Dear readers,
Whether you are new here or one of my original subscribers, welcome! Thank you for being here.
If you’ve been here a while, you’ll notice a change in the title of this newsletter. What used to be The Only Woman in the Room is now Primary Text. I’ll still be writing about history through a woman-centered lens (can’t help it - it’s in my DNA), but I’m shifting just a bit to focus on the material sources. Truth is, we’ve always been looking at sources together. Now, I’m bringing them front and center.
What will be doing in this little corner of the internet? Primary Text is about the material ways humans used to speak to each other before the text message was invented. But, at its heart, it’s about people.
We all have hopes, dreams, desires, angers, fears, jealousies, things and people that we love or despise. We all face difficult decisions as we navigate our lives. We make choices based on years of preparation or sometimes on something as random as how we felt in the morning as we crawled out of bed. We want to be ourselves, and at the same time we fake it ‘til we make it. We want to be part of the world, and we want to leave something behind to let the world know we were here.
This is true today, and it is true of people who lived 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and 500 years ago.
We’re all just people, after all.
So who were these people, so different from us yet just like us, who lived so long ago? Where can we find them? How do they speak to us across the centuries? What are they telling us?
Searching for those people and uncovering their stories is what we’ll do in Primary Text. Twice a month, we’ll look at the stuff that people left behind that reveals their voices and tells us something about who they were and what they wanted.
Much of the time, that stuff will be letters because, until the invention of the telephone, the computer, and the smartphone, letters were the way that people communicated with each other. Much of what we know about history is based on letters written in one form or another.
But we’ll also look at manuscripts, typescripts, account books, newspapers, and printed books (hopefully marked up with notes!). We’ll consider marginalia, doodles and drawings, paintings and portraits, art and crafts, textiles, bits of clothing, and more.
Almost any artifact can be a primary text – you just have to be open to what it’s trying to tell you, to wonder how each material object fits into a larger puzzle that makes up a life.
There is a trove of fascinating personalities in the archives. They have a lot to say. Let’s listen to them – one scrap of paper at a time.
This is the signature of five-year-old François de Longueville on a letter to his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in over two years. He missed her dreadfully and signed his letter “Françoys votre mignon” — “François your cutie” — which is probably what she called him. It’s a startling letter to find, especially because it’s from the 16th century.
About me
I’m Leah Redmond Chang, an award-winning author and historian. My most recent book is Young Queens: Three Renaissance Women and the Price of Power (2023). You can find out more about my work here.
Each newsletter goes directly to your inbox if you subscribe. I love hearing from you, so please add your voice to the comments!
In the meantime, here are a few of my favorite posts:
