Manuscripts

Recently, I have found myself answering a number of reference questions concerning our musical holdings (a reference librarian manifestation of the frequency illusion perhaps?). Whatever the reason, it has been a nice reminder that some of our manuscript holdings contain…

Last week’s Crocodile was a jumble of household instruments with numbers next to them. As our first commenter, Katie Will, correctly guessed, the detail was from the table of contents of a type of heraldic manuscript known as an Ordinary.…

The answer to last week’s Crocodile mystery is, as some of you guessed, £135 15s 0d (or 135 pounds, 15 shillings). This amount is a snippet of one entry made on a page in Folger MS V.b.308, the account book of…

A guest post by Nicholas Tyacke Back in 2008, on the eve of directing a Faculty Weekend Seminar at the Folger, on “The University Cultures of Early-Modern Oxford and Cambridge,” I took the opportunity to consult the card catalog of…

exegi monumentum aere perennius regalique situ pyramidum altius, quod non imber edax, non Aquilo inpotens possit diruere… (Odes III: XXX, lines 1-4, published 23BC)  I have built a monument more lasting than bronze, higher than the Pyramids’ regal structures, that…

When Shakespeare was young and in love, he wrote a gushing letter to his bride-to-be, enclosing with it a lock of his hair and five verses. Or that’s what an audacious teenager in the 1790s would have us all believe. The supposed love letter…

a Guest Post by Marissa Nicosia and Alyssa Connell Since we launched Cooking in the Archives in 2014 we’ve been looking for chocolate. We love chocolate, our friends and family who taste our recipes love chocolate, and we were pretty…

There are thousands of manuscripts sitting quietly amongst the Folger’s ever-growing collection which Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) aims to transcribe. Earlier this year EMMO collaborated with Zooniverse, a hugely successful online crowd-sourcing platform, so that people all over the…

A guest post by Gail McMurray Gibson, William R. Kenan Professor Emerita of English and Humanities, Davidson College. When the Macro Plays manuscript pages recently came out of the Folger vault for a day of conversation with scholars, curators, and…

We thought we had the right question. Renate Mesmer (Head of Conservation), Heather Wolfe (Curator of Manuscripts), and I invited several scholars to the Folger for a lab-based discussion on “V.a.354: What to do about the Macro Manuscripts?” Specifically, the…

Over the past few months, EMMO has been busy with several first-ever activities connected to transcribing manuscripts at the Folger. In August, we transcribed excerpts from over twenty four manuscripts currently exhibited in the Age of Lawyers Exhibition (running until…

John Ward’s sixteen notebooks, once they are fully transcribed for EMMO, are going to be an incredibly rich source for nearly everyone who thinks about or studies early modern England. Most people have heard about them because of John Ward’s…