- Renaissance Humanism, Early Modern History, History of the Book, Marginalia, History of Reading, History of Venice, and 20 moreHistory of Ideas, Early Modern Intellectual History, Print Culture, Early modern Ottoman History, Mediterranean Studies, Early Modern Europe, Book History, 17th Century Dutch Republic, History of the Mediterranean, Diplomatic History, Renaissance Studies, Ottoman Empire, Manuscripts and Early Printed Books, Venetian History, Cultural History, Renaissance Italy, Early Modern Italy, Italian Humanism, Republic of Letters (Early Modern History), and Intellectual and cultural historyedit
- I am a cultural and intellectual historian of the early modern world. My work focuses primarily on the nexus of knowl... moreI am a cultural and intellectual historian of the early modern world. My work focuses primarily on the nexus of knowledge-making, cultural contact, and religion as a global phenomenon. I am currently a Research Fellow in History at Trinity College, Cambridge. I am currently at work on two projects. My first book, under contract with Harvard University Press, is a study of how early modern scholars studied cultural and religious diversity. It follows Martin Crusius, a Lutheran professor of Greek, and his investigation into Greek life under Ottoman Rule. My second project is a study of Protestant proselytization in the early modern Middle East.
I defended my dissertation at Princeton University in 2020 and studied History and Classics in Amsterdam and Venice. I have taught at the universities of Amsterdam, Princeton, and Utrecht. My research has been generously supported by the Renaissance Society of America, the Bibliographical Society of America, the DAAD, the Huntington Library, the Social Science Research Council and the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. In the 2019-2020AY I was the recipient of a Josephine de Karman Fellowship and Princeton's Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellowship. I have been a visiting researcher at the University of Tübingen (2017, 2019), the Descartes Centre of Utrecht University (2017), the University of Oxford (2018), and the Vossius Center of the University of Amsterdam (2020).edit
This article uses the life and writings of Martin Crusius (1526–1607), professor of Latin and Greek at the university of Tübingen, to explore the methods and tools of early modern ethnographers. For decades Crusius recorded contemporary... more
This article uses the life and writings of Martin Crusius (1526–1607), professor of Latin and Greek at the university of Tübingen, to explore the methods and tools of early modern ethnographers. For decades Crusius recorded contemporary Greek life under Ottoman rule by investigating a broad array of visual, material, textual, and oral evidence and by mustering various scholarly methods. The documentary record that Crusius compiled demonstrates that early modern ethnography was one among many period forms of knowledge making in which tropes and techniques from several fields and disciplines came together fruitfully.
It can be read here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/07504628A15978B10F585625BF470689/S0034433818000040a.pdf/reconstructing_the_ottoman_greek_world_early_modern_ethnography_in_the_household_of_martin_crusius.pdf
It can be read here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/07504628A15978B10F585625BF470689/S0034433818000040a.pdf/reconstructing_the_ottoman_greek_world_early_modern_ethnography_in_the_household_of_martin_crusius.pdf
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Large numbers of annotated books that belonged to members of the Winthrop family — which included the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other individuals prominent in the early modern British Atlantic world — survive... more
Large numbers of annotated books that belonged to members of the Winthrop family — which included the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and other individuals prominent in the early modern British Atlantic world — survive in libraries across the Northeastern United States. The notes in their margins reveal how the Winthrops responded to a vast array of material, from alchemical recipes to political tracts. Once deciphered and compared with other documents, such as letters and diaries, they show not only the ways in which the members of the family read these varied books, but also how they learned to do so and how they passed their skills on to new generations. Most important, they reveal that reading played a central role in the family's life and in its members' responses to political and religious crises.
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Over the past three decades, the history of reading has become an increasingly lively field of scholarship. Important case studies have documented the freedom that individual readers have enjoyed in handling their books. On a structural... more
Over the past three decades, the history of reading has become an increasingly lively field of scholarship. Important case studies have documented the freedom that individual readers have enjoyed in handling their books. On a structural level, however, the scholarship has been hampered by limited access to an inherently fragmented body of evidence. This article introduces a new research project, Annotated Books Online (ABO), which aims to provide a platform for the study of manuscript annotations in early modern printed books. ABO offers an open-access research environment where scholars and students can collect and view new evidence, as well as collaborate on transcriptions, translations, and new research initiatives. To illuminate the promising potential of new research on marginalia and adumbrate
the challenges ahead, the second part of this article offers a case study of three intriguing annotated copies of Homer, once owned by the German reformer Philipp Melanchthon (Columbia University Library, Plimpton 880 1517 H37).
the challenges ahead, the second part of this article offers a case study of three intriguing annotated copies of Homer, once owned by the German reformer Philipp Melanchthon (Columbia University Library, Plimpton 880 1517 H37).
