About Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was born Lady Mary Pierrepont on May 15, 1689 in London. After her marriage to Edward Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary became well known for her "wit" in the London court and her circle of friends included Alexander Pope, Abbé Antonio Conti, John Gay, and Mary Astell.
Today, she is best known for her letters from Turkey and her work advocating for smallpox vaccination. In 1716 Lady Mary traveled through Europe to Turkey, with her husband, then British Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte. On the trip, Lady Mary traveled extensively, crossing through present-day Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria on the way. As Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O'Quinn state, "her observations serve as one of the most important records of intercultural exchange between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire" (1).
As a women and because of her class position, Lady Mary was able to access female realms in Turkey and provide first hand accounts of her experiences. Her accounts refute previous representation of Turkish women written by European male travel writers that usually depicted the women as overly sexualized and/or oppressed. Her travels brought her into close contact with Ottoman language and poetry, which she studied, but also political and economic issues, especially regarding women.
Although Lady Mary sent some letters to her friends and family while in Turkey, most of her experiences were recorded in journals, and we cannot assume that the letters that appear in the text were actually letters sent, as most of them did not survive (13). The letters that we read today are based off of the manuscript she wrote after returning home based off of those notes. Lady Mary used her notes and previous letters to carefully craft her her entire journey into the epistolary form.
Today, she is best known for her letters from Turkey and her work advocating for smallpox vaccination. In 1716 Lady Mary traveled through Europe to Turkey, with her husband, then British Ambassador to the Ottoman Porte. On the trip, Lady Mary traveled extensively, crossing through present-day Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, The Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria on the way. As Teresa Heffernan and Daniel O'Quinn state, "her observations serve as one of the most important records of intercultural exchange between Christian Europe and the Ottoman Empire" (1).
As a women and because of her class position, Lady Mary was able to access female realms in Turkey and provide first hand accounts of her experiences. Her accounts refute previous representation of Turkish women written by European male travel writers that usually depicted the women as overly sexualized and/or oppressed. Her travels brought her into close contact with Ottoman language and poetry, which she studied, but also political and economic issues, especially regarding women.
Although Lady Mary sent some letters to her friends and family while in Turkey, most of her experiences were recorded in journals, and we cannot assume that the letters that appear in the text were actually letters sent, as most of them did not survive (13). The letters that we read today are based off of the manuscript she wrote after returning home based off of those notes. Lady Mary used her notes and previous letters to carefully craft her her entire journey into the epistolary form.
About The Project
This project was designed to translate Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters into a twenty-first-century experience, as if Lady Mary existed today and was sharing her travel experiences with her friends and family (and the world). We see her carefully crafted manuscript of letters and their circulation as similar to a contemporary social media experience, in particular the travel blog.
Our decision to use both Twitter and the travel simultaneously allowed us to both translate Lady Mary's experience into the immediacy and constant sharing that social today makes possible, while still maintaining the important reflective, filtered aspect of letter writing in the blog posts. While blog posts are often aimed at a general audience, the inclusion of twitter allowed us to connect with the individual recipients of the letters as they were addressed in the text. Both platforms allow for the type of self-authorship we see as central to the texts.
Social media platforms today provide a canvas for self-fashioning, and also fluidity and change, in much the same way that both the epistolary narratives and scribal texts allowed in the eighteenth century. As Cynthia Lowenthal discusses, Lady Mary "carefully selects and tailors specific genres as one means of creating such performance" (32). She explains that:
"In her best letters, there is no suggestion that her prose is intended as an example of unmediated consciousness; the pleasure for a reader, and presumably for Lady Mary herself, can be found in the shape the medium of self performance takes, and the rhetorical strategies and literary conventions fashioned for a particular correspondent, incorporated within a particular emotional context, and proffering an individuated self" (Lowenthal 32).
In her contact with Alexander Pope, Lady Mary heavily discusses politics, marriage laws, and the treatment of women, often comparing and contrasting these topics with English ideology. She also fills her letters with references to classical literature and the arts. However, when writing to her sister or other women, she focuses on Turkish fashion, cultural customs, food, architecture, and beauty. This illustrates that Lady Mary is conscious of her audience and the ramifications of discussing certain topics with certain individuals. Her rhetorical choices within the text continually cast her as both an intellectual and politically conscious figure, as well as a compassionate and culturally aware female.
Similar to the decisions we make daily about how to present ourselves and our experiences on social media platforms, Lady Mary was also conscious of the choices she made in relaying her adventures as a handwritten manuscript of a letter book, only published after her death; not only did she choose which events to discuss and how, but who to address each topic or letter to and how to style herself according to the recipient.
Twitter visualizes in a clear way the interactive experience of letter writing that Lady Mary manipulates; just as she targets some her letters to certain individuals, we can similarly target tweets. The sense of interaction and community that Twitter makes apparent also allows us to visualize the unseen circulation of Lady Mary's manuscript.
