Schedule as of November 2, 2022
At the start of the 2022–2023 academic year, major renovations continue at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Our building on Capitol Hill remains closed for the duration of that project, with an anticipated reopening in Fall 2023. Newly refurbished spaces for our researchers are among the improvements, which also include dedicated exhibition galleries, meeting spaces with enhanced audio-visual capabilities, and updated HVAC systems.
Summer 2022
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Making Meaning: Hands-on Basic Paleography and Book Production (weeklong intensive skills course)
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Teaching Intermediate Paleography (weeklong skills and pedagogy course)
Yearlong
- Researching and Writing the Early Modern Dissertation (yearlong dissertation seminar)
- World, Globe, Planet: The Scales of Relation in Early Modernity (hybrid yearlong monthly colloquium)
Fall 2022
- Shakespeare and Performance Studies: Researching and Teaching Recorded and Live Broadcast Theatre (virtual fall workshop)
Spring 2023
- Early Modern Intersections in the American South (plenary lecture, workshop, and historic site visits)
- Rac(e)ing the Shakespearean Archive: Antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction New Orleans (weekend workshop)
- Gilding the Guilt: The Gilded Age, Craft Production, and the Construction of Cultural Capital (weekend workshop)
- Global Early Modern Trans Studies (symposium)
- An Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas (weeklong skills course)
- Introduction to English Paleography (weeklong skills course)
Full Program Details
Summer 2022
Yearlong
Fall 2022
Spring 2023
An Orientation to Research Methods and Agendas (spring skills course)
Directed by Marcy North, Claire M. L. Bourne, and Whitney Trettien
Co-sponsored with the University of Pennsylvania
The best research is based on inquiry and allows for serendipity. A scholar needs to sharpen research questions and search skills simultaneously and with sensitivity to the ways questions and sources affect each other. The available evidence may invite a new thesis, require a revised approach, or even suggest a new field of exploration. This intensive week is not designed to advance participants’ individual research projects. Rather, it aims to cultivate the participants’ curiosity about primary resources by using exercises that engage their research interests. It is offered to help early-stage graduate students develop a set of research-oriented literacies as they explore Penn’s special collections in ways that will be useful for navigating other collections. With the guidance of visiting faculty and curatorial staff from the Folger and Penn Libraries, twelve to fourteen participants will examine bibliographical tools and their logics, hone their early modern book description skills, learn best practices for organizing and working with digital images, and improve their understanding of the cultural and technological histories of texts. Participants will ask reflexive questions about the nature of primary sources, the collections that house them, and the tools whereby one can access them.
Organizers: Marcy North is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Anonymous Renaissance and numerous articles on early print, manuscript, and women’s writings. She has directed a previous Folger seminar and participated in the Folger's Teaching Paleography and Advanced Paleography workshops. She is finishing a book on the intersection of labor and taste in the production of post-print manuscripts. Claire M. L. Bourne is Associate Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Typographies of Performance in Early Modern England, which was supported by a long-term Folger fellowship, and is currently editing 1 Henry the Sixth for the Arden Shakespeare (4th series). Whitney Trettien teaches digital humanities and book history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is Assistant Professor of English. She is the author of Cut/Copy/Paste, a hybrid monograph on digital book history staged on Manifold Scholarship through University of Minnesota Press.
Anticipated Schedule: Monday through Friday, 22-26 May 2023, at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.
Apply: 6 March 2023 for admission and grants-in-aid.
Introduction to English Paleography (spring skills course)
Directed by Heather Wolfe
Co-sponsored with the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
This weeklong course provides an intensive introduction to handwriting in early modern England, with a particular emphasis on the English secretary hand of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Working from digitized and physical manuscripts, participants will be trained in the accurate reading and transcription of secretary, italic, and mixed hands. In conjunction with the Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies’ Renaissance of the Earth research program, the workshop will include estate accounts, annotated almanacs, and household inventories that showcase how early moderns were practically and imaginatively transforming the earth. Recipe books, personal correspondence, and poetry miscellanies will also be drawn from the Folger collection. Participants will experiment with contemporary writing materials (quills, iron gall ink, and paper); learn the terminology for describing and comparing letterforms; and become skillful decipherers of abbreviations, numbers, and dates. Transcriptions made by participants will become part of the Early Modern Manuscripts Online (EMMO) corpus.
Director: Heather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts and Associate Librarian at the Folger Shakespeare Library, co-director of the recently concluded multi-year research project Before 'Farm to Table': Early Modern Foodways and Cultures, and principal investigator of Early Modern Manuscripts Online. Author of numerous articles on early modern manuscripts, Dr. Wolfe has edited The Literary Career and Legacy of Elizabeth Cary, 1613–1680 (2007), The Trevelyon Miscellany of 1608: A Facsimile Edition of Folger Shakespeare Library MS V.b.232 (2007), Letterwriting in Renaissance England (2004) (with Alan Stewart), and Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland: Life and Letters (2001). She is currently working on a book on early modern writing paper in England.
Anticipated Schedule: Monday through Friday, 5-9 June 2023, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.
Apply: 6 March 2023 for admission and grants-in-aid.