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Publication accompanying the exhibition 'Sicily and the Sea', which is held at, i.a., the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam (in 2015), and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (in 2016),
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Guest post for The Junto on the Winthrop family and the ways in which they collected their books on both sides of the Atlantic. Co-authored by Madeline McMahon.
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Blog post for the Journal of the History of Ideas on an 18th-century Dutch philologist called Pieter Fontein (1708-1788), who we encounter while reading the marginalia that Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) left in his copy of the ancient Greek... more
Blog post for the Journal of the History of Ideas on an 18th-century Dutch philologist called Pieter Fontein (1708-1788), who we encounter while reading the marginalia that Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614) left in his copy of the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus.
http://jhiblog.org/2015/04/06/personal-philology/
http://jhiblog.org/2015/04/06/personal-philology/
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Blog post for the Journal of the History of Ideas on the marginalia of two early modern editors —Pieter Fontein (1708-1788) and Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614)— and their deep interest in the life and work of the ancient Greek philosopher... more
Blog post for the Journal of the History of Ideas on the marginalia of two early modern editors —Pieter Fontein (1708-1788) and Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614)— and their deep interest in the life and work of the ancient Greek philosopher Theophrastus. http://jhiblog.org/2015/10/12/two-editors-and-their-theophrastus/
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Recent research has stressed the highly mobile nature of late Medieval and Early Modern European life. All kinds of people were on the move for a huge variety of reasons, encouraged by longer-term processes such as urbanization,... more
Recent research has stressed the highly mobile nature of late Medieval and Early Modern European life. All kinds of people were on the move for a huge variety of reasons, encouraged by longer-term processes such as urbanization, colonization and improvements in transport and communications infrastructures. This mobility was absolutely fundamental to the cultural, political, economic and religious changes that characterized the Renaissance period.
However, there is still much to know about the practical experience – the physicality and materiality - of mobility in this period; for instance, about the spaces through which mobile people passed (which became important sites of encounter and exchange), the forms of transport they used, the physical, mental and emotional ‘baggage’ that they carried with them. How was access to and experience of mobility shaped by the traveller’s class, gender, religion and age? How did Renaissance authorities, both at city and state level, respond to this mobility, attempting to enable, harness or control it? How, exactly, did mobility facilitate communication and cultural exchange, across and beyond the continent? And how does studying people’s movements shed new light on the great changes of the period, from the transmission of Renaissance culture to Europe’s contact with the rest of the world?
However, there is still much to know about the practical experience – the physicality and materiality - of mobility in this period; for instance, about the spaces through which mobile people passed (which became important sites of encounter and exchange), the forms of transport they used, the physical, mental and emotional ‘baggage’ that they carried with them. How was access to and experience of mobility shaped by the traveller’s class, gender, religion and age? How did Renaissance authorities, both at city and state level, respond to this mobility, attempting to enable, harness or control it? How, exactly, did mobility facilitate communication and cultural exchange, across and beyond the continent? And how does studying people’s movements shed new light on the great changes of the period, from the transmission of Renaissance culture to Europe’s contact with the rest of the world?
Research Interests:
Colloquium 4-5 July 2019 Warburg Haus, Hamburg In a time of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ we may long for an earlier, purportedly simpler world in which facts were simply facts. But were facts ever that simple? How did past... more
Colloquium
4-5 July 2019
Warburg Haus, Hamburg
In a time of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ we may long for an earlier, purportedly simpler world in which facts were simply facts. But were facts ever that simple? How did past generations separate fact from fiction; truth from falsehood; and proof from hearsay? Tradition has it that written proof once ruled supreme, whether it concerned early modern scholarship or litigation, the spiritual world of demons and the saints or the worldly realm of land rights and taxation. As historians in different fields have since realised, proof was an omnipresent, but nevertheless contested practice that bred fierce conflicts about degrees of trust, the nature of truth, the boundaries between scholarly disciplines, and the purview of official institutions.
