Bonanza of Locked Letters

A trunk of undelivered mail from 1689 - 1706

I introduced Letterlocking in an earlier substack. What I didn’t include was information about the bonanza of unlocked letters found in a postmaster’s trunk at the old Postal Museum (now Sound and Vision) at The Hague. The 17th-century trunk of letters once belonged to postmasters Simon de Brienne and Marie Germain. After their death the trunk went to a Dutch orphanage.¹

2500 letters in the postmaster’s chest

The Brienne Collection consists of over 2,500 letters from 1689 - 1706 stored in the postmasters’ chest. Why were these letters never delivered? Whatever the reason, at the Brienne office these ‘dead letters’ were stored in a chest and never destroyed. Most have been sent to “Early Modern Letters Online” at Oxford for digitization.²

Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered

Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered is a collaborative international project that brings together scientists and humanities scholars whose expertise ranges across history, languages, material studies, conservation, curation, artificial intelligence, imaging, and engineering. It explores a truly unique archive of letters: the unlocked letters at the Brienne Collection held at Sound and Vision The Hague, The Netherlands. 

Nearly 600 of these letters were locked and have never been opened, but in a world-first in 2021, a team of scholars announced they had been able to virtually unfold one letter and read its contents without breaking its seal. Here is the article about infolding in Nature Communications.

Early Modern Letters Online

The Cultures of Knowledge —a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project based at the University of Oxford— uses digital methods to reassemble and interpret the correspondence networks of the early modern period.

Early Modern Letters Online³ is a combined finding aid and editorial interface for basic descriptions of early modern correspondence: a collaboratively populated union catalogue of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century letters.

The unlocked letters from the Brienne Collection are available online. The locked letters, of course, are still being interpreted.⁴

1. In 1926, the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague (now Sound and Vision The Hague) acquired the seventeenth-century trunk of letters. The trunk once belonged to postmaster Simon de Brienne (born Simon de Veillaume) and his wife, postmistress Marie Germain, a couple at the heart of Europe’s early modern communication networks. It contains an extraordinary archive, now known as the Brienne Collection: an estimated 2,600 letters sent to The Hague between 1689 and 1706. None of these letters was ever delivered to their intended recipient and, in fact, 600 of them still remain unopened. The vast majority of the letters originate in France, as Brienne and Germain were jointly responsible for delivering all mail from the French kingdom to The Hague, but the collection also includes a number of letters from regions that fell within their wider remit, in particular Flanders, Brabant, and Geneva. As a result, most letters are in French, although the Brienne Collection contains a small number of letters written in English, Dutch, Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Danish. Although postmasters usually destroyed such ‘dead letters’, the Briennes preserved them, perhaps in the hope that someone would retrieve the letters — and pay the postage. Tellingly, their nickname for the trunk was ‘the piggy bank’

2. Early Modern Letters Online includes an index to the unlocked letters.

3. Early Modern Letters Online and its underlying editorial environment was built by developers from Bodleian Digital Library Systems and Services , a collaboration between the Bodleian Library and the Humanities Division of the University of Oxford.

4. McCook, Kathleen. “Letterlocking,” Ebla to E-Books: The Preservation and Annihilation of Memory (February 4, 2022.)