The materiality of letters is slowly beginning to receive the attention it deserves. It has long been understood that letters, besides being important primary sources for historical studies for their contents, also embody societal practices and reflect social relations in the way they were written. These social aspects of letter-writing are also present in their material features. Letters are multimodal, and the information they contain is conveyed by the ink, paper and packet as much as by the text.

This article looks at material aspects of the French letters of Queen Elizabeth I held in the Russian National Library in St Petersburg. The letters consist of three types of document. Each type is described through an example from the manuscripts. The descriptions cover both physical and textual materiality, including the paper used to write the letters, the ways in which the letters were folded and sealed, the use of layout and significant space in the texts, and the use of textual emphasis. Each description ends with a discussion of the afterlife of each letter, as recorded in its materiality.

This article also serves as a guide to reading materiality in letters, particularly from surrogates of letters – this study of materiality has been conducted solely from digital images of the source manuscripts. The final section of the article is a discussion of the limitations of the survey, and the general limitations and possibilities of working from images when access to the source artefacts is unavailable.