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
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
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
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
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.” Ah, of course!… Continue Reading
For the Crocodile Mystery this month, peer into the handwriting of this manuscript and let us know what word or words you see and/or what they mean. Leave your thoughts and guesses as a reply in the Comments section.
Check back next week for the answer.… Continue Reading
The Folger Institute is pleased to announce our 2017-18 cohort of Long-Term Fellows. This year we will welcome seven long-term scholars to the Folger: James Bromley, Urvashi Chakravarty, Surekha Davies, Nicholas Popper, Nigel Smith, Julianne Werlin, and Jessica Wolfe.
The Folger Institute awards two fellowships via the National Endowment for the Humanities and its Grants for Fellowship Programs at Independent Research Institutions (FPIRI).… Continue Reading
New staff members (and researchers!) are sometimes surprised to find that on-order and newly received collection materials show up in Hamnet searches. Many special collections libraries keep that information staff-only until the material has arrived, been processed, and sent to the vault. But it doesn’t feel right to us to hide information that might be useful to researchers. Even if you can’t see an item right now because it was only ordered yesterday, you at least know that it exists, and is on its way.… Continue Reading
Yes, last week’s Crocodile Mystery was a close-up image of a woodblock. This woodblock, in particular:
And in fact, it is the woodblock that was used to print this image:
You can compare this section of the woodblock with the (hand-colored) print that it created:
So what’s going on here? What is this book and why is the woodblock used for one of the illustrations still with it?… Continue Reading
A guest post by Derek Dunne
For anyone who has worked in the Reading Room of the Folger Shakespeare Library, you’ll know that a certain amount of paperwork is part of the daily routine: sign-in sheets, call slips, and of course the exit pass. Each of these is designed to be filled in over time—sometimes written by readers (‘PLEASE PRINT’ as shown below), sometimes stamped by library staff—meaning that the document is always in progress, never quite complete; making these documents both collaborative and hybrid.… Continue Reading
