The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 12.0072  Monday, 15 January 2001

From:           Richard Kuhta <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>
Date:           Thursday, 11 Jan 2001 09:18:12 -0500
Subject:        Laetitia Yeandle

 Dear Folger Readers,

After 44 years of service to the Folger, Laetitia Yeandle, Curator of
Manuscripts, has announced her retirement, effective January 31, 2001.
Laetitia came to the Folger in 1957 when Louis B. Wright was the
Director, and worked alongside Giles Dawson for 11 years.  As Curator of
Manuscripts, Laetitia has established an international reputation
throughout the research community for her teaching, scholarship and
dedication to Folger Readers.

Laetitia has asked, several times, that there be no special event to
mark the occasion of her retirement, and we will honor her request.
However, it is our feeling that private expressions of thanks and
appreciation would be meaningful and I write to invite your
participation.  We are assembling a volume of photographs and
reflections, to be specially bound by Folger conservators for
presentation in February and encourage your contributions.  These can
take any form you choose, from handwritten notes to letters, email
(This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), or cards.  Our only request is that your name is
legible and that your greeting can be included in a bound volume.  As
this is a surprise, please send your contributions to my attention by
February 1st.

Reciting Laetitia's accomplishments properly would take pages and end
without doing justice to the ineffable qualities that make her, and her
work, so distinguished.  Her career opus, The Journal of John Winthrop,
1630-1649 (Harvard University Press, 1996) was praised in the New York
Review of Books as "a model of editorial scholarship."  Her discovery of
an unrecorded manuscript poem of some 1,800 lines by Thomas Traherne was
a landmark of detection, written up in the TLS in a way which well
describes Laetitia's art, "...she was struck by the quality of some of
the lines and the authorial emendations which it contained."  Her Manual
on English Handwriting, written with Jean Preston and now in its 3rd
printing, has been an essential source for many working in the early
modern period.  Laetitia's popular seminar for the Folger Institute,
"Introduction to Paleography," has been a foundation stone in many
careers.  Her work with and for the Renaissance English Text Society and
the Society of American Archivists has earned her lifelong friendships,
but what has perhaps endeared her most has been that combination of
modesty and brilliance which surfaces daily in her work with the Folger
collection, and for Folger Readers.

There will be other forms of tribute, but we sense this may be the most
meaningful, coming from you.  We invite your reflections.  Thank you.

 Richard J. Kuhta
 Librarian
 Folger Shakespeare Library
 201 E. Capitol Street, SE
 Washington, DC 20003
 tele: (202) 675-0327
 fax: (202) 675-0313
 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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