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| DATE | 2015-11-10 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout-NYLXS] The importance and moral obligation to archive
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/08/undelivered-letters-17th-century-dutch-society
Undelivered letters shed light on 17th-century society
Thousands of pieces of correspondence, many still unopened, were stored
away by Dutch postmaster and are now being examined by academics
Hague letters
The collection includes letters from aristocrats, spies, merchants,
publishers, actors and musicians. Photograph: Hague Museum for Communication
Maev Kennedy
Sunday 8 November 2015 10.36 EST
Last modified on Sunday 8 November 2015 19.10 EST
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An appeal for help from a desperate woman has been opened and read more
than 300 years after the man it was sent to refused to accept delivery –
not surprisingly, since the wealthy merchant in The Hague must have
suspected it contained the unwelcome news that he was about to become a
father.
The letter is part of an extraordinary trove of thousands of pieces of
correspondence, never delivered, many still unopened and sealed closed,
found packed into a leather trunk and stored away for centuries in the
Netherlands.
The collection includes letters from aristocrats, spies, merchants,
publishers, actors, musicians, barely literate peasants and highly
educated people with beautiful handwriting, and are written in French,
Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Latin.
One of the letters that has been transcribed and translated is from a
woman writing to a Jewish merchant in The Hague on behalf of “a mutual
friend”. The friend was a singer with the Hague opera who had left for
Paris, where she discovered the disastrous truth. She needed money from
the merchant to return.
“You can divine without difficulty the true cause of her despair. I
cannot put it into so many words; what I ought to say to you is so
excessive. Content yourself with thinking on it, and returning her to
life by procuring her return,” it says.
The letter is marked “niet hebben”, indicating that the man refused to
accept it. The fate of the poor singer is unknown. Daniel Starza Smith,
of Oxford University, said the man was undoubtedly the father of the
child – the true cause of the singer’s departure.
The trunk in which the letters were kept
The trunk in which the letters were kept Photograph: Hague Museum for
Communication
The linen-lined leather trunk, covered in official seals, was presented
to a postal museum in The Hague in 1926, but the 2,600 letters it held,
600 of them unopened, are only now being studied by an international
team of academics, including scholars from Leiden, Oxford, MIT and Yale.
Special scanning techniques will be used to examine the contents without
opening the sealed letters or damaging the ingenious variety of ways in
which the pages were folded to so that the letter became its own
envelope. The letters were sent between 1680 and 1706, a time of
constant war and political upheaval in Europe, and were kept by a
married couple, Simon de Brienne and Maria Germain, the postmaster and
mistress in The Hague.
They were a canny business couple who spent a period in England as court
officials to the newly crowned William III before selling their
positions for £1,550 and a barrel of Burgundy and returning home.
At the time the delivery of letters was paid for by the recipient, and
many may have been undeliverable because the recipient had changed
address – one had been forwarded to a series of different addresses, in
vain – or even died. Smith believes that they were kept in the hope that
one day they would be collected and paid for.
‘Something about these letters frozen in transit makes you feel like
you’ve caught a moment in history off guard,” he said. “Many of the
writers and intended recipients of these letters were people who
travelled throughout Europe, such as wandering musicians and religious
exiles. The trunk preserves letters from many social classes, and women
as well as men.
“Most documents that survive from this period record the activities of
elites – aristocrats and their bureaucrats, or rich merchants – so these
letters will tell us new things about an important section of society in
17th-century Europe. These are the kinds of people whose records
frequently don’t survive, so this is a fantastic opportunity to hear new
historical voices.”
A paper dove included with one of the letters
A paper dove included with one of the letters. Photograph: Hague Museum
for Communication
Many of the letters, he said, even preserved the quality of spoken
language of the day, frequently written down without punctuation.
Many of the letters refer to the political turmoil of the time, with
reports of highway robbery, religious discrimination and other perils.
One man wrote from Nancy, in France, in 1702 warning his musician
brother not to attempt to travel via Paris as a fellow musician had been
conscripted into the army there. He added the warning: “If you come
here, do not bring your instrument or anything else.”
Often the anguish was more personal than political. One woman wrote
enclosing a cut-out paper dove holding a flaming heart, bitterly
recalling “the fidelity which you promised me and which I have given
with all my soul”. Whoever the faithless lover was, he never got the letter.
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