An international team of experts will use X-ray tomography to reveal the contents of thousands of preserved and undelivered letters from the 17th century without opening them. About 2,600 letters written by people from all walks of life were stored in a leather trunk at the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague, Netherlands.
The Hague postmaster Simon de Brienne and his wife Maria Germain held on to the letters when they failed to be delivered because recipients died, moved or refused to accept them in the hopes that someone else would collect them.
Researchers from different universities such as Oxford, Leiden, Yale, Groningen, and MIT will examine the letters through scanning technology to preserve the seals. They will look into the contents and how these letters were folded and sealed. The project, with which 600 of the 2,600 letters are never opened, is called Signed, Sealed, Undelivered.
Nadine Akkerman, the project leader, explained that much can be learned about a letter in the way it was folded.
"We call letterlocking: folding and securing letters so no one could secretly read," said Akkerman.
She also said that the technology which will be used in this project is a revolutionary innovation in research.
The experts believe these letters can give more insight about the life of people who lived in France in the 17th century. Some of the families who sent letters were fleeing from religious prosecution from Louis XIV. These letters revealed the emotional toll that separation from their families brought to them, said researcher David van der Linden.
The trunk of letters contains thousands of correspondents from spies, aristocrats, publishers, merchants, musicians, actors, peasants who were barely literate, and individuals who were highly educated with beautiful penmanship. Some of these letters are written in Spanish, French, Italian, Latin and Dutch.
One of the transcribed letters was an appeal from a woman who wrote to a Jewish merchant living in The Hague. The woman said she was writing on behalf of a mutual friend who was a singer at an opera in The Hague and had left for Paris. The opera singer discovered something that would be disastrous, and so she asked the merchant for money.
"You can divine without difficulty the true cause of her despair. I cannot put it into so many words; what I ought to say to you is so excessive. Content yourself with thinking on it, and returning her to life by procuring her return," the letter said.
The merchant refused to accept the letter so it was marked with "niet hebben." The opera singer's fate was never known.
Daniel Starza Smith from Oxford University said that the opera singer was undoubtedly pregnant with the merchant's child.
Another letter described the political turmoil at the period. A man from Nancy, France warned his brother who was a musician not to travel to Paris because a fellow musician had been enlisted into the army.
Smith said these letters are written by people from different social classes, be it women or men.
"Something about these letters frozen in transit makes you feel like you've caught a moment in history off guard," Smith added.
Below are some of the preserved letters:
