""I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer"": Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice...

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Mary Beth Norton

""I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer""

Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column

Mary Beth Norton

$37.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Princeton University Press
01 July 2025

Diaries, letters & journals; Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800; European history; Social & cultural history; Gender studies: women

A fascinating collection of questions and answers

about courtship, marriage, love, and sex

from a seventeenth-century periodical

The Athenian Mercury

a one-page, two-sided periodical published in 1690s London

included the world's first personal advice column. Acclaimed historian and Pulitzer Prizefinalist Mary Beth Norton's ""I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer"" is a remarkable collection of questions and answers drawn from this groundbreaking publication.

In these exchanges, anonymous readers look for help with their most intimate romantic problems

about courting, picking a spouse, getting married, securing or avoiding parental consent, engaging in premarital sex and extramarital affairs, and much more. Spouses ask how to handle contentious marriages and tense relationships with in-laws. Some correspondents seek ways to ease a conscience troubled by romantic and sexual misbehaviour. The lonely wonder how to meet a potential partner

or how to spark a warmer relationship with someone they already have an eye on. And both men and women inquire about how to extract themselves from relationships turned sour. Many of these concerns will be familiar to readers of today's advice columns. But others are delightfully strange and surprising, reflecting forgotten social and romantic customs and using charmingly unfamiliar language in which, for example, 'kissing is a luscious diet', a marriage might provide 'much love and moderate conveniency', and an 'amorous disposition' can lead to trouble.

Delightful and entertaining, ""I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer"" provides a unique, intriguing, and revealing picture of what has

and hasn't

changed over the past three centuries when it comes to love, sex, and relationships.

By: Mary Beth Norton
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780691253992
ISBN 10: 0691253994
Pages: 216
Publication Date: 01 July 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Mary Beth Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emerita of American History at Cornell University. Her books include the Pulitzer Prizefinalist Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power in the Forming of American Society; 1774: The Long Year of Revolution, winner of the George Washington Prize; In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692; and Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women.

Reviews for ""I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer"": Letters on Love and Marriage from the World’s First Personal Advice Column

""[A] colorful sampling of reader inquiries on romance originally printed in the late-17th-century English newssheet the Athenian Mercury. . . . The intriguing exchanges offer a distinctive window into the conservative gender politics of the late Stuart period, in which women’s purity was paramount and marriage was the goal to which all individuals were expected to aspire. This fascinates."" * Publishers Weekly *