Monarchs, courtiers, servants and spies: lives, language and future prospects for historical English correspondence

Mel Evans, University of Leeds

Correspondence is a mainstay of historical English linguistics, and for good reason: it is (relatively speaking) plentiful, socially representative, pragmatically diverse, and reflective of the public, professional and personal experiences and communicative needs of historical authors and writers. Letters capture a moment in time, whilst simultaneously offering a continuous generic thread from some of the earliest English records through to the present day – an insight into the language and lives of monarchs, courtiers, servants and spies.

In this paper, I first acknowledge the tremendous value of previous scholarship on the language of letters, and what it has taught us about the history of English. I then explore what lies ahead for future investigations of historical correspondence, and explain why the modest epistle is still worth getting excited about. I focus on three areas of for potential future work: the opportunities for interdisciplinary methods involving big (meta)data; the value of comparison between linguistic understandings of present-day digital communication and past (non-digital) practices; and the pragmatics of the multimodal page.