Manuscripts, Secretaries, and Scribes: The Production of Diplomatic Letters at Court

By the end of the sixteenth century, the network of British foreign relations stretched from the European states to the Near East, and the foreign correspondents of Queen Elizabeth I ranged from the princes of the German states to the Sultans of Morocco and of the Ottoman Empire. Copies, drafts and minutes of these epistolary exchanges are preserved in many modern archives, so that anyone wishing to study the surviving evidence of Queen Elizabeth I\u2019s diplomatic exchanges is confronted with a vast and dispersed body of sources