Stuart and Mimi Rose Rare Book and Manuscript Exhibition Hall

The Stuart and Mimi Rose Rare Book and Manuscript Exhibition Hall, one of two large halls anchoring the New Pavilion, will include space for permanent and temporary exhibitions to demonstrate the impact of the early modern world on our own. 
 
One of the hall’s three galleries will be devoted to some of the greatest and most formative works in the Folger collection including Caxton’s Chaucer, the Macro Manuscripts, John Donne letters, and documents of Elizabeth I.
 

“This exhibition space will give people—not just scholars, but regular people—a chance to appreciate rare books." —Stuart Rose

 

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The beginning of the Cook's Tale in Caxton's 1477 printing of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales
The beginning of the Cook's Tale in Caxton's 1477 printing of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
Item Title: 
[Canterbury tales] Whan that Apprill with his shouris sote and the droughte of marche hath p[er]cid þe rote ...
Item Call Number: 
STC 5082
Luna Link: 
View in our digital image collection
Item Creator: 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400.
Item Date: 
[1477]

One of the items included will be this 1477 edition of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. William Caxton produced it in England's first printing shop, located in Westminster at the Sign of the Red Pale. Only ten known copies, including the Folger volume, have survived, in addition to two fragments. 

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The Castle of Perseverance from Mankind

The Castle of Perseverance from Mankind

Item Title: 
The Castle of Perseverance
Item Call Number: 
V.a.354
Luna Link: 
View in our digital image collection
Item Date: 
ca. 1440

Also on display will be the three manuscripts of 15th-century allegorical dramas known as the Macro Plays, which are the earliest morality plays in English to survive in their entirety. Named for their 18th-century owner, the Suffolk antiquarian Cox Macro, these handwritten pages are undoubtedly some of the greatest treasures of the Folger. Without these unique plays—given the titles Wisdom, Mankind, and The Castle of Perseverance by the 19th-century scholars who first transcribed and published them—we would know virtually nothing about pre-Reformation forms of this drama. Featured above is the last page of The Castle of Perseverance. It contains the earliest known stage diagram for an English play and is thus an invaluable record of early performance history. 

 

 

Part of the Building Renovation Project

supported by 

The Wonder of Will: The Campaign for the Folger Shakespeare Library