Thousands of pieces of mail, many still unopened, were hoarded by a Dutch postmaster and are now bei

The linen-lined leather trunk, covered in official seals, was presented to a postal museum in The Hague in 1926, but the 2,600 letters it held, 600 of them unopened, are only now being studied by an international team of academics, including scholars from Leiden, Oxford, MIT and Yale.

Special scanning techniques will be used to examine the contents without opening the sealed letters or damaging the ingenious variety of ways in which the pages were folded to so that the letter became its own envelope. The letters were sent between 1680 and 1706, a time of constant war and political upheaval in Europe, and were kept by a married couple, Simon de Brienne and Maria Germain, the postmaster and mistress in The Hague.