Handwriting in Early America

A Media History

Edited by Mark Alan Mattes

SERIES: Studies in Print Culture and the History of the Book

University of Massachusetts Press

As digital communication has become dominant, commentators have declared that handwriting is a thing of the past, a relic of an earlier age. This volume of original essays makes it clear that anxiety around handwriting has existed for centuries and explores writing practices from a variety of interdisciplinary fields, including manuscript studies, Native American studies, media history, African American studies, book history, bibliography, textual studies, and archive theory.

By examining how a culturally diverse set of people grappled with handwriting in their own time and weathered shifting relationships to it, Handwriting in Early America uncovers perspectives that are multiethnic and multiracial, transatlantic and hemispheric, colonial and Indigenous, multilingual and illiterate. Essays describe a future of handwriting as envisioned by practitioners, teachers, and even government officials of this time, revealing the tension between the anxiety of loss and the need to allow for variations going forward.

Contributors include James Berkey, Blake Bronson-Bartlett, John J. Garcia, Christopher Hager, Desirée Henderson, Frank Kelderman, Michelle Levy, Lisa Maruca, Christen Mucher, Alan Niles, Seth Perlow, Carla L. Peterson, Sarah Robbins, Patricia Jane Roylance, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, and Danielle Skeehan.

Reviews

‘Handwriting in Early America treats material practices of manual inscription and makes a strong case for their key role, even during an age of print, in the formation of self and society. . .Readers will learn, accordingly, to take a skeptical view of current doomsaying predictions that handwriting will soon become a thing of the past, thanks to the dominance of digital technologies of communication.’—Deidre Shauna Lynch, Eighteenth-Century Studies

‘Handwriting in Early America takes an open posture toward the digital. As Mattes urges in his introduction to the collection, we must expand our ideas of what counts in our analyses of handwritten manuscripts and their afterlives.’—Kristina Bross, American Literary History

‘Whether thinking critically about what genre a handwritten object embodies, what its material specificities tell us, or how anxieties over the medium have existed in the past, Handwriting in Early America provides digestible examples to spur you. Because, as it turns out, being able to read and understand handwriting isn’t just for 'steampunk fantasies.' It’s a powerful tool for archival and literary studies, and this volume shows just how far scholars can push our thinking when they put it into practice.’—Jayne Ptolemy, SHARP News

‘Mattes suggests that we can come to grips with what writing is by triangulating between inscription, the people inscribing, and the systems of communication in which their inscriptions circulated. The 16 essays in the collection bear out the expansive potentials of this framework, not only by truly taking on the contingency of writing itself but also by revealing how the same kinds of writing can do radically different cultural work.’—Sonja Drimmer, Public Books

‘This is an exciting collection. To see handwriting as a kind of media—and to understand that media form as intersectional—is a major and most welcome shift in how scholars understand the material texts of early America and is crucially important for the field moving forward.’—Megan Walsh, author of The Portrait and the Book: Illustration and Literary Culture in Early America

‘This new collection is a key intervention in literary studies. Its essays vary from the most canonical writers (Bradstreet, Poe, Emerson) to more obscure figures whose texts inform the ways scholars understand writing, textuality, and intermediality.’—Hilary E. Wyss, author of English Letters and Indian Literacies: Reading, Writing, and New England Missionary Schools, 1750–1830