Eyebrow shaping has been a thing for a long time. Including in the early modern period. Another one of our favorite posts from the past comes from the time when Heather Wolfe found a whole section on eyebrows in one of our manuscripts. Curious to learn more? Read all about it in Early modern eyebrow interpretation, or what it means to have a unibrow… Continue Reading
If you’ve ever been confused by the differences between woodcuts, engravings, and etchings, clearly you’re not alone! This post by Erin Blake, from 2012, is perennially one of our most popular. So in case you missed it the first time around, take a look at Woodcut, engraving, or what?… Continue Reading
Happy summer, everyone! (Or happy winter, if you’re in the southern hemisphere!)
From now until the end of August, we’re going to be doing a summer retrospective here on The Collation, highlighting some of our past posts. This blog has been around for eight (8!) years now, so we’ve got quite the pool to choose from!
To start off, let us take you back to where this all began, with our very first post from August 2011: Welcome to The Collation
We hope you enjoy these looks back into some of our favorite content, while we prepare to bring you even more new posts in the future.… Continue Reading
When, in Act 2 of William Shakespeare’s famous teen suicide play Romeo and Juliet, Juliet muses “[w]hat’s in a name? That which we call a rose / [b]y any other word would smell as sweet,” it’s lucky for her that she isn’t speaking to a librarian. Although her sentiment is poetic, we librarians prefer to be a bit more precise when it comes to terminology.… Continue Reading
Tell us what you think is going on here! If you have correctly answered a crocodile post in the last 6 months, please consider giving it a couple days for others to have a guess, and no checking Hamnet, either…… Continue Reading
A guest post by Lauren Working
Thomas Wood’s 1576 letter to Richard Bagot begins conventionally enough. Wood was sending some artichoke “slips” with his letter, and he begins by describing the optimal way to plant the specimens to guarantee their growth. He accompanies this description with a simple sketch in the margin before turning to news from the Continent, including the story of a Polish duke who had “turned Turk,” or converted to Islam.… Continue Reading
A guest post by Alicia Meyer
The Folger Shakespeare Library houses three etchings of African diasporic people by Wenceslaus Hollar. While we may never know the identities of the figures in these images, Hollar’s artistic choices direct how we see and remember seventeenth-century black lives. In this set of images, the vulnerabilities of youth, gender, and rank, as well as skin color, refract the figures’ agency and influence the viewer’s gaze to different ends.… Continue Reading
For the June 2019 “Crocodile Mystery” we asked you to spot the differences between these two pictures:
The main difference, of course, is that one is pretty much the reverse of the other. There are significant compositional differences too, though:
Background figures in A do not appear in B
Running man holds out an open palm in A and a sword in B
Scabbards and legs in A make oblique angles; in B they are parallel or near-parallel (they’re also moved so that figures in both A and B can draw their swords right-handed).… Continue Reading
Last month’s Crocodile Mystery asked you to name what the images had in common. This month we ask the opposite: what’s different?
Click the image for a larger view. Much MUCH larger versions of both pictures are available, but we’re only interested in differences that can be spotted at this scale. Please do not attempt to count the leaves (or, if you do, please do not expect Folger staff to verify your count).… Continue Reading
A guest post by the Before ‘Farm to Table’ team
This week the Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures team turned their collective attention to Hannah Woolley (or Wolley), a British woman writer who was among the first women in early modern Britain to earn a living by her writing. She wrote across various genres during her life, providing readers with instructions on how to cook, how to perform household tasks, and how to manage employees.… Continue Reading
