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Sidonius is often the only source of information on his addressees. Following Dolveck's stemma codicum of Sidonius' Letters , the present contribution offers a timely reassessment of the manuscript tradition attesting the names of his addressees by using manuscript studies and onomastics as a tool for prosopography. The paper first examines the evolution of onomastics in the Late Antique West and Sidonius' own name. These introductory remarks are closed by some considerations on what is commonly believed to be Sidonius' epitaph and whether it bears the author's name or that of his son Apollinaris. The contribution then analyses some of the most noteworthy case studies of diverging readings of names of addressees in his collection, questioning the prosopographical tradition. The survey shows that the popularity enjoyed by some names—rather than attested variants—in Sidonius' prosopography is a remnant of prior editions and of their influence over the collective knowledge of the author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on an examination of a corpus comprising 244 letters authored by Chinese women residing in Wangxia, a rural district within Guangdong province, to their emigrant family members settled in Arizona, the United States from the 1910s to 1920s, this article posits that the phenomenon of being left-behind constituted a pivotal catalyst for the social and economic empowerment of women within rural contexts, fostering heightened self-awareness and autonomy. These accounts of their personal experiences, emotions, and reflections on gender relations document the awakening initiative and self-empowerment of ordinary women in the first half of the twentieth century. On the one hand, the absence of male authority in the family caused by the exclusive emigration of males out of villages created space and conditions for women’s independence and autonomy; on the other hand, transnational epistolary communications with emigrants empowered these women to control remittances and enabled them to increase their families’ fortunes, which further stimulated their desire for economic independence and education. These women’s letters offer rich historical testimony to the reality that an awareness of gender equality and female empowerment were the result of the Chinese women’s own initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have examined the performance of recalling Arabic letters. Some studies suggest that the low recall performance of Arabic letters may be attributed to the inherent visual complexity of Arabic script, while others highlight poor visual attention abilities among Arabic readers.In this context, the presentstudy focuses on investigating immediate memory and the factors influencing its capacity among young Arabic readers. Immediate memory refers to the number of letters an observer can recall in a free recall task. Three experiments were conducted to examine the effects of exposure time (50, 100, and 200 ms), letter spacing (0.04°, 0.36°, and 1°), and stimulustype (acquired vs. non-acquired). Acquired stimuli consisted of Arabic and Latin letters, whereas non-acquired stimuli included Amazigh letters. It is noteworthy that our participants had no prior exposure to the Amazigh language. The results revealed significant effects of exposure time, letter spacing, and stimulus type on performance in the free recall task. In light of these findings, the study provides a discussion of factors that may account for the low recall performance observed in previous research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on the Old English translation of the Latin Epistola Alexandri Ad Aristotelem (The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle) as it appears in the Nowell Codex. It explores the text's capacities as a prescriptive guide for the work's eleventh-century consumers. A blend of hagiographic and heroic literature devoid of a stated audience, the Nowell Codex defies classification according to content or target audience. By focusing on Alexander's Letter, I test whether the fictional epistle prescribes a particular judgement on its protagonist's conduct for audiences to embrace or shun. Specifically, I examine the letter's possible valuations of sexual conduct as social practice, and examine, albeit secondarily and briefly, resonances among its neighbouring texts: Saint Christopher; Wonders of the East; Beowulf and Judith. Entertaining the collection as an exhortation to chastity, doubling as a call to arms against earthly and spiritual enemies, may reconcile the texts' apparent thematic disparity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the discussion on epistolary elements in Ian McEwan's Atonement, analyzing how letters function as narrative tools and contribute to character development and historical authenticity. Topics include comparison of Atonement to the epistolary novel genre, the role of letters in advancing the plot; and the examination of McEwan's creative intentions in light of his plagiarism controversy.

