The present article explores how women of power engaged in diplomatic efforts via forms of epistolary privacy by analysing private letters between Elizabeth I and Anna of Saxony in the late 1570s and early 1580s. Through a close examination of how their exchanges moved from very public matters to more personal requests, the authors show how early modern notions of privacy offered strategic communication prompts that could be used effectively by women in political negotiations. The intersection between these zones of privacy with the very public matters being addressed in Elizabeth's and Anna's epistolary exchange makes explicit how noble women could develop their own private politics, becoming active agents of diplomacy even in periods of extreme religious and political turmoil through personal connections within female noble circles.
Approaches to the History of Privacy in Knowledge-Making natália da silva perez, erasmus university rotterdam, netherlands natacha klein käfer, university of copenhagen, denmark W e tend to associate knowledge with the mind, the intellect, or the brain, but much of what we come to know starts with concrete engagements with the world. Experimentation, rehearsal, repetition, habit formation-all of these are intrinsic to getting to know something, and getting to know it well. Because it often involves trial and error, knowledge development is done more comfortably in private, where the knowledge-maker remains unobserved while learning or developing something new. Even when practices of knowledge-making achieve a stage where they require social engagement, there might still be a concern for maintaining a certain level of privacy. Groups create strategies to confine the spreading of their techniques. Masters and apprentices share their knowledge under strict rules of the trade. Cooks conceal key ingredients from the tasters of their delicacies, and basically every grandparent is the know: a journal on the formation of knowledge, volume 7, number 1, spring 2023.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.