Website of the Week (WoW) #163: Bess of Hardwick”s Letters: The Complete Correspondence c.1550-1608
This site, from the Universities of Glasgow and Sheffield, brings together, for the first time, the remarkable letters written to and from Bess of Hardwick. Bess (c.1521/2-1608) is one of Elizabethan England’s most famous figures, renowned for her reputation as an indomitable matriarch yet perhaps best known as the builder of stately homes like Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth House. “The letters allow us to reposition Bess as a complex woman of her times, immersed in the literacy and textual practices of everyday life as she weaves a web of correspondence that stretches from servants, friends and family, to queens and officers of state.”
Bess of Hardwick’s Letters | The complete correspondence, 1550-1608
www.bessofhardwick.org