Manuscripts
One page, four inscriptions, three households
A guest post by Rebecca Laroche I began transcribing Folger manuscript V.a.681 because I recognized from the dealer’s description the name of a family, the Shirleys, and its house, Staunton Harold; I had previously found another book owned by another…
Accounting for Relationships: the Drury Lane Financial Records
A guest post by Chelsea Phillips With the cherry trees blooming (almost), the sun shining (sometimes), and tax season looming, there is no more delightful time to consider the vagaries of 18th-century theatrical accounting practice. The Folger Shakespeare Library holds…
Untangling Lady Day dating and the Julian calendar
Folger X.c.92 (3) is my new favorite manuscript: it’s a letter written in Paris that single-handedly demonstrates the fact that “new style” dates refer to two different calendar modernizations. One modernization has to do with the Christian calendar’s reckoning of…
Theatrical Bills and Receipts
Folger manuscripts W.b.110 and W.b.111 are an oddly mis-matched pair. W.b.110 is nearly 46cm tall (almost 18 inches, for those playing along at home) and nearly 160 leaves, while W.b.111 is a good 10cm shorter and about a third the…
The Charming Mr. Stoker and the Monster Within
A guest post by Jason McElligott Let me begin with a confession that may not endear me to many friends of the Folger: I don’t enjoy Shakespeare. To be completely honest, I find him hard work. Now, I am not…
Tracing the transmission of medical recipes
A guest post by Elisabeth Chaghafi A lot of early modern recipe books are eclectic compilations that reflect the interests or needs of the people who compiled them. Often they do not even separate between cookery and medical recipes but…
Experiments with early modern manuscripts and computer-aided transcription
Guest post by Minyue Dai, Carrie Yang, Reeve Ingle, and Meaghan J. Brown. Hundreds of years ago, scholars might spend hours in a library searching through thousands of pages to find a useful paragraph.Things get much easier when we can…
A "lost" drawing by Ellen Terry
Is it possible to lose something you never had? The other day I managed to “lose” a 1905 sketch of a theater interior by actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928). I had caught a glimpse of it when sorting through a small…
Early modern head lice remedies; or, dealing with pediculosis, Renaissance-style
With assistance by Beth DeBold This post is dedicated to all those parents and caregivers who have gotten the dreaded phone call while at work: “your child has lice.” You have to drop everything and retrieve your child from school,…
The itemized life: John Kay’s notebook
Folger X.d.446, the notebook of John Kay, combines accounts and verses. Short-term fellow Laura Kolb argues that Kay’s book is noteworthy not because it combines these things, but because it does so with both care and a kind of inventiveness,…
Books of Offices
A guest post by Nicholas Popper The Folger has fourteen of an odd, unloved sort of manuscript that I’ve taken to calling “Books of Offices,” which exist in over a hundred versions throughout archives in the US and UK. Typically…
Bound to Serve: Apprenticeship Indentures at the Folger
A guest post by Dr. Urvashi Chakravarty In 1616, the apprentice Robert Dering received the following letter from his master Thomas Style. Letter from Thomas Style to Robert Dering Dering was bound overseas with one Mr. Culpepper, and in his…