Abstract
Francis Walsingham, in a draft of a letter to Cobham in October 1580, refers to the world in which his secretariat functions as ‘this age, so full of Dark Practices and Cunning Devices’. Recent scholarship on early modern cultures of communication demonstrates that secrecy was deeply embedded in the socio-political infrastructure of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, and this thesis specifically argues that secrecy in the early modern period was understood as an inherently material concept. Although by nature a subject that evades scrutiny, as a subject of study secrecy becomes available for analysis through the material and textual traces left by the use of ‘practices’ and ‘devices’ – the practical methods of security developed in response to concerns about the interception of sensitive communications. By outlining an understanding of the professionalisation of secrecy and the role of the letter as a mode of communication that could be subject to encryption, this thesis seeks to both highlight the sites where it can be analysed and outline a method for doing so.This research puts forward a methodology for assessing early modern secrecy building on a historically contextualised definition of secrecy as holding an inherent materiality, which can be examined through analysis of early modern infrastructure.
Assessing texts about secrecy, the role of the secretary and the archive, and letters constructed using materially secretive means (including letterlocking and cipher encryption), the thesis demonstrates how secrecy in the early modern period was both understood rhetorically as material, and leaves material traces that can be analysed.
The thesis progresses from the conceptual to the practical, especially material, aspects of secrecy. It outlines a comprehensive methodology for assessing secrecy in the epistolary world of Elizabethan England. By combining the multiple modes of analysis, the study puts forward a new way of assessing how secrecy was embedded into the practicalities of everyday life in the secretariat, and Elizabethan culture more broadly. The methodology uses close reading, an understanding of the practicalities of the Elizabethan secretariat as the professionalised mode of secrecy in Elizabethan England, digital tools encompassing data- analysis techniques, and practice-and-research mode of reconstructing material artefacts, which will comprise a method that can be applied by other scholars to future research.
Sitting at the unique juncture of three fields which it will contribute to, this study builds on criticism of early modern literature and texts more broadly, the study of early modern materiality, and theoretical frameworks from the emerging field of secrecy studies, which it applies to early modern material. It also incorporates new techniques of digital analysis to argue for the inclusion of material features in the cataloguing of early modern materials, providing a new mode of understanding the material and immaterial in relation to one another.
Date of Award | 1 Jan 2024 |
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Original language | English |
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Supervisor | Clare Birchall (Supervisor) & Daniel Smith (Supervisor) |