Secrets of 300-year-old leather trunk revealed

Historians will finally take a look at over 2,600 fascinating 17th-century handwritten letters that were enclosed in a 300-year-old linen-lined trunk.

These archaic letters were mailed out but never received between the years 1680 and 1706 in France, Spain, and the Spanish Netherlands.

In 2012, Rebekah Ahrendt, an assistant professor in Yale University’s Department of Music, came across a mention of a trunk that arrived in 1926 at the Museum voor Communicatie in the Hague, Netherlands with its contents never thoroughly examined.

Now, an international team of experts from MIT, Yale University, University of Leiden, University of Groningen, and Oxford University is investigating the letters in a project called "Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered."

The researchers will use a range of innovative techniques like 3-D X-ray microtomography for use on some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, to explore these often complexly folded letters and to read the unopened letters without breaking their seals. Using the latest advances in X-ray technology from the field of dentistry, the team will read the letters for the first time without damaging this unique archive.

Nadine Akkerman, from the University of Leiden, says: “Because early modern ink contained iron, incredibly delicate scanning can detect it on the paper. By scanning each layer of paper in a letter packet, we should be able to piece the letters back like jigsaw puzzles and read them without breaking the seals.”

The seals and the unique ways the letters were folded are crucial to understanding the letters’ dissemination, reception, and use.

The letters themselves contain stories and personal messages.

Here's one described in Yale News:

The letter is addressed to a wealthy merchant in The Hague and reads: "I am writing on behalf of your friend and mine and she realised as soon as she left the opera company in The Hague to go to Paris that she had made a terrible mistake. Now she needs your help to come back to The Hague. I could tell you the true cause of her pain, but I think you can guess."

At the time, recipients were required to pay for their letters. Some would be held with the prospect of a future payment. One appears to be a refused love letter but for others their reasons for rejection are unknown.

The study will also look at the way some of the letters are folded and sealed to make sure nobody could secretly read them.

The letters, most of which were posted in France, were stored by The Hague-based postmaster, Simon de Brienne, and his wife, Maria Germain who held onto letters that were undeliverable because the addressee had moved, died or simply refused to accept them, in the hope that they would eventually be collected.