ENG 346: Eighteenth-Century Literature in the Digital Age: Gender, Genre, and Engagement

First, keep an eye out for nouns -- people, places, and things. I underlined those within the letter. Let's take a look.

Jean Le Rond d'Alembert: The recipient of the letter. You should always track the recipient of the letter. Also, a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher who collaborated with Diderot on the Encyclopédie.

Madame Geoffrin: Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin, a French Englightenment figure internationally known for her salons, where the most famous writers and philosophers in France would gather to discuss the issues of the day. 

Paris: Home to Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, Madame Geoffrin, and Montesquieu. A major hub for arts and sciences at the time.

come here: Russia. Catherine was promoting Russian interests, trying to combat European disinterest in Russia.

Monsieur Euler and his sons: Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician, engineer, and scientist. Catherine the Great lured Euler and his family back to Russia with exorbitant financial promises.

my Academy: The Imperial Academy of the Arts. Though opened before her reign, Catherine was a major proponent of the Academy, and worked hard both to lure prominent foreign-born artists and scientists to the Academy, and to send Russian artists to study abroad and bring their knowledge home.

As you can see, doing some quick background research -- utilizing a variety of sources available to you, from Credo Reference on the library's home page to Wikipedia -- can give your letter a lot more context. It can also help suggest tags that will help connect your letters to those of your classmates, painting a wider and more accurate picture of the connections between all these figures throughout the 18th century.

There were a number of things I bolded, because I want to highlight something about how letters at the time were often written.

Montesquieu's principles: Today, Montesquieu is best remembered for his political theories, but his meteorological one -- which stated that climate is a major influence on people and societies, with warm countries producing hot-headed people and cold climates producing stiff, rigid thinkers -- is most relevant to this letter. How do I know? Let's look at the other words I bolded.

The severity of the climate

a brutal climate

freeze

warm up

mild and blissful climate

severe and dull climate

You will often see themes and motifs recur throughout a letter. Here, I noticed that Catherine referred frequently to heat and cold. That, combined with the reference up top to Montesquieu's Principles suggested that she was trying to advocate for and defend Russia, where extremes of cold temperature may have given it a reputation as a rigid place not fit for great thinkers and artists.

While Montesquieu would make an excellent tag for the post, the rest of these words are not things you would use to tag the post. They are, however, crucial to understanding what Catherine was trying to say. When you notice certain words or ideas being repeated over and over in your letter, ask yourself: Why are they doing this? The answer may open you up to new meanings and new avenues of research.

I did not italicize much, and this is less formal than the other three. But why did I italicize the following section?

Is it true that your government does not at all like philosophy? I have heard it said, moreover, that if you wish to seem important in France you must speak very ill of philosophers. Your mild and blissful climate opens up the intelligence. Our severe and dull climate does not allow the understanding to penetrate very far.

I wanted to highlight this because... Catherine is being sarcastic here. I just wanted to say that sarcasm is not a modern invention, nor solely the province of comedians and satirists of the time.

Just like you have to exaggerate certain aspects of your tone in texts and emails, so too did the letter writers of the past. In the Colonial Williamsburg Journal's "The Art of Eighteenth-Century Letter Writing," Andrew Gardner finds a number of influential texts on writing letters at that time. For example, one piece of advice from Samuel Richardson's Familiar Letters is as follows:

You must be obsequious to a degree of slavery. Not one of an audience that is able to hiss, but you must fear...More satisfaction, more ease, and more profit may be got in many other stations, without the mortifying sense of being deemed a vagrant by the laws of your country.

Many of these letters will feature heightened language, intense emotion, sarcasm -- all devices used to make sure their point was made across time and space.

Remember, as you read these letters, that their writers were people not too unlike yourselves. If you think something was sarcastic, or yearning, or jealous -- it may very well be! You will get more out of these letters if you remember that they are both private and public, and that the writers were writing with a purpose. In this letter, Catherine was defending her country from French snobbery and promoting her love of the arts and sciences. It's defensive, funny, and full of little jabs. Read your letters like you might read a text from a friend, at least once, and see if you can glean the sentiment behind the words.