MALI: Thousands of undelivered 17th century letters have been found in a leather trunk in the Netherlands, ranging from an account of the desperation of an unwanted pregnancy, correspondence containing religious tokens, letters with business samples, to examples of how spies sent vital information.
What began with a music historian reading a short brief in a 1938 French journal regarding undelivered 17th century letters in The Hague, the Netherlands, has mushroomed into an international collaboration involving experts from the Universities of Oxford, Groningen and Leiden, Yale, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and the Museum voor Communicatie in The Hague.
The museum was given these letters in 1926, in the original trunk belonging to Simon de Brienne and his spouse, Maria Germain, two postmasters in The Hague between 1676 and 1707.
It all started with an unrelated investigation carried out by assistant professor of music at Yale, Rebekah Ahrendt, who in 2012 was tracking a theater group that worked in The Hague at the turn of the 18th century.
