Q & A: Ashley Buchanan, Associate Director for Fellowships, Folger Institute
The Folger Institute is pleased to introduce Dr. Ashley Buchanan, our new Associate Director for Fellowships. Dr. Buchanan received her Ph.D. in early modern history in 2018 from the University of South Florida and comes to the Folger with experience…
Recipe Books, Plague Cures and the Circulation of Information
a guest post by Yann Ryan As well as its terrible consequences for health and mortality, plague in early modern England had a major impact on the communication and circulation of information. Movement was restricted, towns with suspected cases were…
A Glimpse into the Cultural History of Fragaria
a guest post by Jennie Youssef When the term of my Folger fellowship began, I had made some headway in my research for a dissertation chapter on the foodway of strawberries. The strawberry’s symbolic significance in medieval art and early…
The mystery of Humphrey Walcot’s grocery bill and early-modern popular numeracy
a guest post by Ray Schrire It is time for an unofficial Crocodile Mystery. Humphrey Walcot’s grocery bill. Folger, L.f.196 These are a few of my favorite items from the merchant Humphrey Walcot’s shopping list of May 8, 1601 (a…
Picturing Children’s Food in Early Modern Europe
a guest post by Carla Cevasco While I started my Folger fellowship intending to research children’s foodways in the manuscript recipe book collection, I was surprised by how many hungry, eating, or even eaten children could be found in the…
Extra-Illustrating Othello
a guest post by Patricia Akhimie On my last visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Fall 2019 (a time that seems all too distant now) to conduct research for a new edition of Othello, I set myself the goal…
Should we care where Lucy Hutchinson went to church?
A guest post by Crawford Gribben Over the last few years—and with the benefit of my summer Folger fellowship—I’ve been thinking about the network of friends and rivals that had at its centre the puritan theologian, John Owen (1616-83). John…
Unsung Travelers: a history of global mobility from below
A guest post by Ananya Chakravarti In March 2017, not long after President Trump stormed into office on a platform decrying “globalists,” the historian Jeremy Adelman published an essay asking whether “the short ride” of global history had come to…
Focus on a Decade of Folger Institute Research and Community
In the past decade, seventy-five different Guest Authors have published over one hundred posts in The Collation. Roughly half of these contributors wrote posts about their experiences working with the Folger collections and researcher community through Institute-sponsored programming. Many fellows…
The Production of Whiteness in the Anglo-French Match (1625)
A guest post by Mira Assaf Kafantaris Meghan Markle’s incorporation into the British monarchy, and her subsequent departure from it, has thrown into high relief the ideologies of whiteness at the heart of royal European traditions. Even though the symbolism…
2021-2022 Folger Research Fellows
The Folger Institute is pleased to announce the 2021-2022 cohort of Folger Institute Research Fellows! With the Folger Shakespeare Library building renovation project well and truly underway, the Folger collections remain unavailable for in-person consultation. However, the Folger Institute is…
Reading Anatomy Texts Like Poetry (and why we should do it more often)
A guest post by Whitney Sperrazza Thomas Bartholin, Bartholinus anatomy (London, 1668), page 76. Folger B977, image from Luna. When we look at this page from Thomas Bartholin’s 1668 anatomy text (Folger B977), it’s easy to think of it as…