Spring 2024: Stallybrass, Wolfe, Schrire: "Erasable Writing Technologies 1500-1800"

Heather Wolfe, Ray Schrire, and Peter Stallybrass have been pondering the relationship between erasable notebooks and the materiality of numeracy for the last few years. Heather and Peter first published on erasable notebooks with Roger Chartier and Frank Mowery in 2004 in “Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England,” and they have since worked on building up the Folger’s collection of such notebooks. In 2007, they curated, with Michael Mendle, the Folger exhibition “Technologies of Writing in the Age of Print,” which explored the coexistence of new and old writing materials, scripts and practices in early modern England. Ray Schrire’s work on grammar schools led him to an exploration of the history of popular numeracy (and the co-existence of Roman numerals with Hindu-Arabic numerals in early modern Europe), which led all three of them to rethink what they thought they knew about writing materials and practices. See Ray’s blog in the Folger’s Collation: www.folger.edu....
Through long emails and Dropbox dumps, they have come to realize that the more they learn about the materiality and technologies of literacy and numeracy, the more significant but also complex the affordances of erasable writing appear to be. They have benefited greatly from attending Joe Howley’s fascinating talk on Roman writing equipment at the Material Texts workshop on February 26. Joe’s talk is now available online. They look forward to getting knee deep in the Prize Papers at the National Archives in London, which provide an unrivaled archive of documents taken from more than 35,000 ships captured by British privateers between1652 to 1815. They hope that these documents will help them better understand portable, inkless note-taking practices in early modern Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Such notes were taken on the street, at shops, markets, and fairs, and when traveling and on board ships. They were usually made when standing and far from the extensive writing equipment that merchants, secretaries, scribes, bureaucrats and authors assembled when sitting at their tables or desks.
Heather is consulting curator of manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Ray teaches in the department of history at Tel Aviv University, and Peter is living happily in what Marx calls “rural idiocy” after retiring from the University of Pennsylvania. Heather is currently writing a book on early modern writing paper in England; Ray is finishing The Grammar School: A Cognitive History, 1450-1700 (under contract to Oxford University Press), and Peter is still trying to finish Printing for Manuscript, based on his 2006 Rosenbach lectures.