Folger Collections

Ansel shares how her questions as an artist fellow about Fuseli’s take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth inspired her to create two abstract, large-scale oil paintings but this time from a woman’s perspective that celebrates the play’s sisterhood.

Have you ever noticed a decorated paper on a volume in our collection and wondered how it was made?

The solution to this month’s Folger Mystery reveals the purpose of dots and slashes drawn in early modern account books

More new exciting additions to the Folger collection!

Explore First Folios owned by two 17th-century women, a prop dagger used by a leading actress of the late 19th century, and scripts and programs from a 20th-century women’s theater in Japan that’s still performing Shakespeare today.

Caroline Duroselle-Melish, Curator of Early Modern Books and Prints, highlights some exciting new items in the Folger collection

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

Conservation interns from the Folger and Library of Congress share their experience working across both institutions to learn new techniques for treating materials and for preparing materials for exhibition.

Through her correspondence, Delia Salter Bacon reveals what it was like to undergo a 19th century “water-cure”

Fellow Jean Marie Christensen explores beauty standards of the 17th century.

Herbarius: A New Herbal for the Anthropocene, by 2024-25 artist research fellow Suzette Marie Martin, is a “deconstructed manuscript” series of paintings that traces the intercontinental dispersal of non-native plant species through formerly valued medicinal herbs, now despised as weeds.

In which a 16th century monk flips Erika off, and we all pick out our next tattoos