Bloggers and other social media users today create an interactive community of users who participate in the creation of texts, posts, and overall experience in similar ways as manuscript circulation in the eighteenth-century. As Heffernan and O'Quinn point out, Lady Mary's manuscript of letter's circulated for almost forty years as a "scribal text" before it was ever published. Lady Mary would send the manuscript out to someone, for example Mary Astell, who would comment, add notes, write poems or letters to the reader, etc, before returning it. This type of "scribal exchange," and the social aspect of the non-published manuscript text has an interesting place in the division between public and private as well as constructions of authorship. As Margaret Ezell points out, the "private," unpublished, manuscript becomes permeated by the public in its circulation and to collapse the notion of "public" into "publication" misrepresents literary production within these circles and ignores the important social function of these texts. These circulating manuscripts, Ezell notes, created a fluid notion of "'public,' 'private,' and 'social' modes of authorship" that continued to influence constructions of authorship beyond the period (44).
This division between public and private becomes even more complicated as Lady Mary's manuscript was also a book of letters and the epistolary form provide another example of a form of writing that is considered private and personal, but is punctuated by the public. As Elizabeth Cook notes, the letter itself carried connotations of private, sincere, and direct communication as well as a "potentially playful and deceptive form" for rhetorical fashioning and "'calm and deliberate performance'" (16). The epistolary novel then becomes a site of "ontological ambiguity" as it blurs fact and fiction as well as public and private (19). While more clearly public than the letter, blogging, specifically travel blogging, seems to provide a similar experience as the letter in the eighteenth century. Whereas a letter from a friend or family member would often be shared amongst a group, the travel blog becomes a way for keeping in touch with family and friends and smaller blogs in particular remain personal in tone and style, even as they are accessible to a public audience.
Our translation of this text into a contemporary voice and not just a contemporary technology, is linked with our understanding of audience for this project. We hope that this site will serve as a tool for readers new to eighteenth-century literature and possibly unfamiliar with the important social function of literary texts, both published and scribal during the period. When we visualize Lady Mary’s travels within a 21st century medium, we’re allowing her experiences to come to life in the way that we would understand traveling today. Our project then might bring light to an experience that has only been read in the past, and not “experienced” interactively the way that Lady Mary's manuscript was.
We also sought to create an interactive, multimedia experience that not only makes the letters accessible but provides images, music, video, etc., to users so that they can become fully immersed in Lady Mary’s world. In this way, we hope that this site can also serve as a resource to more experienced readers who would like more information about Lady Mary's travels and practical examples of what she actually saw, heard, and experienced while in Turkey.
While we often felt that Lady Mary was comparatively progressive in her thinking and writing, particularly concerning women and marriage laws, in wanting to maintain the essence of Lady Mary's letters we found ourselves dealing with some uncomfortable topics. Lady Mary lived in an 18th century society where race and class were prominent issues. Her class status gave her access to many of the people and places she wrote about and as a result her views very often reflect on this elevated social position. If we choose to ignore these "gritty" details, for example Lady Mary's passive discussions of slavery, we're ignoring the reality of English and Turkish 18th century life.
In making this project, we decided to use the spellings of names and places as they appear in the letters. We used (and are indebted to) the Broadview edition of the text. In linking Lady Mary’s references to specific media when the connection was not clear, we relied chiefly on the footnotes in the Broadview text, though often times finding media required a deeper level of research on our part. As it stands, the website currently links to reference pages that are accessible to all users. While we understand that using Wikipedia or similar pages might not be the most scholarly choice, we wanted to choose pages that did not require university affiliation of paid subscription, so that the site might reach the largest audience. When beginning to work with other digital projects and read through blogs we noticed that their were a number of links that we could not access. Whenever possible, we used more academic websites and will continue to upgrade links as our research progresses.
The decision to turn Lady Mary’s project into a social media platform first stemmed from the clear connection we saw between manuscript circulation, letter writing, and social media today (and our love of Twitter). However, in engaging with the letters in such depth, we have gotten close to the text in a way that might not have been practical (or possible) if we were to write a seminar paper about these connections.
Our decision to use both Twitter and the travel simultaneously allowed us to both translate Lady Mary's experience into the immediacy and constant sharing that social today makes possible, while still maintaining the important reflective, filtered aspect of letter writing in the blog posts. While blog posts are often aimed at a general audience, the inclusion of twitter allowed us to connect with the individual recipients of the letters as they were addressed in the text. Both platforms allow for the type of self-authorship we see as central to the texts.
Social media platforms today provide a canvas for self-fashioning, and also fluidity and change, in much the same way that both the epistolary narratives and scribal texts allowed in the eighteenth century. As Cynthia Lowenthal discusses, Lady Mary "carefully selects and tailors specific genres as one means of creating such performance" (32). She explains that:
"In her best letters, there is no suggestion that her prose is intended as an example of unmediated consciousness; the pleasure for a reader, and presumably for Lady Mary herself, can be found in the shape the medium of self performance takes, and the rhetorical strategies and literary conventions fashioned for a particular correspondent, incorporated within a particular emotional context, and proffering an individuated self" (Lowenthal 32).
