with publication scheduled for 2024.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The ever-deteriorating condition and the dispersed nature of the Boyle women’s letters underlines the important role of the edition as both an act of preservation and way of protecting continuity of access to these manuscript sources. Accurate transcriptions and the detailed annotation of names and places mentioned in the letters will create, through the edition, a durable record of those often-silent, peripheral figures and remote locales which might otherwise be lost from history. The collation and presentation of the women’s letters into a single, more easily readable format will encourage researchers to use this substantial body of evidence to generate studies into a wide range of topics: female literacy, family dynamics, the female life cycle, the history of emotions, trauma and resilience, health and natural remedies, and early modern perceptions about climate and the landscape. The inclusion of all the Boyle women’s letters in this edition will make a more immediate contribution to the historiography of the period by broadening out the field of women’s manuscript writing and the possibility of studying early modern Britain and Ireland as articulated by a range of different female voices and from numerous gendered perspectives. The edition also establishes a new, multi-woman editorial model, illustrating how a set of gendered methodologies and practices are applied to three hundred and eighty-five letters while also capturing and reflecting those features which are commonly shared, and which distinguish the writing styles and modes of expression of the twenty-five female correspondents.

Screenshot of WEN website