Renaissance Paleography in England: An Intermediate Skills Course

For more past programming from the Folger Institute, please see the article Folger Institute scholarly programs archive.

This was a fall 2000 semester skills course led by Laetitia Yeandle.

For those who attended the Folger's introductory seminar on Renaissance paleography, for those who already had some experience transcribing English documents of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or those who wanted to brush up their working knowledge of the secretary and legal hands, this course provided guidance and further practice. Participants transcribed a wide range of documents of historical and literary interest from the manuscript collections of the Folger Shakespeare Library. These included correspondence, literary works, accounts, inventories, wills, and deeds. Participants encountering textual problems in their own work with Renaissance English manuscripts were encouraged to discuss them with the class.

Director: Laetitia Yeandle is the Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She coedited with Richard Dunn The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649 (1996) and edited the text of The Tractates for the Folger Library Edition of The Works of Richard Hooker (1990). With Jean Preston, she coauthored Handwriting in England: 1440–1650 (1992), and with Giles E. Dawson, Elizabethan Handwriting, 1500–1650: A Manual (1966).