Digital technologies offer a quick and convenient method of communicating across distance, but there are unique benefits to engaging in forms of delayed communication. Long-distance letter writing in the early nineteenth century was often a slow business, and one that Romantic poet, John Keats, capitalised on. In particular, the letter provided Keats with a means of managing the reality of his circumstances when he was faced with inexorable loss and tragedy. In the period of time leading up to the death of his brother, Tom, in 1818, Keats exploited the specific cultures and forms of letter writing to generate a unique consolation for himself and his family members; as he confronted the reality of his own death two years later, the letter played a similarly crucial role in managing his feelings of loss and grief. Letter writing, during these difficult periods, presented Keats with a unique dichotomy: the letter kept him grounded in the cruel reality of his situation while often functioning as a singularly effective means of managing it. How the specific cultures of letter writing and disease intersect, and how Keats's imaginative epistolary narratives coalesce with the increasingly urgent facts of consumption and death, will be examined here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Battista Guarini’s letters had a great fortune in print between the Nineties of the Sixteenth and the first decade of the Seventeenth century. Then comes a period of oblivion, ending in the Thirties of the Eighteenth century, when the letters were included into the draft edition of all Guarini’s Works, made by the printer Giovanni Alberto Tumermani. Although the three volumes of letters (edited by Apostolo Zeno in cooperation with Lodovico Antonio Muratori) were never published, the contribution of the studies made in preparation for printing is still relevant today. Specifically, Zeno found and transcribed letters, whose originals are lost; moreover, he copied twice the annotations that Giovan Niccolò Panizzari, a Guarini’s friend, had written at the first edition of the printed letters (Venezia, Ciotti, 1593). These annotations provide important information about the transition from letter-document to letter-work and about the author will. In this article I want to reconstruct the authorial intervention in Ciotti’s first edition and provide the Panizzari’s annotations scholar edition.

The article describes the predominant type of dysgraphia in primary-school students that live and study in a bicultural and bilingual environment of the Republic of Tuva, Russia. The research revealed the effect of social factors on the development of written expression as a manifestation of a higher mental function, i.e., speech. Domestic social psychology pays little scientific attention to speech formation in the conditions of natural bilingualism, which gives relevance and novelty to this neuropsychological research. Its objective was to identify the leading type of dysgraphia in primary-school children and subject it to quantitative and qualitative analyses. The author counted dysgraphic errors in a text written by primary-school students and used the neuropsychological approach to classify them. Acoustic-kinesthetic (phonemic) dysgraphia proved to be the most frequent type of dysgraphia. It was caused by Tuvan pronunciation and spelling peculiarities, which proved that the bilingual Tuvan-Russian environment affects written speech of primary-school students.

The essay provides news and publishes the text of a short handwritten letter (unknown until today) by Marcel Proust addressed to a «chère Madame». The letter, purchased by Bononi and hung under glass on one of the walls of his library, forms a sort of diptych with a pencil portrait of the great French writer very similar to the famous one painted in 1892 by Jacques-Émile Blanche.

The paper deals with the commentary on N.V. Gogol’s letter dated October 2, 1833, to his friend at the Nizhyn Gymnasium of Higher Sciences V.V. Tarnovsky. This letter, which has not yet been commented on with sufficient completeness and accuracy, discusses the mutual friends of Gogol and Tarnovsky, their former classmates living in the capital (A.S. Danilevsky, N.Y. Prokopovich, V.Ya. Prokopovich, N.V. Kukolnik, P.G. Redkin, V.I. Lyubich-Romanovich, etc.), as well as a circle of people close to them, with whom Gogol maintained contact. The letter’s biographical, historical, cultural, and literary context helps to compile a comprehensive academic commentary on it, using archival data and materials from printed sources on the history of the first third of the 19th century. That allows us to understand better Gogol’s interests, activities, and environment in the early 1830s. A study of the realities contained in the letter convinces us that Gogol, despite his acquired literary fame and acquaintances in the literary world, valued his relationships with his fellow countrymen and classmates, who still played a big role in his life and were keenly interested in how their destinies turn out.

The article analyzes the letters of St. Feofan 1881‒1883, addressed to N. I. Kugusheva and her daughters Alexandra and Anastasia, and undated letters adjacent to them. The research considers numerous examples of absolute and relative dating established as a result of cross-analysis of letters to different addressees. If more precise information is not available, we establish extreme chronological limits, no earlier and no later than the dating of the letter. The indications are historical events, circumstances of the biography of correspondents, mentions of famous persons as living or dead, and correlation with other letters. Events that are important for the family become milestones and do not allow dating letters earlier or later than the date they indicate, namely the death of daughter Maria, the wedding of daughter Alexandra, the appearance of a newborn granddaughter in the house, etc. These crucial landmarks, identified during the research, help form a reliable chronological outline in which, according to logic, undated letters are located.

