13 May 2013
by
Heather Wolfe
4 Comments
Learning to write the alphabet is one of the first stages of writing literacy. For early modern English children, this meant first learning to read the letters of the alphabet (printed in black letter) from a hornbook. They then learned to … Continue reading
6 May 2013
by
Sarah Werner
3 Comments
As the commenters on last week’s crocodile guessed, the mystery image showed writing masquerading as print or, to use the more formal term, a pen facsimile (click on any of the images in the post to enlarge them): It’s telling … Continue reading
3 April 2013
by
Erin Blake
2 Comments
World, meet Sem. Sem, meet the World. Looks thrilled, doesn’t he? Well, you’d be a bit jaded, too, if you’d been hanging around the Folger for over 80 years, waiting for someone to finally notice you. It all began February … Continue reading
28 March 2013
by
Heather Wolfe
17 Comments
When we think of filing today, we think of digital files and folders, and manilla folders, hanging files, and filing cabinets. But what did filing look like in early modern England? How did people deal with all their receipts and … Continue reading
1 March 2013
by
Heather Wolfe
7 Comments
This post was originally going to be titled “Murder in the Archives” and was going to be about an account in William Westby’s 1688 diary (Folger MS V.a.469) of the discovery of a dismembered body found scattered on a dung … Continue reading
8 January 2013
by
Heather Wolfe
0 comments
No, it’s not Lady Gaga’s hairline or the frizz on one of those creepy troll dolls.1 Last week’s crocodile mystery is in fact a close up of silk embroidery floss that had been tightly wrapped around a folded letter, with seals … Continue reading
7 December 2012
by
Heather Wolfe
2 Comments
Many Collation readers are already familiar with the Folger’s Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608 (Folger MS V.b.232), and the fabulous Trevilian Great Book of 1616 at the Wormsley Library. Both manuscripts, created by Thomas Trevelyon/Trevilian1 (b. ca. 1548), have been published in … Continue reading
9 November 2012
by
Heather Wolfe
2 Comments
We thought we’d kick off your weekend with an amusing and fascinating hybrid book that is ripe for research. The as-yet unidentified compiler of this late seventeenth-century, ca. 800-leaf volume, a recent acquisition at the Folger, describes it in many … Continue reading
4 October 2012
by
Heather Wolfe
4 Comments
As part of their paleography training, my paleography students always spend a bit of each afternoon working in pairs on transcriptions. It gives them a break from being in the “spotlight” as we go around the room reading manuscripts line … Continue reading
6 September 2012
by
Heather Wolfe
0 comments
Last week’s crocodile mystery concerned the nature of a fragment of paper used to repair a letter from Thomas Cromwell to Nicholas Wotton written in 1539. This mystery is probably not the first, or the last, time that our answers … Continue reading