Projects
An epistemological study of material models from practical mathematics in early modern natural philosophical debates Ghent University
We investigate how objects known from practical mathematics where appropriated by natural philosophers as models for natural inquiry. Relevant aspects of the objects’ behavior were isolated for an understanding of natural phenomena (in optics, mechanics or meteorology). Direct manipulations of the objects often played an important role to achieve this. We will also engage in the reconstruction of some experiments
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 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 ...
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 ...
Involving Readers. Practices of Reading, Use, and Interaction in Early Modern Dutch Bibles (1522-1546) KU Leuven
In the words of the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986): “The book is not a closed entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relationships.” The book does not simply exist, but is created and shaped by the ongoing dialogue between makers and readers, text and context, time and space. This idea forms the backbone of this dissertation. In this study, I display the textual and material interactions between early ...
Women in Academia? Gendering knowledge transfers in university cities in the early modern LowCountries (Leuven & Leiden, 1575-1675) KU Leuven
This project aims to study the role of women as knowledge ‘agents’ in university cities to understand
how gender shaped the transfer of knowledge in the early modern period. Comparing the ‘Catholic’
university of Leuven with the ‘Calvinist’ university of Leiden (1575-1675), it inspects the impact of
social, cultural and religious parameters on the agency of women in early modern academia. It aims
to: 1) Identify the women ...
The Presence of Classics in Early Modern Book History (PreCEM) KU Leuven
Copying As Common Practice in Early Modern Architecture Ghent University
This project advances the hypothesis that techniques of mechanical drawing, and specifically, drawings produced by manual copying and direct tracing, served as the bedrock of early modern architectural education prior to the advent of formal schools of architecture. The normative histories of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian architecture have relegated drawings of mechanical subject matter (construction machinery, scaffolding systems, ...
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 ...