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: Dr. 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 for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

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 for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Program Description link: https://www.folger.edu/2022-2023-folger-institute-scholarly-programs#ResearchMethods

Global Early Modern Trans Studies (spring symposium)

Organized by Simone Chess, Nick Jones, Will Fisher, Colby Gordon, and Melissa E. Sanchez

This symposium invites its participants to consider the intersections of early modern trans studies and early modern race studies in a global context. The symposium begins from the premise that discerning the contours of gendered embodiment in early modern texts requires sustained attention to the emergence of modern racial hierarchies. Thinking with trans studies presses us to account not just for gender, but also for racialized gender as it is imbricated with other social vectors including nation, religion, disability, and status. Focusing on a period that predates the U.S.-centric lens through which transgender and racial histories are often considered, the symposium will trace the manifold ways that forms of trans embodiment taking shape in early modernity intersect with genocidal histories of white supremacy, anti-blackness, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, settler colonialism, and empire. Invited speakers will address both the multiplicity and specificity of racialization and the ways that different gender and racial categories and identities are generated within specific geographic and cultural contexts and as part of the processes of imperialism and colonization.

Organizers: Simone Chess is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at Wayne State University. Will Fisher is Associate Professor of English at Lehman College and The CUNY Graduate Center. Colby Gordon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College. Nicholas R. Jones, Yale Department of Spanish and Portuguese, is the former King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s 2021-2022 Scholar-in-Residence at New York University. Melissa E. Sanchez is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature; Director of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies; and Director of the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Invited Speakers: Kim F. Hall (Barnard College), Marquis Bey (Northwestern University), and Jules Gill-Peterson (John Hopkins University) will deliver a plenary conversation on Thursday evening to open the symposium. Over the following Friday and Saturday, speakers including Cecilio M. Cooper (New York University), Esteban Crespo-Jaramillo (Yale University), Leah DeVun (Rutgers University), Carla Freccero (University of California, Santa Cruz), Miles Grier (City University of New York), Sawyer Kemp (Queens College, City University of New York), Greta LaFleur (Yale University), and Zeb Tortorici (New York University) will open up a range of relevant themes for extended conversation. Abdulhamit Arvas (University of Pennsylvania) and Howard Chiang (University of California, Davis) will serve as respondents.

Anticipated Schedule: Thursday evening, Friday, and Saturday, 18 – 20 May 2023, in Washington, DC.

Apply: 6 March 2023 for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger Institute Consortium affiliates.

Program Description link: https://www.folger.edu/2022-2023-folger-institute-scholarly-programs#GlobalTrans

Questions? Reach out to Owen Wiliams (owilliams@folger.edu)

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