The Collation
Research and Exploration at the Folger
The Collation is a gathering of useful information and observations from Folger staff and researchers. Read more about this blog
Coding Elizabeth’s Court: A Digital Experiment
With Danielle Rosvally The Dataset Gathered by Marion E. Colthorpe, The Elizabethan Court Day by Day (ECDbD) is a record of the people, places, and events of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Colthorpe consulted state papers, diaries, government records,…
What is an Aesopian fable in the Renaissance? The case of the Renaissance Catwoman
A guest post by Liza Blake What is an Aesopian fable in the Renaissance? This post is about where our modern Aesopian fables come from, drawing on the Folger Shakespeare Library’s incredibly rich collections of animal fables. For more detail…
De Acupunctura: Willem ten Rhijne and Bringing Eastern Medicine to Europe
I am continually in awe of the depth and breadth of knowledge that our readers possess. Y’all are truly excellent. Yes, the answer to the Crocodile Mystery is, as several people answered, a chart of the acupuncture points on the…
“What manner o’thing is your crocodile?”: November 2018
As October draws to a close, we bring you a new Crocodile Mystery. (If you’re new around these parts and totally confused as to why we refer to our monthly mystery post as a “Crocodile”, this post will explain it.)…
Tracing the transmission of medical recipes
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…
Minding the Gaps of Early Modern Drama
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…
Hexed
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…
“What manner o’thing is your crocodile?”: October 2018
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…
The mystery of the Shakespearian cartoons
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…
Experiments with early modern manuscripts and computer-aided transcription
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…
Happy 500th Birthday!
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…
About that frontispiece portrait of Hannah Woolley....
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…