Once nearly as ubiquitous as dictionaries and cookbooks are today, letter-writing manuals and their predecessors served to instruct individuals not only on the art of letter composition but also, in effect, on personal conduct. Poster and Mitchell contend that the study of letter-writing theory, which bridges rhetorical theory and grammatical studies, represents an emerging discipline in need of definition. In this volume, they gather the contributions of eleven experts to sketch the contours of epistolary theory and collect the historic and bibliographic materials - from Isocrates to email - that form the basis for its study.

Among the numerous letter-writing manuals which were printed in eighteenth-century Britain, a few were authored by such famous novelists as Samuel Richardson or Daniel Defoe. The present volume is a first-time edition of an autograph manual devised by William Gilpin, commonly known as one of the theoreticians of the picturesque, which he intended either for individual use in the schools he was teaching or for publication. The manual was exclusively devised for boys and men. Although its primary purpose was to provide models of letters on various occasions (at school, in apprenticeship, in debts, in mourning), its content is also partly fictional, since several groups of letters provide short stories about the lives of young soldiers writing home, reformed rakes making a fortune in India or fathers trying to correct their sons’ misdemeanours. The whole tone is highly moral, since the manual was also conceived as a work of edification. As such, it is an excellent counterpart to the correspondence which William Gilpin exchanged with his grandson, William Writes to William: The Correspondence of William Gilpin (1724–1804) and his Grandson William (1789–1811) (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). The manual is presented with an introduction, notes, index and appendix of a list of eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals, focusing on the issues of sources, society and epistolary writing.

The growth of the Atlantic world led to the separation of many families. Sarah Pearsall explores their lives and letters, revealing the sometimes shocking stories of those divided by sea, and argues that it was these transatlantic bonds-much more than the American Revolution-that reshaped contemporary ideals about marriage and the family.

Taking a new approach to the study of cross-cultural trade, this book blends archival research with historical narrative and economic analysis to understand how the Sephardic Jews of Livorno, Tuscany, traded in regions near and far in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Francesca Trivellato tests assumptions about ethnic and religious trading diasporas and networks of exchange and trust. Her extensive research in international archives--including a vast cache of merchants' letters written between 1704 and 1746--reveals a more nuanced view of the business relations between Jews and non-Jews across the Mediterranean, Atlantic Europe, and the Indian Ocean than ever before. The book argues that cross-cultural trade was predicated on and generated familiarity among strangers, but could coexist easily with religious prejudice. It analyzes instances in which business cooperation among coreligionists and between strangers relied on language, customary norms, and social networks more than the progressive rise of state and legal institutions.

How did people learn to write letters in the eighteenth century? Among other books, letter-writing manuals provided a possible solution. Although more than 160 editions can be traced for the eighteenth century, most manuals were largely intended for men. As a consequence, when The Ladies Complete Letter-Writer was released in London in 1763, it was the first manual to be exclusively destined for women in eighteenth-century Britain. Even though it was published anonymously, several elements tend to show that it must have been edited by Edward Kimber. It was reprinted in Dublin in 1763 and in London in 1765 and largely circulated. The reasons for its success may have come from its concern in epistolary rhetoric, its original organisation, or the entertainment provided by examples coming from different sources, among which letters by Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Mary Collier, or the Marquise de Lambert. It also provided women with a variety of subjects which were supposed to be part of their sphere of interest, and others which were not, thus questioning a number of pre-conceived ideas on women and their way of writing with or without propriety. Unedited since 1765, the manual is now presented with introduction, notes and two indices focusing on the issues of sources, society and epistolary writing.

This lively, interdisciplinary book will change the way we read and interpret eighteenth-century letters.