The Collation

Research and Exploration at the Folger

Tracing the transmission of medical recipes

October 18, 2018 | By Guest Author

A guest post by Elisabeth Chaghafi A lot of early modern recipe books are eclectic compilations that reflect the interests or needs of the people who compiled them. Often they do not even separate between cookery and medical recipes but include a mixture of both. Two examples of such eclectic recipe books in the Folger’s collection are V.a.140 and X.d.469. V.a.140 was compiled in about 1600.… Continue Reading

Minding the Gaps of Early Modern Drama

October 4, 2018 | By Guest Author

A Guest Post by Heidi Craig The history of early modern drama and theatre is punctured with gaps, unknowns, and absences. Over half of the estimated 3,000 professional plays performed before the closure of the theatres in 1642 have evaporated without a trace. About 750 plays endure as only fragments, such as a play title or extract, that point to complete scripts otherwise lost; the number of these lost plays and our knowledge of them continues to grow, thanks to the ongoing work of The Lost Plays Database, edited by Roslyn Knutson, David McInnis and Matthew Steggle, and hosted by the Folger.… Continue Reading

Hexed

October 2, 2018 | By Elizabeth DeBold

This month’s crocodile post asked our readers to think about some interesting designs appearing in and on our books. The first, appearing on the covers of Folger STC 11011 copy 2, are two slightly different designs with a central shape made out of six adjoining loops, surrounded by widening concentric circles. The second is a similar design, but lightly traced on the flyleaf in STC 16878 in pencil.… Continue Reading

“What manner o’thing is your crocodile?”: October 2018

September 25, 2018 | By The Collation

For this month’s mystery, we’d like your thoughts on this image: what’s going on here with the design appearing in different spots on these two books? What is it, what does it mean, why might it appear here? Share your thoughts in the comments section!    … Continue Reading

The mystery of the Shakespearian cartoons

September 18, 2018 | By Sarah Hovde

I first encountered this book three years ago, in 2015. Intrigued by its sparse catalog record, which at that point consisted of a cataloger-supplied title (“[Cartoons based on quotes from Shakespeare]”), an estimated page count, and little more, I went down to the vault to retrieve it. It turned out to be a little volume of, well, cartoons based on quotations from Shakespeare, interpreted in settings humorously far-removed from their original contexts; almost square, with a plain leather binding and some small gilt embellishments bordering the front cover.… Continue Reading

Experiments with early modern manuscripts and computer-aided transcription

September 13, 2018 | By Guest Author and Meaghan J. Brown

Guest post by Minyue Dai, Carrie Yang, Reeve Ingle, and Meaghan J. Brown. Hundreds of years ago, scholars might spend hours in a library searching through thousands of pages to find a useful paragraph.Things get much easier when we can work with digitized text. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems can automatically recognize text on images—such as printed books, handwritten letters, and photos—and convert it to a readable and editable digital format.… Continue Reading

Happy 500th Birthday!

September 11, 2018 | By Abbie Weinberg

On a recent tour, I was showing a book published in 1518, and mentioned that clearly we were celebrating its 500th birthday by showing it off to a group of very appreciative folks. But that got me thinking—what other books in our collection turn 500 years old this year? 500 is a rather significant number. So let’s take a look at some of the cohort of books in our collection that have been around for half a millenium.… Continue Reading

About that frontispiece portrait of Hannah Woolley….

September 5, 2018 | By Heather Wolfe

I was delighted by the range of responses we got for last week’s Crocodile post on the identity of the woman in the engraving: Catherine of Braganza, Cleopatra, Lady Frances Egerton, Elizabeth Nash nee Hall (Shakespeare’s grand-daughter), Hannah Woolley, and Sarah Gilly. The answer: None of the above, and some of the above. Sarah Gilly? Some surviving impressions of this portrait have the inscription “The Effigies of M:trs Sarah Gilly,” as does the one above. … Continue Reading
quote from Hamlet F1 "Words, words, words"

Early Modern Digital Texts: a link roundup

August 21, 2018 | By Meaghan J. Brown

The early modern textual landscape is broad and varied online, from full-text collections focused on a single genre or area of research, to in-depth examinations of the history of a famous text. In this post, we’ll explore a few of the online projects that aim to provide insight into early modern texts—and full texts for reading: some at scale and some in intimate detail.… Continue Reading