Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric

An exploration of how everyday Renaissance practices of folding, sending, archiving, and arranging manuscript poetry created lyric intimacy

Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric explores how everyday Renaissance practices of folding, sending, archiving, and arranging manuscript poetry informed how their authors imagined possibilities for nearness and desire. Demonstrating that the processes that shape a poem’s creation, transmission, and reception constitute an integral part of the lyric genre, Dianne Mitchell exposes the intimate work produced by the interaction of poetic form and physical matter in early modern lyric.

Following the busy lives of poems as handmade artifacts, Mitchell tracks three key moments in the material life of Renaissance lyric: its creation in the new domestic site of the closet, its transmission to readers via a postal intermediary, and its long-term storage in the pages of a manuscript book. Wedding the study of the material text and the history of sexuality with close readings of poetry by John Donne, Mary Wroth, Hester Pulter, William Shakespeare, and others, Mitchell shows how form’s entanglement with routine activities such as epistolary correspondence and inventorying household goods shaped the terms by which lyric created closeness across distance, across household spaces, and across time.

Paper Intimacies in the Early Modern Lyric reconceives notions of what lyric poetry is and what it looks like in the early modern era, revealing a lyric intimacy that proves stranger and more expansive than we have presumed.