The article studies the personal experience and meaning of nationalism for Finnish mid‐nineteenth‐century national protagonists from the gender perspective. Using the concept of personal nationalism and the group biographical approach, the article analyses experiential and narrative self‐construction in the correspondence exchanged between members of the key family of the contemporary Finnish national circles, the Tengströms. I argue that nationalism had a deep personal, even existential, meaning for these people. However, there were differences in the ways men and women could tap into nationalism as a resource of self‐construction and in the ways they could embody and express their personal nationalism. The national meanings were, in the end, somehow branded as masculine. Men tied the national cause intensively and explicitly to their entire existence, for instance, through emotional friendships and nationalised careers. Women had to use detours, like constructing proper national womanhood through countertypes and mediating their national engagement through men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article represents the transcript of a 2022 witness seminar on the theme of members of the British public writing to politicians. Collectively, the witnesses have experience of this issue dating from the early 1970s through to the present day. Angie Williams shares her experience of handling correspondence for Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn as leaders of the Labour Party. Lord Kinnock (Neil Kinnock) describes what it was like to receive correspondence both as an MP and as Labour Party leader. David Beckingham relates his experience working in the Number 10 Political Office under Theresa May and Boris Johnson. Lord Parkinson (Stephen Parkinson) also gives a perspective on May, for whom he worked both at the Home Office and in Downing Street. Camilla Jequier explains her role dealing with correspondence for two Conservative MPs. The issues explored include attempts to use correspondence to measure public opinion, the shift from letters to email, gifts enclosed with letters, correspondents with mental health issues, death threats, and the emotional dimensions of correspondence. The witnesses had similar or overlapping experiences. There was agreement that correspondence is often misdirected or phrased in ways that are unlikely to be productive. This may point to a failure of citizenship education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Tiempos Modernos is the property of Tiempos Modernos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article explores the depiction of letters, epigraphs, and other texts in Iamblichus’ fragmentary Babyloniaka, primarily preserved by the ninth-century writer Photius in his Bibliotheca, and argues that they act as evidence for the novel’s own cultural and literary positioning. These texts, while superficially unconventional in their form and mode of transmission, in practice reiterate traditional anxieties about written texts found throughout Greek literary history. As such, this paper argues that these embedded texts act as mirrors to the novel’s own framing as a self-proclaimed Babylonian fiction constructed through imperial Greek linguistic and literary models. By considering the hitherto neglected depictions of letters and other texts within Photius’ summary of the Babyloniaka, this approach sheds new light on the literary allusivity and cultural framing of the now-lost novel and its later reception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores Fu Lei's Family Letters, 1954–1966 (1981) as an accidental then aborted künstlerroman for the newly established People's Republic of China. It suggests that Fu's private epistolary transformation of the bildungsroman is an important undercurrent of Chinese socialist literature and a telling participation in the utopian historical-aesthetic project of socialist subject formation. Reading the Family Letters as a coincidental socialist bildungsroman allows us to see Fu's "heart and mind's journey" in the early decades of the People's Republic, challenging the dichotomous framework with which the relationship between the Chinese state and its intellectuals is often understood. More importantly, it allows insights into Fu's vision of the artistic bildung and its implication for a New China. Through Fu's narrative preoccupation with Jean-Christophe, and in contrast to the officially orchestrated New Folk Songs movement (1958), this understanding of the correspondence as a Romantic bildungsroman with two protagonists probes the question of the possibilities of a socialist developmental narrative, of agency and participation in the emergence of new subjectivity, and of the role of the artist in New China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the experiences of Jewish right-wing underground members who were imprisoned in detention camps in Eritrea, Sudan, and Kenya during the British Mandate rule over Palestine from October 1944 to July 1948. These 459 detainees endured harsh conditions and isolation, after being exiled without trial and denied the ability to appeal to a court. Their primary means of communication with the outside world was by correspondence. An extensive collection of letters penned by these detainees to their loved ones and to national and international institutions is housed in Israeli archives, particularly within the Jabotinsky Institute. Additionally, original newspapers and a comprehensive book compiled during their time in the camp are among the preserved materials. Remarkably, these ego documents have seen limited use in academic research. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive depiction of the isolated microcosm of culture, education, struggle, and resilience cultivated by these young Jewish men despite their uncertain condition and lack of control over their fate. This analysis relies on letters composed in real-time, subject to military censorship as well as self-restraint, to avoid causing distress to their families. These letters constitute a valuable historical resource that sheds light on a lesser-known case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nuova Rivista Storica is the property of Societa Editrice Dante Alighieri s.r.l. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 871–2 two letters were dispatched in the name of the West Frankish king Charles the Bald to Pope Hadrian II. These letters have long been of interest to historians for their rigorous defence of royal sovereignty in the face of an increasingly intrusive papacy, and their authorship has often been ascribed to Charles's prolific archbishop, Hincmar of Rheims. This article argues that these letters should be read from a different perspective, prioritising the tone taken by the author of the letters. By exploring the author's ideas about honourable forms of address and the avoidance of harsh censure, I argue that these letters show the guiding hand of Charles himself, revealing a view of royal power not only as an institution, but also as a status that necessarily had to be approached with deference and praise. Close examination of Charles's argument suggests that his identification with contemporary panegyrics, above all those by his Irish praise poet Sedulius Scottus, informed his perspective on the dignity of his royal office and led him to respond aversely to papal criticism that threatened to undermine his legitimacy as ruler. Hadrian's transition from harsh rebuke to sycophancy across his letters suggests that Charles's diplomatic successes with the papacy were also accompanied by papal recognition of his exalted, quasi-imperial status through laudatory address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the enduring significance of poet, William Wordsworth's 1790 journey across the Alps, particularly in relation to his correspondence with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth. It explores how their letters to each other and their subsequent writings reflect their intimate collaboration and mutual influence, shedding light on the creative process behind William's poetry, especially "Descriptive Sketches" and "The Prelude."

