Workshops: Goods

Workshop 14: Parcel Post:
Women's Exchanges of Goods and Letters in Early Modern Europe

Conveners:

• Deanna Shemek, Italian, University of California, Santa Cruz
• Margo Hendricks, English, University of California, Santa Cruz.

For many early modern women, postal networks and parcel delivery systems were a principal source of contact with distant family and loved ones as well as with the wider world of commercial exchange. This workshop addressed the ways different disciplines take up the evidence of this correspondence, and the different kinds of information that may lie embedded in epistolary exchanges, especially when letters are accompanied by material goods. How does the letter itself, as keepsake and document, function as an exchangeable good ? How did women manipulate a gift economy that reinforced friendships and relations of indebtedness by participating in such exchanges ? How did women educate themselves about the world through such correspondence ? How can we understand their alliances through the nature of the objects they exchange ? How is women's patronage and collecting tied to the exchange of goods by messenger only, and how is this different from collecting by men ? Does our shared study of these materials across disciplines require special methodologies or understandings of our work as researchers ? Because letters reside at the boundary between the documentary and the literary and because they were so often accompanied by goods, the workshop's aim was to bring together historians with literary investigators to discuss ways to treat this information.

The session was open to all registrants at the conference, but participants were also invited to send to the primary convener a short statement (1-2 pages) describing their own current work in this area and suggesting methodologies and bibliography they find useful. The conveners collected and circulated this information to all participants who requested it.