Queen Elizabeth I’s French Letters in the National Library of Russia

Roughly fifteen ago, Steven May suggested I look into Queen Elizabeth I’s correspondence in French. He knew the territory had not been entirely explored and its riches not properly listed. While compiling a list of extant letters in French by the queen, in her hand or not, I consulted Harrison’s important anthology of her letters, which contains a substantial number of translations from the French. This is when I first encountered a reference to the Imperial Library in Russia. I was immediately intrigued. I then contacted the library and enquired as to who had consulted the letters and found out Matti Kilpiö from the University of Helsinki had in 1996. I wrote to him and he immediately agreed I could continue researching them, for which I was immensely grateful. He also kindly shared descriptions of the letters by Lana Visharenko (written in April 2002), suggestions for possible autograph letters (the joint work of Visharenko and Matti Kilpiö), in addition to comments deriving from the notes made by Matti Rissanen in the (now) National Library of Russia. The University of Helsinki funded a joint trip to the Library in October 2013, where I met Matti Kilpiö, Matti Rissanen and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka. Matti Kilpiö, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka and Terttu Nevalainen, the Director of Varieng (the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English at the University of English), secured more funding for another research trip in October 2017 and a third one in March 2019, where I had the pleasure to present my work before colleagues and graduate students. Terttu Nevalainen offered to publish a digital bilingual edition of the corpus in the Varieng e-series. Working in the manuscripts room of the National Library of Russia was particularly pleasant and efficient thanks to the help of Natalia Elagina and her impeccable French. Sharp digital pictures (whose costs were covered by the University of Helsinki) were ordered and Margarita Logutova informed me the library granted their open publication. The letters belong to to the library’s formidable collection of early modern French material, and prove how close and complex diplomatic ties were between England and France at the end of the sixteenth century.

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.