If somebody in the 18th century had wanted to send a love letter using SMS text, they would have been doomed to fail ? neither the technology nor the recipient would have been able to handle such a flood of emotional signs. Why is that? The present volume collects contributions from a variety of disciplines dealing with hitherto neglected questions of a cultural history of the love letter. The results are surprising ? the love letter has its own rules, and is far more independent from the development of other forms of written culture than was previously assumed.