The Collation

Research and Exploration at the Folger

Polyglot Poetics: Transnational Early Modern Literature

February 16, 2018 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Dr. Nigel Smith I am writing a transnational history of early modern European literature. Our inherited history of the different early modern vernacular languages and their literatures was fashioned through the lens of the 19th-century and earlier 20th-century nationalism, and this story is one of how each literature descended from the Greek and Roman classics via the Italian Renaissance.… Continue Reading

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

Announcing a New Folger-NACBS Short-Term Fellowship

February 9, 2018 | By Amanda Herbert

The Folger Institute and the North American Conference on British Studies (NACBS) are delighted to announce a new fellowship for scholars of the British world who are working on topics from the early modern period through to the present day. While the Folger has long been a destination for early modernists, our hope is that its extraordinary eighteenth-, nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century collections will now become more visible to scholars of modern Britain and the British Empire.… Continue Reading

The Shakespeare stamps

February 6, 2018 | By Sarah Hovde

As several philatelically-astute readers quickly identified, the portrait of Shakespeare shown in last week’s Crocodile mystery is from a stamp!     These one shilling stamps were issued annually for a number of years at the turn of the 20th century. Each stamp used the same image of Shakespeare, a depiction loosely adapted from his memorial in the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, printed in a different color each year.… Continue Reading

Books of Offices

January 24, 2018 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Nicholas Popper The Folger has fourteen of an odd, unloved sort of manuscript that I’ve taken to calling “Books of Offices,” which exist in over a hundred versions throughout archives in the US and UK. Typically entitled with variations of “A survaye or Booke of Offices aswell of his Majesty’s Courts of Recorde as of his Majesty’s most noble household,” or “A collection of all the offices of England with their fees and allowance in the King’s Gift,” they differ markedly from the well-known humanist descriptions of English governance written by Thomas Smith and William Harrison.… Continue Reading