Brienne Collection: A virtually unfolded letter to Madame Collin, France (c.1690-1720) (UH0218)

Letterlocking: Brienne Postal Archive: A virtually unfolded letter to Madame Collin at the home of Monsieur Harlan, tax collector, France (c.1690-1720)
Modelled after letter DB-1538 in the Brienne Collection, Sound & Vision, with permission.
Model found in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries (MIT), Unlocking History Research Group archive, MC 0760.
This video celebrates the first anniversary of the launch of letterlocking as a field of study. This letter has never been opened. It was sent from France to a Madame Collin at the home of a tax collector, Monsieur Harlan, at La Haye en Touraine. We’ve captured the folding sequence of this letterpacket. Stay tuned for updates which will reveal the contents.
Our findings were the result of a collaboration between 11 researchers working together. Read about our findings in our Nature Communications article, www.nature.com/articles/s4146.... Visit our Dataverse, our open repository for data collected for this project: dataverse.harvard.edu/dataver....
In 1926, a seventeenth-century trunk of letters was given to the Museum voor Communicatie - now Sound & Vision - in The Hague, which was then, as now, the center of government, politics, and trade in The Netherlands. The trunk belonged to two of the most active postmasters of the day, Simon de Brienne and Marie Germain, a couple at the heart of European communication networks. The chest contains an extraordinary archive: 2600 "locked" letters sent from all over Europe to this axis of communication, none of which were ever delivered. In the seventeenth century, the recipient also paid postal and delivery charges. But if the addressee was deceased, absent, or uninterested, no fees could be collected. Postmasters usually destroyed such “dead letters," but the Briennes preserved them, hoping that someone would retrieve the letters - and pay the postage. Hence the nickname for the trunk: “the piggy bank” (“spaarpotje” in Dutch). The trunk freezes a moment in history, allowing us to glimpse the early modern world as it went about its daily business. The letters are uncensored, unedited, and 600 of them even remain unopened. The archive itself has remained virtually untouched by historians. Our international and interdisciplinary team of researchers is undertaking a process of preservation, digitization, transcription, editing, and identification of letterlocking categories and formats that will reveal its secrets for the first time - even, we hope, those of the unopened letters.
The Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered research team comprises Rebekah Ahrendt, Nadine Akkerman, Jana Dambrogio, David van der Linden, and Daniel Starza Smith. Thanks to Koos Havelaar, Ruben Verwaal, and the Unlocking History team. Produced by MIT Video Production. Directed and demonstrated by Jana Dambrogio. Special thanks to MIT Video Production staff, Ayako Letizia, and the late Simone Felton. Funded by the Seaver Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries in support of our project, “Unlocking History.”
Citation information: Authors: Jana Dambrogio, Daniel Starza Smith, and the Unlocking History Research Group. Title: "Brienne Postal Archive: A virtually unfolded letter to Madame Collin at the home of Monsieur Harlan, tax collector, France (c.1690-1720)" Letterlocking Instructional Videos. Unlocking History number 0218/Letterlocking Unique Video number: 218. Date filmed: 30 July 2021 Duration: 1:39. Date posted: 2 March 2022. Video URL: [Insert URL]. Date accessed: [Date].
Copyright 2016-present. Jana Dambrogio, the Unlocking History Research Group, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). All rights reserved. The following copyrighted material is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License creativecommons.org/licenses/.... Contact the MIT Technology Licensing Office for any other licensing inquiries.
To find out more about letterlocking and the Brienne Collection, visit letterlocking.org and follow us on social media @letterlocking.
Follow our collaborators @misswalsingham @NWOHumanities @MITLIbraries @LeidenHum @dcvanderlinden.
TH-cam URL: • Brienne Collection: A ...

[@katieleblanc8918]

I'll look for updates, very interesting find!

[@evelynwong4102]

Interesting.