The Collation

Research and Exploration at the Folger

“What manner o’thing is your crocodile?”: March 2017

February 28, 2017 | By The Collation

The mystery this month isn’t about what the text is (these pages are excerpts from a Calvinist Bible in French printed in Geneva in 1588) but rather it’s about the paper. What is going on here? Leave your thoughts and guesses in the comments and we’ll be back next week with more information.… Continue Reading

A New ASECS-Folger Short Term Fellowship

February 23, 2017 | By Amanda Herbert

The Folger Institute is delighted to announce a fellowship in partnership with the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. This $2,500 award will allow its recipient a one-month residency at the Folger Library in Washington, DC. The fellowship is interdisciplinary, and will work to support all areas of scholarly inquiry pertinent to eighteenth-century studies. Established in 1969, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies is an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to the advancement of scholarship in all aspects of the period from the later seventeenth through the early nineteenth century in Europe, its colonies, and across the globe.… Continue Reading

Manuscripts in libraries: catalog versus finding aid

February 21, 2017 | By Erin Blake

When searching for manuscripts at the Folger—or pretty much any special collections library—it helps to know that manuscripts often lead a double life. Many exist simultaneously as part of a library, and as part of an archive, and libraries and archives have different ways of collecting, organizing, and describing material. Libraries contain deliberately purchased items, and these items tend to be arranged in a human-devised order (“artificial arrangement” in Information Science jargon).… Continue Reading

Announcing a New Fellowship with the Omohundro Institute

February 14, 2017 | By Amanda Herbert

The Folger is known for our Shakespeare collections, but our holdings support research on all aspects of British and European literary, cultural, political, religious, theatrical, and social history from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries: and that includes materials that document early modern interactions between women and men around the American and Atlantic worlds. The Folger Institute is proud to partner with the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture on a new fellowship, dedicated to supporting studies of early America, broadly understood.… Continue Reading

A promptbook in disguise

February 7, 2017 | By Sarah Hovde

It’s time to pull back the curtain on last week’s crocodile mystery: that weird woven material is a close-up photograph of the cover of a promptbook! Both commenters who took a guess last week came pretty close. This particular promptbook was used during an 1838 production of Woman’s wit, or, love’s disguises at the Tremont Theatre in Boston, probably by an actor named Thomas Barry, who performed in New York and Boston during the mid-19th century.… Continue Reading