Projects
The emergence of a 'modern' labour market? Tracing rural labourers in an early modern commercial farming system: the Waasland polder area (1650-1850) University of Antwerp
The Presence of Classics in Early Modern Book History (PreCEM) KU Leuven
Printing images in the early modern Low Countries. Patents, copyrights, and the separation of art and technology, 1555-1795 Ghent University
Like Instagram today, new print technology caused a revolutionary increase in the number of images in the early modern period. In that same era, art and technology became separated. Today, art and technology are considered different types of human making, practised at different institutes and studied by different disciplines. Yet the separation of art and technology is not obvious; it was developed in Western Europe in the early modern ...
A dead language resuscitated? Ancient Greek in early modern culture and scholarship KU Leuven
Facing Diversity. Representations of Early Modern Learned Women Writers and the Construction of intellectual and literary authority (1500-1850) KU Leuven
The prototypical image of the learned has long been that of a man. This project reveals a different lineage. It investigates female representations of intellectual and literary authority at the dawn of modern science in the early modern era, systematically analyzing printed textual and visual portraits of women writers as agents of public authority. In traditional historiography on women’s contributions to the early modern European ...
History and Theory of Early Modern Architecture Ghent University
My research examines the practices and techniques of early modern architecture, with particular attention to fifteenth and sixteenth-century Italy. My work is pioneering in the authority it grants practical, working architectural drawings, renderings that are commonly overlooked by historians of architecture and art due to their utilitarian and workaday qualities. Since Giorgio Vasari, scholars have been conditioned to differentiate ...
Private partnerships in early modern Antwerp (1621-1791). University of Antwerp
Sabbatical Werner Thomas: Inquisition and social control in early modern Spain KU Leuven
Preparation of a publication (monograph) on Inquisition and social control in early modern Spain, building on my previous research on the persecution of Protestantism in the Iberian Peninsula. Not only will a sabbatical give me the opportunity to spend a longer period at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid – where the documents of the Consejo de Inquisición are kept – it will also be easier to work continuously and exclusively on the ...
Theatre society. Vernacular literary culture and the development of an early modern knowledge society in the Low Countries, 1450-1650 Ghent University
Between 1450 and 1650, the world of performative literature became the centre of a Western European media system. Performative literature also became a model for the public organization and communication of knowledge. This project studies ways in which the institutions, agents, and media of the theatre society of an early modern metropolis (in this case Antwerp) translated and applied knowledge and information.