Courses

This hands-on class invites participants to explore how individuals folded letters to function as their own creative, and occasionally top-secret, enclosures before (and after) the invention of the envelope in 1830. Use paper, wax, scissors, and seals to reconstruct several historical letterlocking formats found in the Rosenbach’s collection while discussing the relative security, innovation, and elegance of each model. 

In celebration of Mexican Independence Day, join us for a yoga experience inspired by the visionary work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz—the 17th-century Mexican poet, philosopher, and nun who defied convention to pursue a life of intellectual and spiritual inquiry. 

In this class, participants will join that sustainable tradition, recycling vegetable cartons into one-of-a-kind blank books inspired by Anne Goy’s crisscross binding! Along the way, this workshop teaches broadly useful bookbinding skills, including how to prepare a text block and fundamental sewing techniques.

In this hands-on printing workshop, you will use a 19th century iron handpress to create your own, personal copies of U.S. founding documents–such as Common Sense and the Federalist Papers. The workshop will be accompanied by a discussion of how print culture has served as a tool of change and given voice to the people, with examples from the Rosenbach collection.

On the 250th anniversary of Girard’s arrival in Philadelphia, join the Rosenbach for an afternoon seminar focused on the Bass Otis portrait and the story of Girard’s decision to cast his lot with the young American republic.

This four-session class will cover the foundations of letterpress, from setting metal type to pulling prints. Learn about the history of printing through exploring an extraordinary publication: Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral.  

Make your own portrait miniature in this in-person workshop. Bring a small photo or print of a favorite image (up to about 4”x5”), and John Wind will provide all the other supplies needed to embellish and frame the image in a meaningful and personal way.  

This five-week course offers an in-depth exploration of Anne Brontë’s life and works. The youngest of the Brontës, Anne is sometimes overshadowed by her elder sisters, whose works have achieved greater prominence in literature and culture. Yet Anne’s writing is no less powerful or profound, offering a unique voice unafraid to confront and represent the darker, more uncomfortable aspects of 19th-century culture. Through close reading, discussion, and consideration of the historical context of her two published novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), this course will explore what Anne had to say about morality, gender, class, religion and the struggle for independence. We will give particular attention to how and why Anne wanted to interrogate and challenge Victorian social conventions with clarity and courage.  

Our course will take place across six sessions, with one week between each meeting.

We’ll examine how William Davenant’s departures from (and additions to) Shakespeare’s original text transformed the tragedy for new audiences—and what these changes reveal about the play’s afterlife. 

Jewish activism before and during the American Revolution helped set the stage for the new United States’ Constitution. Paul Finkelman will discuss this important history of Jewish participation in the American Revolution. 

Let’s bring back the Medieval trend of wearing books as fashion accessories! In this hands-on bookbinding class, you will craft a belt book inspired by the Rosenbach’s 1364 illuminated almanac [MS 1004/29], which is also known as a “bat book.” 

In this five-session course, we will uncover some of the medieval influences upon Eliot’s most famous work, including selections from The Wasteland, Four Quartets, and Murder in the Cathedral. Along the way, we’ll investigate how and where he draws upon the Arthurian Grail cycle, Christian mysticism, and The Canterbury Tales.

The apparent simplicity of Emily Dickinson’s poetry is deceptive—beneath her brief, direct language lies profound depths of emotion and insight. In this three-part yoga series, we’ll explore her life and work through movement, breath, and reflection.

Session 3: Wonder & Interconnection 

Beginning with Edgar Allan Poe’s influence on Horacio Quiroga—who adapted Poe’s gothic intensity and psychological suspense to the jungles and borderlands of the River Plate and Misiones—this course traces the evolution of the contemporary Latin American short story in English translation. We’ll read pivotal writers—Borges, Rulfo, Fuentes, García Márquez—and spotlight the vital contributions of women writers, including Rosario Ferré and Mariana Enríquez. 

This course will explore this theme in three plays: the perfectly formed comedy As You Like It, the searing tragedy King Lear, and the graceful romance The Winter’s Tale. Along the way, we will discover that the virtues of the green world speak especially powerfully to us today in a time of division and disruption in both the social and the natural environments.  

Do you love discovering fascinating stories from history? Have you ever wanted to get up close and personal with museum and library collection objects, including rare books, manuscripts, paintings, and decorative arts? If so, then let the Rosenbach become your laboratory for study.   

This book is more than a romance, more than a slice of history brought to life— it’s a detailed demonstration of how individuals of art and wit can preserve their agency in eras when it’s under attack from oppressive societal forces. In close reading, we will explore the lasting power of Stendhal’s vision and the legacy of The Charterhouse of Parma. 

In this hands-on class, you will learn to create dynamic booklets of your own, from the humble pamphlet to a single-sheet book to the French door zine. No prior zine-making experience is required. 

This immersive weekly course will help readers explore (and enjoy) the intricacies, enigmas, and hilarities of Ulysses. First-time readers of the novel will find many resources for understanding this challenging work. For those returning to the novel, this will be a great way to delve into a book whose depths never seem to end.

This is the adventure of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy—The Golden Compass (UK title: Northern Lights), The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. These books are not only international bestsellers, they have been adapted for film, stage, graphic novels, and other media. In this course, we will read these books in community, following their many paths and considering their literary inheritance. 

The sewn boards binding developed by Gary Frost is a modern version of one of the earliest forms of the codex. This structure has been used to rebind books as a library binding and as a limited-edition binding for new artist works. The book opens flat and is a great structure for beginning bookbinders. In this class, you will learn to make this unique book, which can be a notebook, a sketchbook, a gift, or a model for additional handmade books. 

Over the course of four biweekly meetings we’ll read some of Johnson’s most important works—essays, poems, fiction, travel narratives, biography—and selections from Boswell’s Life. The focus will always be on the humanity of the man behind the works.  

Readings from British Biography: A Reader  will inform course discussion on what makes a biography comparable in some ways to the novel and in others to works of history and literary criticism.

In this course, we will look together at these lithographs to examine Dalí’s unique take on the misadventures of the knight errant Don Quixote and his faithful sidekick Sancho Panza, exploring such topics as the magical potential of madness and the transformative capacities of the imagination.

As Melville moved between historical fictions of the late-18th century and portraits of America in the 1850s, he fictionalized figures like Benjamin Franklin, rewrote the memoirs of sea captains and frontier lawmen, and captured with brutal precision and irony, elements of the American character that endure to this day. In the first three sessions of this course, we will cover one short work per week, reserving the last two sessions for the raucous satire of The Confidence-man, which Philip Roth described in 2016 as “the darkly pessimistic, daringly inventive novel” that speaks most directly to America today.  

In this course, we'll explore this stylistic and psychological masterpiece. Each session will include some relevant background, but our discussions will be guided by the interests of our participants. Likely topics will include gender, history, cities, war, time, trauma, power, sexuality, and family.