Collection highlights

This 1611 book by Thomas Coryate has been called the first travel guide printed in England.

This book, compiled by a middle-class English woman in the early 1600s, freely mingles culinary and medicinal recipes.

This 1598 illustration shows Escheape Market, a meat market in London with butchers’ shops along both sides of the street.

This 1598 Italian lute was restored by Arnold Dolmetsch, a leading figure in the revival of early music performance at the beginning of the 20th century.

Fencing terminology from this manual by Vincentio Saviolo, an Italian fencing master who settled in London around 1590, appears in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

This engraving from a 1590 second edition of Thomas Hariot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia depicts different methods of catching fish.

This beautifully hand-colored book is a 1588 translation of Niccolò Tartaglia’s Quesiti et inventioni diverse, which offers practical advice on the technology of war.

John Foxe’s Actes and monumentes, more familiarly known as the Book of Martyrs, is fundamental to almost any study of the English Reformation.

Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum Microcosmicum reflects the considerable advances in anatomical knowledge that took place in the Renaissance.

From the late 1500s until her death in 1624, calligrapher Esther Inglis created more than 50 beautifully crafted manuscript books, including this collection of poems.

This letter, written by the 17th-century poet to his father-in-law, is one of 13 in the Folger collection, representing about a third of Donne’s surviving letters.

The Folger copy of Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender is one of only seven extant copies of the first edition, published in 1579.