Dr Heather Wolfe

Munby Fellow 2021-22

Dr Heather Wolfe is Curator of Manuscripts and Associate Librarian for Audience Development at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. She holds a BA from Amherst College, an MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge and an MLIS from UCLA. She has been principal investigator of scholarly projects including Early Modern Manuscripts Online (2014-2017) and Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early modern foodways and cultures (2017-2021) and is co-developer of Dromio, an innovative online interface for teaching and transcribing early modern manuscripts.

Munby Fellow Project: 'Decoding Early Modern Writing Paper'

Heather’s research explores the socio-materiality of early modern paper consumption and looks at the long history of our modern everyday paper ‘choices’. It provides a bibliographic methodology for interpreting texts in relation to the nature of their paper substrates. Paper was as varied in the early modern period as it is now, and each variant carries meaning that is now largely lost, but not unrecoverable.

During her Munby fellowship, Heather worked intensively to survey, analyse and characterise the use of paper in the manuscripts and archives of the University Library and various college collections in support of her current monograph project. She examined watermarks and paper sizes and qualities in relation to textual genres, focusing primarily on unbound material, but also blank books. She focused particularly on John Spilman, the most well-known papermaker in Elizabethan England, identifying examples of his paper and tracing documents that shed light on his life and trading activities. She also studied the court records relating to Sturbridge Fair in the University Archives tracing paper use and various incidents of book and paper-related infractions.

Recent publications:

• “More Content, Less Context: Rethinking Access,” Archives: Power, Truth, and Fiction. Co-written with Victoria Van Hyning. Eds Alison Wiggins and Andrew Prescott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024): 174–191  
• “On Curating Filing Holes,” Inscription: the Journal of Material Text, Issue 2: Holes (October 2021): 29–49. Gill Partington, Adam Smyth, Simon Morris, editors. 
• “Letterwriting and paper connoisseurship in elite households in early modern England,” Working with Paper: Gendered Practices in the History of Knowledge. Eds Carla Bittel, Elaine Leong, and Christine von Oertzen (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019): 17–31 
• “Shakespeare’s coat of arms: the surviving manuscripts in context,” Shakespeare on the Record: Researching an Early Modern Life. Ed. Hannah Crummé (Arden Shakespeare, 2019): 33–76. Winner of the 2019 Janette Harley Prize by the British Records Association (for the entire volume). 
• “The material culture of record keeping in early modern England,” Archives and Information in the Early Modern World. Co-written with Peter Stallybrass. Eds Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters and Alexandra Walsham. Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 212 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018): 179–208. Winner of the 2019 Archival History article award by the Society of American Archivists.