Undelivered letters shed light on 17th-century society

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/08/undelivered-letters-17th-century-dutch-society?CMP=ema_565a

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...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.

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