Copyright of Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on the establishment and evolution of the Hermann Hesse Editionsarchiv, detailing its inception and growth over several decades. Topics include the archive's role in preserving and expanding Hesse's literary legacy, its pivotal contributions to understanding Hesse's political perspectives, and its extensive collection of unpublished writings and correspondence, which have enriched scholarly understanding and public appreciation of the author's work.

En este trabajo se ha pretendido realizar un estudio de las mujeres intelectuales españolas que mantuvieron correspondencia con Rubén Darío, ya sea como remitentes o como destinatarias, y cuya relación ha sido analizada a raíz de las cartas que se conservan en el Archivo Rubén Darío de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid. A través de esta reciprocidad epistolar se observa la rica vida social y literaria en la que se movieron estas mujeres eruditas y los lazos de amistad y vínculos intelectuales que mantuvieron con el máximo representante del movimiento modernista en lengua española. Especial interés tuvo para estas mujeres doctas el deseo de conocer de cerca al poeta nicaragüense, compartir con él los círculos literarios en los que se movían, así como ver publicado alguno de sus escritos en las revistas Mundial Magazine y Elegancias, de las que Rubén Darío era el director literario. Abstract In this work we have attempted to carry out a study of the Spanish intellectual women who corresponded with Rubén Darío, either as senders or as addressees, and whose relationship has been analyzed based on the letters preserved in the Rubén Darío Archive of the Complutense University of Madrid. Through this epistolary reciprocity, we can observe the rich social and literary life in which these erudite women moved and the friendship and intellectual bond that they maintained with the highest representative of the modernist movement in the Spanish language. Of particular interest to these learned women was the desire to get to know the Nicaraguan poet up close, to share with him the literary circles in which they moved, as well as to see some of their writings published in the magazines Mundial Magazine and Elegancias, of which Rubén Darío was the literary director. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.12795809

