Posts By: Heather Wolfe

Was early modern writing paper expensive?

February 13, 2018 | By Heather Wolfe

Many of us have repeated the assertion that writing paper in early modern England was expensive and scarce, but it has always bothered me. After hearing this fairly regularly in response to two common questions —“Why did people write on the endleaves of printed books?” and “Why are there no ‘Shakespeare manuscripts’?”—I started keeping track of paper prices in account books and bills and receipts to see if this was actually true.… Continue Reading

Imagining a lost set of commonplace books

June 7, 2017 | By Heather Wolfe

As observed by one of our respondents, last week’s Crocodile was a detail from a blank leaf bisected by a vertical line in graphite, with a column of handwritten letters consisting of the Roman alphabet followed by the Greek alphabet. The leaf is from a commonplace book. The letters of the two alphabets might have been a way to prepare the page to receive entries in an organized manner.… Continue Reading

Announcing EMMO’s Beta Launch

January 20, 2017 | By Sarah Powell, Paul Dingman and Heather Wolfe

To kick off the new year at Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO), the EMMO team (Paul Dingman, Mike Poston, Sarah Powell, Caitlin Rizzo & Heather Wolfe, with additional thanks to Rebecca Niles) is thrilled to announce the launch of our beta site. Throughout this test period we will add transcriptions and new features to the site, with a view to making EMMO’s corpus an indispensable resource for early modern scholars in the years to come.… Continue Reading

William Shakespeare, Poet and Gentleman

January 18, 2017 | By Heather Wolfe and Michael Witmore

The Guardian newspaper recently published an article about new manuscript discoveries concerning the life of William Shakespeare. These discoveries, made by Heather Wolfe, are described as a decisive blow to the belief that Shakespeare was a front man for someone else—a smoking gun that disproves the claims for other candidates such as Edward de Vere, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, or Queen Elizabeth.… Continue Reading

Scissors inside books?

December 6, 2016 | By Heather Wolfe

The rusty outline we showed in last week’s Crocodile post is, as one of our responders, Giles Bergel, correctly guessed, from a pair of scissors. It appears in Folger First Folio number 58, in Henry IV, part 1 (pp. 50-51). This First Folio is currently in the Folger Great Hall, along with nineteen other First Folios, for the exhibition First Folio!… Continue Reading

I have sent you a Privy Seal…

October 6, 2016 | By Sarah Powell and Heather Wolfe

The answer to last week’s crocodile mystery? As Jan Kellett correctly pointed out in her comment to the October Crocodile Mystery, the red-orange concentric circles in this image are an “offset mark made by a seal.” The mark was made by the waxy residue and impression from a privy seal which was once enclosed within a letter. Early modern letters often mention things enclosed (another letter, seeds, a lock of hair, a recipe, a poem) but rarely do we see the proof of such an enclosure.… Continue Reading

Shakespeare the player: a new discovery sheds light on two Folger manuscripts

July 22, 2016 | By Heather Wolfe

The reference to a coat of arms belonging to “Shakespeare the Player by Garter” in a manuscript at the Folger, V.a.350, has garnered much attention over the years. Folger MS V.a.350 is currently on loan to the British Library for their exhibition Shakespeare in Ten Acts, and Zoe Wilcox, one of the curators, recently highlighted it in “Shakespeare: Gentleman or Player?,”… Continue Reading

A Pictorial Table of Contents

June 8, 2016 | By Heather Wolfe

Last week’s Crocodile was a jumble of household instruments with numbers next to them. As our first commenter, Katie Will, correctly guessed, the detail was from the table of contents of a type of heraldic manuscript known as an Ordinary. An Ordinary is a collection of heraldic charges—geometric patterns, or depictions of animals, objects, or people—that can appear inside an escutcheon, or heraldic shield.… Continue Reading

Textual variants in Shakespeare’s love letter to Anne Hathaway

February 23, 2016 | By Heather Wolfe

When Shakespeare was young and in love, he wrote a gushing letter to his bride-to-be, enclosing with it a lock of his hair and five verses. Or that’s what an audacious teenager in the 1790s would have us all believe. The supposed love letter is the handiwork of forger William Henry Ireland. For those of you new to him, see Arthur Freeman’s account of his identification of the original Ireland forgeries at Harvard, and the Collation post on William Henry Ireland’s forged Shakespeare library by Arnold Hunt and me.… Continue Reading

Purchases from the Robert S. Pirie Collection, Part 3: the manuscripts

January 19, 2016 | By Heather Wolfe and Elizabeth DeBold

In addition to the printed books and embroidered bindings described in last week’s post, the Folger also acquired 26 early modern manuscripts at the Robert S. Pirie sale at Sotheby’s (New York) in early December 2015. They should be arriving at the Folger soon, and we are eager to accession them, catalog them, and get them into the hands of our readers.… Continue Reading