Abstract:

Considering highly developed communication mediums of the twenty-first century, it is a peculiar task to go back to the Middle Ages and to witness the importance attached to letter-writing as a cultural, social, and literary activity that unearths the changing dynamics of the age. Not surprisingly, the standards applied to medieval letters were quite different from their modern counterparts because unlike the feeling of intimacy and privacy inherent in the epistolary style, medieval letters were communal pieces intended to be read by more than one person. It is also important to note that, contrary to the general tendency to regard letter-writing as a solitary activity, in the Middle Ages it was a part of the oral tradition since medieval letters were usually dictated to the scribes, and they were read aloud. Moreover, together with the increasing value of the written documents, almost every wealthy family started their own archive in medieval England. Still, only some have been able to reach us from the fifteenth century, and of these the best known are the Paston Letters. Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to analyse the development of fifteenth-century vernacular letters by primarily focusing on the Paston women and to examine the circulation of information in and out of the family members. The variety proposed by these letters mostly stems from the number of their women writers who – as real figures in history – tried to express their anxieties, fears, aspirations and hopes that each one of us may feel familiar with today. In this respect, growing authority and visibility of the female figures in the Paston family underline the early stages of the dissolution of the idealized prescriptions of medieval women who were projected as passive and docile beings. Exchanging the ideal with the real, therefore, the letters of the Paston women illustrate the attempt of medieval women to find a voice and space of their own.

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