Letters & Printing

Does love have a history? ‘Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America’ examined the salutations and closings used in hundreds of letters sent across the Atlantic by husbands and wives between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, to explore how married couples expressed their feelings for each other. 

I also edited a collection of essays on letters of all sorts, from Emily Dickinson’s poetic missives to the anguished letters sent by German wives to their soldier husbands during World War One.

Other work studied the spread of printing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish America, to assess the impact of the printing press on the spread of revolutionary ideas.