The article aims to find out how the story of Dasha, described by Shmelev in the letters to O.A. Bredius-Subbotina in 1941–1942, was reflected in the writer’s work. The letters, the memoirs, and the historical materials allow us to reconstruct the biography of D.V. Zamotina. D.V. Zamotina’s letter to I.S. Shmelev dated May 1, 1937, from the archive of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn House of Russian Abroad Archive is introduced into scientific circulation. The article proves that the Zamotin family significantly contributed to the preservation and transfer to the national archives of the writer’s prerevolutionary heritage. The story of Dasha is comparable with his stories “The Grapes” (1913), “In the Manor” (1914), novels The Story of a Love (1927), and The Heavenly Paths (1937, 1948). The article notes the similarity of the portraits of the heroines, their social status, the individual details, the scenes, the images, and the motifs. The article takes into account modern literary works, which analyze the considered images and the motifs. The results show that Dasha Zamotina is the embodiment of the “Shmelev’s girl.” In conclusion, the article considers the work of the writer as a whole, highlights his favorite characters, and notes the similarity of pre-revolutionary and emigrant pathos — “organic democracy”; for this reason, Dasha can be called the Muse of Shmelev with a capital letter.

The mail transfer in Serbia can be tracked from Menzulana's post stations, Tatarian courier service, and appointment of the chief supervisor to Constitution of postal administration which enabled a gradual transformation of this state institution into the system similar to current one. This transformation followed the Serbian authorities' struggle for national independence which Prince Miloš Obrenović endeavoured to establish trying to improve a postal network at the same time, so that a postal network with suitable staff could satisfy the needs of all citizens of Serbia.

For studying the Great Patriotic War history, the testimonies of direct participants and eyewitnesses of the events of the war years are of great importance. The purpose of the article is to give a comprehensive description of documents of personal origin (memoirs, diaries, letters) reflecting the participation of Siberians (soldiers and home front workers) in the Great Patriotic War. The article designates these documents by the generalizing term “ego-documents”, generally accepted in the social sciences and humanities. The authors make a brief review of domestic and foreign publications on the introduction into scientific circulation and the evolution of the concept of “ego-document”. To solve the research problems, they identified a documentary stream (DS) of publications containing ego-documents. It was based on the materials of the bibliographic database (DB) “Scientific Siberica: nature, history, economics, culture, science of Siberia and the Far East” (“Nauchnaya Sibirika: priroda, istoriya, ekonomika, kultura, nauka Sibiri i Dalnego Vostoka”), generated by the SPSTL SB RAS, supplemented by data of publications from other authoritative sources. The article presents a bibliometric analysis of the DS content: the type-species composition of publications, types of ego-documents, the dynamics of publications in a time perspective (1945–2022), geographical data on the places of conscription, the residence of ego-documents authors, topics of publications, etc. An overview of some number of ego-documents publications from DS is given. Research results: a steady dynamics of quantitative increase in publications of ego-documents has been revealed since the 90s. XX century; the diversity of the type-species structure of DS was determined; the geographical connection of DS publications with the territories of 20 regions of Siberia and the Far East is shown; the main topics of ego-documents have been identified with a brief description of individual publications.