In her contact with Alexander Pope, Lady Mary heavily discusses politics, marriage laws, and the treatment of women, often comparing and contrasting these topics with English ideology. She also fills her letters with references to classical literature and the arts. However, when writing to her sister or other women, she focuses on Turkish fashion, cultural customs, food, architecture, and beauty. This illustrates that Lady Mary is conscious of her audience and the ramifications of discussing certain topics with certain individuals. Her rhetorical choices within the text continually cast her as both an intellectual and politically conscious figure, as well as a compassionate and culturally aware female.
Similar to the decisions we make daily about how to present ourselves and our experiences on social media platforms, Lady Mary was also conscious of the choices she made in relaying her adventures as a handwritten manuscript of a letter book, only published after her death; not only did she choose which events to discuss and how, but who to address each topic or letter to and how to style herself according to the recipient.
Twitter visualizes in a clear way the interactive experience of letter writing that Lady Mary manipulates; just as she targets some her letters to certain individuals, we can similarly target tweets. The sense of interaction and community that Twitter makes apparent also allows us to visualize the unseen circulation of Lady Mary's manuscript.
Bloggers and other social media users today create an interactive community of users who participate in the creation of texts, posts, and overall experience in similar ways as manuscript circulation in the eighteenth-century. As Heffernan and O'Quinn point out, Lady Mary's manuscript of letter's circulated for almost forty years as a "scribal text" before it was ever published. Lady Mary would send the manuscript out to someone, for example Mary Astell, who would comment, add notes, write poems or letters to the reader, etc, before returning it. This type of "scribal exchange," and the social aspect of the non-published manuscript text has an interesting place in the division between public and private as well as constructions of authorship. As Margaret Ezell points out, the "private," unpublished, manuscript becomes permeated by the public in its circulation and to collapse the notion of "public" into "publication" misrepresents literary production within these circles and ignores the important social function of these texts. These circulating manuscripts, Ezell notes, created a fluid notion of "'public,' 'private,' and 'social' modes of authorship" that continued to influence constructions of authorship beyond the period (44).
This division between public and private becomes even more complicated as Lady Mary's manuscript was also a book of letters and the epistolary form provide another example of a form of writing that is considered private and personal, but is punctuated by the public. As Elizabeth Cook notes, the letter itself carried connotations of private, sincere, and direct communication as well as a "potentially playful and deceptive form" for rhetorical fashioning and "'calm and deliberate performance'" (16). The epistolary novel then becomes a site of "ontological ambiguity" as it blurs fact and fiction as well as public and private (19). While more clearly public than the letter, blogging, specifically travel blogging, seems to provide a similar experience as the letter in the eighteenth century. Whereas a letter from a friend or family member would often be shared amongst a group, the travel blog becomes a way for keeping in touch with family and friends and smaller blogs in particular remain personal in tone and style, even as they are accessible to a public audience.
Our translation of this text into a contemporary voice and not just a contemporary technology, is linked with our understanding of audience for this project. We hope that this site will serve as a tool for readers new to eighteenth-century literature and possibly unfamiliar with the important social function of literary texts, both published and scribal during the period. When we visualize Lady Mary’s travels within a 21st century medium, we’re allowing her experiences to come to life in the way that we would understand traveling today. Our project then might bring light to an experience that has only been read in the past, and not “experienced” interactively the way that Lady Mary's manuscript was.
We also sought to create an interactive, multimedia experience that not only makes the letters accessible but provides images, music, video, etc., to users so that they can become fully immersed in Lady Mary’s world. In this way, we hope that this site can also serve as a resource to more experienced readers who would like more information about Lady Mary's travels and practical examples of what she actually saw, heard, and experienced while in Turkey.
While we often felt that Lady Mary was comparatively progressive in her thinking and writing, particularly concerning women and marriage laws, in wanting to maintain the essence of Lady Mary's letters we found ourselves dealing with some uncomfortable topics. Lady Mary lived in an 18th century society where race and class were prominent issues. Her class status gave her access to many of the people and places she wrote about and as a result her views very often reflect on this elevated social position. If we choose to ignore these "gritty" details, for example Lady Mary's passive discussions of slavery, we're ignoring the reality of English and Turkish 18th century life.
In making this project, we decided to use the spellings of names and places as they appear in the letters. We used (and are indebted to) the Broadview edition of the text. In linking Lady Mary’s references to specific media when the connection was not clear, we relied chiefly on the footnotes in the Broadview text, though often times finding media required a deeper level of research on our part. As it stands, the website currently links to reference pages that are accessible to all users. While we understand that using Wikipedia or similar pages might not be the most scholarly choice, we wanted to choose pages that did not require university affiliation of paid subscription, so that the site might reach the largest audience. When beginning to work with other digital projects and read through blogs we noticed that their were a number of links that we could not access. Whenever possible, we used more academic websites and will continue to upgrade links as our research progresses.
The decision to turn Lady Mary’s project into a social media platform first stemmed from the clear connection we saw between manuscript circulation, letter writing, and social media today (and our love of Twitter). However, in engaging with the letters in such depth, we have gotten close to the text in a way that might not have been practical (or possible) if we were to write a seminar paper about these connections.