Have you ever made your own stationery? Or followed a correspondence in the form of a radio play? Letters – once the world’s most important means of communication – are the focus of a student-organised exhibition evening at the Lecture Theatre Centre on 9 February.
The Institute of History invites you to the event, entitled ‘You’ve Got Mail. Letters of the Early Modern Period’, from 7.00 pm to 9.00 pm. It is the result of two project seminars run by the ‘Early Modern History’ department, which, during the current winter semester, have explored the historical letter from various perspectives – as a medium and an important source for early modern ways of life, communication practices, thought and action prior to our modern age.
Both seminars complement one another for the exhibition, enabling visitors to gain insights into the letters and to hear about the people to whom we owe these treasures today. In addition, a professional papermaker will introduce visitors to the traditional art of making writing paper.
In a sense, letters meant the world: they were vessels of connection, written conversations, messengers of the soul or long-awaited signs of life. Their senders captured everyday life, love, faith, hope, business, grief, fear and terror, affection and friendship on paper. However, the seminars were also about getting to know the people and stories behind historical letters and understanding how this form of communication actually worked in the past.
In the Bachelor’s seminar ‘Historical Letter-Writing Practice’, students reconstructed letters and the process of letter-writing: they examined content, form and postal routes, and used quill pens and sealing wax. The results include faithful reconstructions of letters, examples of folding techniques, postal charts, correspondence presented as radio plays, artistic exhibits such as pinboards, and film clips on the process of making sealing wax.
The exhibition invites visitors to look, listen, try things out, empathise – and even to touch: history enthusiasts, for example, can hold Marie Antoinette’s last letter in their hands – as a reconstruction.
In the Master’s seminar ‘Global Microhistory(ies)’, the students examined unique, previously unexplored letters from an early modern collection of privateer records, the so-called London ‘Prize Papers’. They adapted these stories for the exhibition in various formats. The rich variety and broad scope of these stories, compiled by the students through intensive research, give an idea of just how significant the letters once were to their authors.
Visitors learn, for instance, of a man from a village in Hesse who was drawn to America at an early age, a traveller in an African town that never really existed, and merchants from Emden who drank from Chinese teapots that they may well have smuggled into their own country themselves.
The exhibition also welcomes Master’s and doctoral candidates from Uppsala University (Sweden), who are running a research-oriented workshop together with students from Oldenburg.