The historiography on proof is varied, and scholars work in parallel traditions; historians of science are inspired by Bruno Latour; historians of religion look at wonders and miracles; historians of scholarship discuss authenticity and forgery; cultural historians are fascinated by the witness. Proof, in short, has enjoyed much critical press within today’s scholarly disciplines. Rarely, however, have scholars integrated these individual observations to probe the shared European legacy of proof. This conference seeks to provide an international forum for an interdisciplinary exchange about the concept of proof in its different early modern guises. It invites scholars – from political to religious history, from law to the history of art and science – to think about the common intellectual problems that once underlay practices of proving in the early modern period.
With its focus on the period from roughly 1400 to 1800 it hones in on what we posit was a crucial phase in the history of proof. The early modern period is traditionally affiliated with the construction of precisely the disciplinary boundaries that continue to separate different strands of contemporary research on proving. Proof itself underwent a similar transformation: different ways of proving became specific to separate disciplines. To understand, then, why such a fundamental concept as proof is still too often studied within and hardly across separate scholarly disciplines we need to return to the very moment when different forms of proof were articulated for different spheres of life and thought. But instead of making the mute point that disciplines develop exclusive forms of proving, our conference seeks to understand the processes by which the disiplinization of proof could ultimately come about: for instance, to what extent did the articulation and definition of proof contribute to the development of disciplinary boundaries, and vice versa? Did its articulation in one discipline influence the development in others? Did certain traditions of proving influence this process in disproportionate ways? Did the early modern period develop a hierarchy of proof?
Attendance is free, but if you want to join, please register via email (toelle@gmail.com) before 25 June 2019. Lunch and refreshments are provided during the day, but dinner comes at an extra cost (about €60), should you chose to join us for dinner.
4-5 July 2019
Warburg Haus, Hamburg
In a time of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ we may long for an earlier, purportedly simpler world in which facts were simply facts. But were facts ever that simple? How did past generations separate fact from fiction; truth from falsehood; and proof from hearsay? Tradition has it that written proof once ruled supreme, whether it concerned early modern scholarship or litigation, the spiritual world of demons and the saints or the worldly realm of land rights and taxation. As historians in different fields have since realised, proof was an omnipresent, but nevertheless contested practice that bred fierce conflicts about degrees of trust, the nature of truth, the boundaries between scholarly disciplines, and the purview of official institutions.
The historiography on proof is varied, and scholars work in parallel traditions; historians of science are inspired by Bruno Latour; historians of religion look at wonders and miracles; historians of scholarship discuss authenticity and forgery; cultural historians are fascinated by the witness. Proof, in short, has enjoyed much critical press within today’s scholarly disciplines. Rarely, however, have scholars integrated these individual observations to probe the shared European legacy of proof. This conference seeks to provide an international forum for an interdisciplinary exchange about the concept of proof in its different early modern guises. It invites scholars – from political to religious history, from law to the history of art and science – to think about the common intellectual problems that once underlay practices of proving in the early modern period.
With its focus on the period from roughly 1400 to 1800 it hones in on what we posit was a crucial phase in the history of proof. The early modern period is traditionally affiliated with the construction of precisely the disciplinary boundaries that continue to separate different strands of contemporary research on proving. Proof itself underwent a similar transformation: different ways of proving became specific to separate disciplines. To understand, then, why such a fundamental concept as proof is still too often studied within and hardly across separate scholarly disciplines we need to return to the very moment when different forms of proof were articulated for different spheres of life and thought. But instead of making the mute point that disciplines develop exclusive forms of proving, our conference seeks to understand the processes by which the disiplinization of proof could ultimately come about: for instance, to what extent did the articulation and definition of proof contribute to the development of disciplinary boundaries, and vice versa? Did its articulation in one discipline influence the development in others? Did certain traditions of proving influence this process in disproportionate ways? Did the early modern period develop a hierarchy of proof?
Attendance is free, but if you want to join, please register via email (toelle@gmail.com) before 25 June 2019. Lunch and refreshments are provided during the day, but dinner comes at an extra cost (about €60), should you chose to join us for dinner.