Edward Coleman was drawn, hanged, and quartered for treason in December 1678, a victim of the public frenzy around the ‘Popish Plot’.

The Ransom Center’s Pforzheimer Collection includes hundreds of manuscripts from Coleman and his newsletter office, reporting information and court gossip to Richard Bulstrode, a British diplomat in Brussels. Now available online, the letters form a part of the growing world-wide electronic archive.

An examination of one of these letters using paleography practice will reveal how digital archives change the way we read history.

Paul Sullivan served as Associate Director of the Liberal Arts Honors Program at UT Austin, where he taught humanities and English from 2006 to 2017. He studies early modern English drama and humanism.