The editors of French Historical Studies seek articles for a special issue on letters and correspondence in the Francophone world to appear in 2021.
Personal and intimate writings (sometimes called “ego documents”) have long stood in the shadow of more “official” historical sources. Traditionally, historians have used letters for biographical purposes and only rarely based social and political histories primarily on epistolary exchanges. Yet recent works in the history of intimacy have not only revealed the richness of writing intimate histories; they have also shown how connected our sense of self and our emotional lives are to wider historical dynamics.
This special issue of French Historical Studies proposes to take stock of and press on with this historiographical renewal. If letters mark the intersection of the personal and the social, of public and private, what does it mean to write to and be read by someone else? What are the...
