Cramped, Tired and Painful Hearts

Experiences of Anxiety in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Seafarers’ Wives Letters

Abstract

This article examines a letter corpus from the Prize Papers, sent in 1664 by Dutch seafarers’ wives to their men overseas, to explore what early modern letters can reveal about experiences of anxiety. These letters were sent in a time of crisis: the bubonic plague haunted Dutch port cities and the Second Anglo-Dutch War was looming. To overcome the experience-convention dichotomy of epistemic emotions, this article suggests a different approach to epistolary experiences by conceiving them not merely as internal sensations but as a series of affective practices in which the mindful body dynamically interacts with its environment. By approaching letters as sites where the body, the mind, and the environment intersect, this article reveals how women were turning their anxiety into concrete objects of fear, how they tried to communicate anxious feelings in interaction with their environment, and how they experienced these feelings in their bodies. Moreover, it encourages researchers to take formulaic language seriously when discussing the experiences of historical actors arguing that formulae reflect experienced reality and embodied feelings.