الملخص: يتناول البحث أسلوب المراسلة في نقوش الزبور بهدف تحليل بنية الرسالة وأساليبها النحوية والدلالية, والكشف عن مضمونها الاجتماعي والاقتصادي وقيمتها الحضارية في تاريخ اليمن القديم, وتعد الرسائل من أهم النقوش التي دُوِّنت بخط الزبور, وتكمن أهميتها في تناولها لعدد من الأمور المتعلقة بحياة الإنسان اليمني القديم الاجتماعية والاقتصادية والدينية، وكان لها أسلوب خاص في الكتابة والتركيبة اللغوية؛ إذ احتوت على أساليب عدة في العنوان والتحية والمضمون والخاتمة, علاوة على احتوائها الكثير من الظواهر والدلالات النحوية لاسيما استخدامها لضمائر المتكلم والمخاطب, وأفعال الأمر والمضارع التي تخلو منها نقوش المسند, وقد بينت الرسائل مدى الترابط الاجتماعي في اليمن القديم؛ وذلك من خلال التراسل بين جميع أفراد المجتمع سواء كان بين أفراد وجماعات أم بين جماعات وأفراد أم فيما بين القبائل أيضًا, كما بينت الرسائل الدور الكبير للمرأة في المراسلة والتراسل وتلقي الرسائل ومشاركتها للرجل في كافة الجوانب لاسيما الاجتماعية والاقتصادية منها, وهذا دليل على مدى التطور الحضاري والاجتماعي الذي وصل إليه الإنسان اليمني القديم. Abstract: This research deals with the style of correspondence in the Zabur inscriptions. It aims to analyze the structure of the letter, its syntactic and semantic approaches, and reveal its social and economic content and its cultural value in the ancient history of Yemen. The Letters are among the most important texts that were recorded in the Zabur script. Their importance lies in their dealing with many social, economic and religious aspects of the ancient Yemeni people's lives. It had a special writing style and linguistic structure. It contained several patterns of the title, salutation, content, and conclusion. It also contained a lot of grammatical and semantic phenomena, particularly the use of first- and second- person pronouns, imperative verbs, and the present tense, which are not found in Al-Musnad texts. The letters explained the extent of the social correlations in ancient Yemen through correspondence between all of the society members, whether individuals and groups, groups and individuals, or also between the tribes. The letters showed the great role woman play in correspondence, whether in sending and receiving letters or participating in all social and economic aspects of life alongside man. This is evidence of the great extent of civilization and social development of the ancient Yemeni people.

The article explores how humans make sense of and perceive war as a crisis, emphasizing the values attributed to it. It focuses on learning in the face of war, which creates internal imbalance but also offers improvement opportunities in various dimensions. The qualitative research is based on the technique of epistolary narrative analysis of 49 letters written by Poles to unknown Ukrainians. The findings (generated code tree) reveal three dimensions of war experiences: the educational lesson in patriotism (the war as a lesson for the people who learn through their own and others’ experiences); the war as a trial prompting support and resistance; an emotional experience marked by shock and chaos. The analysis concludes that the absurdity and horrors of 21st-century war have undermined democratic values, and thus calls on the world’s community to seek mechanisms and strategies revitalized after this drastic war. Learning in crisis situations illustrates how flexible and adaptable human nature is, how society can become more united and ready to take action to protect the common good. The study brings about implications for value formation education, community and solidarity building, as well as emotional and psychological insights into the tolls of war, helping to address the issues of war trauma and psychological well-being.

