Art and Diplomacy: Seventeenth-Century English Decorated Royal Letters to Russia and the Far East

Maija Jansson, Ph.D. (1985), Temple University, FRHS, Director Emerita of the Yale Center for Parliamentary History, currently Visiting Fellow at Yale University. She has published multiple volumes of proceedings in the English parliaments as well as articles on the impeachment of Inigo Jones, ambassadorial gifts, decoration in Whitehall, et cetera.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsIntroductionDocuments and DesignChapter 1. Instruments of PolicyChapter 2. Complexities of Royal LettersChapter 3. Decoration, Format, Art and TextChapter 4. Limners, Printers and EmbellishersEarly StuartsChapter 5. James ILettersChapter 6. Charles ILettersCommonwealth and ProtectorateChapter 7, Note on The InterregnumLater StuartsChapter 8. Charles IILetters Chapter 9. James IILettersConclusionAppendix 1. Notes on the letters printed below from RGADA (transcribed and translated by Paul Bushkovitch)Appendix 2. Brief bibliography of Russian sources (compiled by Paul Bushkovitch)BibliographyIndex

“Maija Jansson’s beautifully illustrated book breathes new life into a field of study traditionally associated with dry and dusty antiquarianism […]. One of the highlights of Jansson’s book is the inclusion of fourteen color reproductions of the most visually exciting of these letters, which again invite us to appreciate royal correspondence of the early modern period as more than mere text: they were material objects and works of art, comprising a rich and varied range of visual semiotics about which, thanks to Jansson, we still have so much to learn.”Rayne Allinson, University of Michigan-Dearborn. In: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Spring 2017), pp. 324-325.“Maija Jansson has uncovered not only a little-known source, but also a neglected culture of official communication, with a long tradition and an enduring set of conventions.”Stephen K. Roberts, in: Parliamentary History, Vol. 36, No. 3 (October 2017), pp. 398-400.