Folger Institute, 2006-2007 Program

Paleography Refresher Course
Heather Wolfe

This six-week, skills-course refresher is designed to provide a review of English secretary and italic handwriting. It will also provide participants with an opportunity to explore further the manuscript collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library, including correspondence, literary works, accounts, inventories, miscellanies, commonplace books, wills, and deeds. Applicants should describe their previous training, including introductory level courses or self-directed work in the archives. They should also describe the documents or classes of manuscript materials with which they are currently working and the nature of their research projects. Participants’ own materials, approaches, and bibliographical and editorial challenges will help shape the course, as participants will introduce their materials to others in the course. In addition to the standard award of one night of lodging per session, the application review committee will award an additional two nights' lodging to funded participants who could profitably extend their time with the collections.

A Sense of the Archive
Spring Semester Seminar for Master's Students
Kristen Poole

This seminar will introduce Master's-level students to the Folger's collections through an exploration of the early modern sensory world. Students will plumb the Library's materials in an attempt to reconstruct how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century men and women heard, smelled, tasted, saw, and experienced touch. How, for example, did people perceive cold? Or experience the introduction of tobacco? How did the early modern experience and perception of the environment differ from our own? To what extent can archival work even answer these questions? While the seminar will be guided by readings in current scholarship, the primary aim is for students to encounter a broad sampling of genres, such as cookbooks, travel narratives, chorographies, natural histories, urban surveys, theater documents, and demonological tracts. The seminar will introduce students to tools for archival research and will encourage the development of individual research interests.

For more information about these and other programs, click here.