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
Time writing
Telescopium Uranicum, 1666. Folger 269- 460q item 5 Chronograms—literally, “time writing”—are dates embedded within text. As such, they are a form of hidden writing called steganography: the encoded characters maintain their own value, but are hidden within a larger text.…
Enter Miranda: the Folger's new digital platform
“Admired Miranda! Indeed the top of admiration, worth What’s dearest to the world!” William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (3.1.47-50) Miranda’s home page offers a chance to search by format, genre, date ranges, or language. The Folger Shakespeare Library is thrilled to…
“What manner o’thing is your crocodile?”: November 2017
For November’s Crocodile Mystery, tell us, if you will, what’s going on in the image below. Leave your guess in the comments and we’ll be back next week with the answer!
Early modern legal violence: for the common good?
A guest post by Dr. Sarah Higinbotham In a 1628 sermon preached before the Assize court at Oxford, Robert Harris reminds the “Sheriffes, Iustices, Iudges” that they have taken “an oath for the common good.” He reminds them that they…
Lost at Sea
Shakespeare liked shipwrecks, including one in at least five of his plays. Sea storms and shipwrecks were a convenient way to separate characters or bring them into conflict, as well as stranding them in a strange place. In the “Age…
Report from the field: network analysis
A guest post by Dr. Ruth Ahnert In July 2017 the Folger Institute welcomed participants and faculty to the third of its Early Modern Digital Agendas (EMDA) gatherings—an NEH-funded Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. The EMDA institutes…
Dryden's Virgil, Ogilby's Virgil, and Aeneas's nose job
First, a confession: this month’s Crocodile Mystery was originally going to pose a question along the lines of “What’s weird about this image?” or “What makes this picture especially interesting?” but I gave up. I couldn’t figure out how to…
“What manner o’thing is your crocodile?”: October 2017
This month’s Crocodile Mystery is a caption contest: Option A: Provide a factually accurate title for this portrait. Option B: Provide an amusingly inaccurate title for this portrait. Option C: Provide both A and B.
In memoriam: Betsy Walsh
Elizabeth “Betsy” Walsh (1953-2017) We are devastated to announce that Betsy Walsh, our beloved head of reader services here at the Folger, passed away on Friday, September 22, 2017. Betsy was an inseparable part of the Folger—indeed, for many of…
A nineteenth-century family circus
A few months ago, I wrote about the process of creating brief catalog records for the Folger’s playbill collection. Since then, I’ve completed records for playbills from London and all of Scotland, and have begun working my way through playbills…
Consuming the New World
A guest post by Misha Ewen William Petre (1575-1637) was a typical gentleman of his time. He was 22 years old and newly married when he began keeping an account book of his household expenses. Between 1597 and 1610 Petre…
"Whose least part crackt, the whole does fly": early views on Prince Rupert's Drops
Honor is like that glassy Bubble That finds Philosophers such trouble, Whose least part crackt, the whole does fly, And Wits are crack’d to find out why. Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part II, Canto II, lines 385-89. In the second part…