During the middle ages, most brides- and grooms-to-be, and their guests, were illiterate, so wedding invitations took the form of a verbal message delivered by the town crier (an especially elastic-lunged individual charged with sharing the news of the day by shouting it). These applied to no one in particular, so it was expected that everyone who heard them was invited.

Wealthier people disdained the use of town criers, and, coincidentally, were often literate. Their wedding invitations took the form of hand-written notices, often produced by hired monks, which would be sealed with the family’s coat of arms and hand-delivered to the potential guests (some modern invitations still preserve the coat of arms tradition).

After the invention of the printing press made newspapers more common, wedding invitations migrated from the spoken word to written text. Many people placed them in newspapers, newsletters, or other commonly-delivered documents. Of course, these didn’t reach everyone - so people would still share the news of the wedding in person after reading about it. Thus the tradition of verbal wedding invitations was retained.

In the 17th century, printers developed metal-plate engraving, which allowed much more richly-detailed wedding invitations to be created at a lower cost. These had a minor liability - they smudged easily - giving rise to the modern tradition of the single sheet of tissue paper over the invitation. Since these invitations took so much effort to create already, it was possible to expend a little more effort to personalize them further. Thus many plate engraved wedding invitations included a special message to each individual guest.

During the 19th century, the predominate printing technology switched to lithography (a chemical printing process) which was even cheaper than plate engraving. During this time, the main obstacle to delivering wedding invitations was the unreliable postal system. To deal with this issue, people began enclosing invitations in two envelopes rather than one, a tradition that has also lasted to this day.

In the late 20th century, more advances in printing technology brought wedding invitations within reach of nearly everyone. The tradition of applying aristocratic etiquette to important ceremonies meant that wedding invitations now reflected the issues bedeviling these invitations centuries earlier - a way of both keeping in touch with tradition and reflecting on the changes wrought since those traditions were created. To this day, wedding invitations are among the most carefully considered, well thought-out correspondence that people send. They are a way to use modern printing and artistic techniques to invite people to participate in a ceremony rife with tradition.

Every so often, you open your mailbox, and there it is: an engraved card, asking for your presence at a wedding. Since the wedding itself is so significant, it’s no surprise that wedding invitations themselves are more carefully crafted than the average correspondence. But wedding invitations have a long history - they weren’t always written on engraved cards, and in fact they weren’t always written at all.

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