Booking and details
Reserve Your SpotDates Fri, Jun 26, 2026, at 12pm
Venue Virtual on Zoom
Tickets Free, registration required
Early modern fertility, miscarriage, and pregnancy loss. British feminist fiction in the long eighteenth century. Hand-made artist promptbooks exploring identity and gender fluidity.
Interested? Join us for the next Virtual Folger Salon.
About Folger Salon
Learn about research happening at the Folger in real time! Each month, Folger Institute scholar and artist fellows share their most exciting finds and thought-provoking challenges, followed by Q&A. Most Folger Salons take place in-person in the Great Hall at the Folger Shakespeare Library, but occasionally these events are held virtually to showcase the work of the Folger’s Virtual Fellows.
This is a free event, with registration required.
Speakers
Jennifer Evans
2025-26 Short-term Fellow
Margaret Hannay Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender-Folger Institute Fellow
Wounded Wombs and Empty Cradles: Miscarriage and Pregnancy Loss in Early Modern England c.1600-1780
This monograph length project examines medical publications, manuscript recipe books, and personal correspondence to understand the experiences of miscarriage and stillbirth in early modern England, c. 1600-1780. It focuses on three key areas: Firstly, understanding reproductive failure, where it asks how miscarriage represented reproductive failure and therefore was considered a form of infertility. Secondly, experiences of treating the miscarrying body where the project explores the disparities between medical theory and lived experiences and illuminates the ways in which reproductive failures stimulated the creation of a gendered body of knowledge about gestation and birth. Finally, the project will thicken our understanding of responses to loss by considering how travel, manual work, and the weather generated self-recrimination.
Elizabeth P. Porter
2025-26 Short-term Fellow
Jake Yuzna
2025-26 Artistic Research Fellow
Promptbooks for Queer Play
Exploring the form of theatrical promptbooks as an alternative to traditional film scripts, the project Promptbooks for Queer Play explores the fluidity of gender and identity in theater and its relationship to contemporary queer communities. Centering on shifting identities found within Shakespeare’s plays, Promptbooks for Queer Play will draw from the promptbooks, theatrical design, costumes, and props holdings at the Folger Library to create new hand-made artist promptbooks.
About Folger Institute
The Folger Institute is a center for early modern research at the Folger Shakespeare Library that brings public audiences together with researchers to explore the cultures and legacies of the early modern world. Learn more.
Re-writing and Reimagining Early Modern Witchcraft Through Creative Practice
Artistic Research Fellow Evelyn Reidy shares how she is using the Folger’s collection material related to witchcraft, early modern beliefs, and women’s knowledge to help her portray the women executed in Salem in 1692-93 in her new play, More Weight, or I Saw Goody Proctor at the Gift Shop.
The one (fem.)
Artistic Research Fellow Billy Morgan shares and contextualizes an excerpt of a fiction piece shaped by their work at the Folger.
Drafting Narratives: Weaving, Sequence, and Story in the Folger Library Archive
Artistic Research Fellow, Kate Nartker, transforms weave drafts from one of our recipe books into cloth and film.
The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe
In his groundbreaking documentary, We Were Here, Folger Fellow Fred Kuwornu shares the diverse African presence in Renaissance Europe—princes, ambassadors, saints, artists, scholars, and knights—all revealed through art from the period.
Artist Dominick Porras Reconstructs Classical Narratives of the Americas
Porras, a Folger Artist Fellow, shares what inspired him, from the Folger collection to Indigenous futurism, in the creation of his new media work, de Bry’s Slipstream.