The Collation

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 (“”), an estimated page count, and little more, I went down to the vault to…

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…

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…

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…

For this month’s mystery, we have a pretty straight-forward question: Who is this woman? Leave your guesses in the comments below, and we’ll be back next week with more information!

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…

Is it possible to lose something you never had? The other day I managed to “lose” a 1905 sketch of a theater interior by actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928). I had caught a glimpse of it when sorting through a small…

Jeffrey Meade’s guess is correct: this type inventory includes a great variety of large sized type. It belongs to a longer document made in June 1819 recording the furniture of the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane when the theater was…