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The Folger Institute

Early modern print of a scholar working in a cluttered room

The Folger Institute is a center for advanced research in the early modern humanities at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Founded in 1970, the Institute gathers interdisciplinary communities of scholars for collections-based research. The Institute sets agendas, models best practices, and tests new methods for scholarship. Together with colleagues around the Folger, the Institute seeks to bring public audiences together with scholarly ones as we discover more about the cultures and legacies of the early modern world.

The Institute supports the curiosity-driven hunches that send scholars to our archives for evidence and to the Folger’s community spaces for discussion and feedback. Institute offerings facilitate the concentrated work of reading and writing, and provide access to modern scholarship, digital resources, and sociable spaces for trial and redirection and recommitment. We take seriously the questions that interrupt received wisdom, exceed easy answers, and open the scope of our understanding of early modernity with all its resonances in our own conflicted world.

Learn more about the Institute’s work

“A smale remembrance”: Elizabethan Posy Rings
Collation

“A smale remembrance”: Elizabethan Posy Rings

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Author
Leah Hampton

A closer look at 17th century engraved rings in the Folger’s collection

North Africa Through the Eyes of England
Collation

North Africa Through the Eyes of England

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Author
Yusuf Mansoor

A look at some of the colonial sources that informed the understanding that 17th century English people had of North Africa.

What of Shakespeare?
Collation

What of Shakespeare?

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Author
Deborah Finkelstein

Findings from a 1945 survey asking patrons of a library about their experiences reading, watching, and performing Shakespeare.