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

May 30, 2017 | By The Collation

Welcome to the end of another month and another Crocodile Mystery. This month’s Crocodile is brought to you by Folger manuscripts! Here’s a detail from a bifolium that is part of a collection of papers described at the item-level in our finding aids. The collection is partly artificial, but the bifolium seems to be connected to other bifolia within the collection, even though their call numbers are not consecutive.… Continue Reading

Happy Birthday, Elias Ashmole!

May 23, 2017 | By Abbie Weinberg

Today is the 400th anniversary of the birth of Elias Ashmole. Perhaps best known today for giving his name (and the founding collection of antiquities and “curiosities”) to the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, this 17th-century antiquarian had a wide range of interests, including astrology and alchemy. Ashmole’s first appearance in print was due to his interest astrology. In 1647, two of his translations appeared in William Lilly’s The Worlds Catastrophe.… Continue Reading

How to catalog 100,000 playbills (give or take a few thousand)

May 16, 2017 | By Sarah Hovde

You’re probably aware that a significant amount of the Folger’s collection remains uncataloged; the majority of items have at least brief records in our online catalog Hamnet, but even today some collections are accessible only through the card catalog. We don’t like that any more than you do—we want all our materials to easily findable, in one place! However, we have so many materials and only a small staff, and we don’t want to put inaccurate information into the catalog just to have something there.… Continue Reading

The Reformation at Folger

May 11, 2017 | By Caroline Duroselle-Melish

As this year marks the 500th anniversary of Luther’s 95 theses and along with it, the beginning of the Reformation, a blog post on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Reformation collection is in order. Our collections in this area became prominent in 1977 when the library acquired the books and pamphlets collected by the Swiss writer Emanuel Stickelberger (1884-1962). Stickelberger’s collection contained 850 titles, 516 of which were printed before 1531.… Continue Reading

New resources, old plays: expanding A Digital Anthology of Early Modern Drama

May 4, 2017 | By Elizabeth Williamson and Meaghan J. Brown

The Folger’s Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama (EMED) is delighted to announce the release of twenty early modern plays, freely available to read and download. EMED offers you the chance to explore the vibrant scene of professional theater in early modern London, from a swash-buckling maid to ghastly—but creative—revenge. We offer a variety of plays, from Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Thomas Middleton’s Changeling, which have had a spate of recent productions, to the less well known—sometimes the much less well known.… Continue Reading

Okay, but what does it mean, or how do you regularize an early modern transcription?

May 2, 2017 | By Paul Dingman

As one reader guessed, the phrase shown in last week’s Crocodile mystery image is in secretary hand, i.e., a type of handwritten script widely used in the British Isles (and elsewhere in Europe) during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As transcribed in Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) from the upper right corner of a manuscript certificate, the phrase is “Est horse lee.”… Continue Reading