Projects
(Re)Writing history in early modern Mechelen: genesis of text and gradations of authorship in an urban chronicle tradition. University of Antwerp
The Untold History of Early Modern Psychology: Soul, Mind, and Body, Between the Fifth Lateran Council and Cartesian Dualism (1513-1662) KU Leuven
What is the mind and how does it relate to our body? These are central questions in today’s philosophy of mind, and they have a long history. The very concept of “mind”, as the item responsible for cognition, and the so-called “mind-body problem” are normally traced back to the philosophy of René Descartes (1597-1650) and his mindbody dualism. But were Descartes’ views solely the result of his ingenuity, or were they rather a synthesis of ...
Did an Early Ordovician onset of cooling of the Early Palaeozoic Icehouse trigger the most important rise in biodiversity in the history of life on Earth? Ghent University
The Ordovician world was long considered to be in a super-greenhouse state during almost its entire duration, marked only by intense glaciations at the end of the period. This end-Ordovician Hirnantian glaciation is famous for causing one of the three great Phanerozoic mass extinction events. However, emerging evidence now suggests that cooling towards the Hirnantian glacial maximum, and thus the onset of the Early Palaeozoic Ice Age (EPI) ...
The printer's widow: gender, family and editorial choices in early modern Antwerp, Louvain and Douai (long 16th - 17th centuries) KU Leuven
The early modern printing and publishing business was a man’s world. The new technology of the printing press was associated with men’s work, due to considerable start-up costs and associations with skilled work, literacy, and learned men. Why then, did early modern title pages regularly name women-led businesses as their place of production? This dissertation investigates how women participated in the production and sale of rare books and ...
STREAM - A spatiotemporal research infrastructure for Early Modern Flanders and Brabant Vrije Universiteit Brussel
The cross-linguistic application of grammatical categories: The early modern genesis of a contemporary problem, with specific reference to the relevance of ‘typically Ancient Greek’ categories (ca. 1470–1800) KU Leuven
Is it justified to describe different languages by means of the same grammatical categories? The cross-linguistic application of categories is still a thorny issue in current linguistics, the roots of which lie in the early modern period, when West-European scholars started to produce on a large scale grammars of languages other than Latin. Although the Latin tradition remained the main descriptive framework, the Renaissance rediscovery of ...
"Language" and/vs. "dialect" in Early Modern linguistic thought: concept formation and empirical underpinnings, with special reference to the ancient Greek background KU Leuven
Although the roots of the twin concepts "language" and "dialect" hark back to Greek antiquity, there is no general agreement about their definitions in present-day scholarship, to the point that a number of scholars refrain from using the term "dialect" as distinct from "language." In order to arrive at a better understanding of this pair and its modern conceptualization, a systematic historiographical study of its origin and development is ...
A Face of One's Own. Author Portraits and the Construction of Female Intellectual Authority in Early Modern Europe KU Leuven
This project investigates women’s historical effort to embody intellectual authority, by analyzing portraits of learned women as agents of public image in the male-dominated European intellectual field (1550-1800).
The complex position of learned women in the early modern public sphere has been the focus of increased attention. However, recent historical studies are characterized by a strongly biographical and text-based methodology ...