This article offers an intensive—although still not exhaustive—reading of a letter written to the adolescent Lorenzo de' Medici by Braccio Martelli, a member of his brigata. It is a document that focuses on the celebrations accompanying the wedding of Lucrezia Donati, the object of Lorenzo's affections, to Niccolò Ardinghelli, an anti-Medicean living in exile. I examine some of the letter's multiple overlapping topics and contexts, including private sociability (wedding practices, music, dance, dress), the trophy status of Lucrezia, sexual and political tensions, and the ties between the letter writer and his addressee in terms of client/patron and homosocial relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue, we propose the letter as a form with geographic potential. Building on prior work on letters in geography, Black feminism, and Indigenous studies, we draw on a collection of sixteen letters in the section to build a case for letters as time travel, anticolonial epistemology, feminist geographic method, and worldmaking praxis. We bring together letter writers who speak to their ancestors known and unknown, to future generations, to ideas, to activists, to places, and to strangers--and weave them into a messy and generative conversation on the kinds of spaces that letters make between and among us. Our intention is to build on recent work in geography to experiment with what the letter makes possible for us as geographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undoubtedly, the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg brought about a profound paradigm shift, transforming both the late medieval book markets and the general reading culture. However, as with many paradigm shifts, we need to differentiate in this regard more than scholarship has acknowledged so far. First, many medieval narrative motives, topics and themes continued to be rather popular well into the seventeenth century, if not beyond. Second, manuscript culture did not simply disappear. Instead, as this article outlines, in many areas and especially among the upper social classes, luxury items in the form of manuscripts remained critically important. A closer analysis also indicates that many times practical knowledge (fencing, horse training, medicine, etc.) and personal observations were copied down by hand and thus passed on to the specific audiences without the printing press involved. The manuscript did not disappear at all; instead, it assumed a more specialized function in terms of knowledge, autobiographical reflections and social representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"[T]he miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps." The following Herman Melville letters have been snatched from the clenched hands of the miser-merman of Davy Jones. There are undoubtedly many more to be grasped. These letters are to an omnium-gatherum of lawyers, a stock broker, students, editors, a publisher, Secretaries of State, and autograph hunters. The letters, long and short, fill lacunae in Melville's life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Chile started the digital project Epistolario de la memoria, which aggregates letters addressed to victims of the civic-military dictatorship (1973–1990). The first epistolary consisted of 34 letters from grandchildren to their disappeared or executed grandparents, which constitutes the corpus of this article. The letters were analysed to examine the grandchildren’s aims, commonalities, and postmemory discourse. The results show that for these young people, the victims are a constant and desired presence in their everyday life. Grandparents are memorialised in sobremesas (family conversations), through photographs and artefacts, as well as through embodied forms of memory such as names passed to descendants and inheritance of personality traits. In their letters, these grandchildren highlight their inherited memories, manifest their commitment to memorialisation and justice, express the pain of absence, and reflect on the presence of the past in the present. This study informs the field of Trauma and Memory Studies and Discourse Studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Gender-affirming hormones (hormones)—the use of sex hormones to induce desired secondary sex characteristics in transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) individuals—are vital health care for many TGNB people. Some hormone providers require a letter from a mental health provider before hormone initiation. We explore the perspectives of TGNB individuals regarding the impact of the letter requirement on their experience of care. Methods: We conducted semistructured interviews with 21 TGNB individuals who have sought or are receiving hormones. We purposively sampled respondents who were (n=12) and were not (n=8) required to provide a letter. An Advisory Board of transgender individuals guided the methodology. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and coded both inductively and deductively. Results: We identified three themes related to the letter requirement: (1) Mental health: While participants appreciated the importance of therapy, the letter requirement did not serve this purpose; (2) Trans identity: The process of obtaining a letter created doubt in participants' own transness, along with a resistance to the pathologization and conflation of mental illness with transness; and (3) Care relationships: The letter requirement negatively impacted the patient-provider relationship. Participants felt the need to self-censor or to perform a version of transness they thought the provider expected; this process decreased their trust in care professionals. Conclusion: A letter requirement did not improve mental health and had several negative consequences. Removal of this requirement will improve access to hormones and may paradoxically improve mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses historical sources that testify to Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini's contacts with present Slovenian territory. He already became well acquainted with the area in his role as secretary to Emperor Frederick III, then especially as Bishop of Trieste in 1447-1450, and finally as Pope Pius II, who confirmed the establishment of the Ljubljana diocese in 1463. The research focuses mainly on the period of his episcopacy in Trieste and investigates several new, hitherto unpublished documents (letters, documents) from this period. These shed new lights on his pastoral activity and question some of the long-accepted narratives of Slovenian historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, the authors use an archival collection housed at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Library Special Research Collections to examine how the concept of "the book" changes in light of historical archival practices and present‐day techniques of digitization and computational literary analysis. The Ballitore Collection consists of roughly 2,500 letters, journals, and notes related to the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Irish Quaker community of Ballitore, Ireland. Researchers on the Ballitore Project have applied the computational methods of network analysis and topic modeling to the collection while considering how its history of collection and curation affect our interpretation of the materials. Just as the documents in the Ballitore Collection have been created, collected, edited, disassembled, reassembled, and curated by networks of writers, readers, and librarians over time, so the Ballitore Project has been run by a diverse, collaborative, nonhierarchical research team dedicated to showing how our contemporary concepts of digitization and media transformation can elucidate the nonlinear relationship between print and manuscript in earlier periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the recent sales and catalogs of rare manuscripts and letters, shedding light on fascinating discoveries and peculiarities within these documents. It highlights notable items, such as an unpublished letter from Baudelaire and correspondence from Barbey d'Aurevilly, offering insights into literary history and the quirks of auction cataloging.