Notes on Contributors
Laura Balbiani
is associate Professor of German Language and Linguistics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan (Italy). She studied in Milan and Heidelberg, got her PhD in Historical Linguistics working on Books of Secrets and scientific literature in the Early Modern Age and received the international award ‘Luigi De Franco’ for the best doctoral dissertation (2001): La magia naturalis di Giovan Battista della Porta: lingua, cultura e scienza in Europa all’inizio dell’età moderna. Laura is author of several essays on alchemy and medicine in the 16th and 17th centuries and her research interests focused on the cultural transfer between Germany and Italy in the fields of science and philosophy. Historical lexicography is the subject of her next project, a study on phraseology in bilingual dictionaries. She is working also as a translator and has published editions of several classics of German literature (Goethe, Hesse, Hauptmann, Hölderlin) and philosophy (Kant, Spalding) in Italian translation.
Petra Feuerstein-Herz
Dr. phil., Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, since the early 1990s librarian and researcher in Wolfenbüttel, head of the Department of Early Printed Books (until autumn 2022). Main research interests: Book and science history of the early modern period, with a focus on natural history and alchemy history. Publications (selection): – ‘Von heimlichkeit der Natur. Benutzungsspuren in alchemischen Anleitungsbüchern’, in Ute Schneider (ed.), Praxeologische Studien zur historischen Buchwissenschaft [= Medium Buch. Wolfenbütteler interdisziplinäre Forschungen 1 (2019)], pp. 45–68; – ‘Solve et Coagula. Handschriften und Drucke zur Alchemie in der Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel’, in Imprimatur N.F. XXV (2017), pp. 195–220; – ‘Weiße Seiten. Durchschossene Bücher in alten Bibliotheken’, Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte, 11 (2017), pp. 101–114, see also Ephemera. Abgelegenes und Vergängliches in der Kulturgeschichte von Druck und Buch. Festschrift für Petra Feuerstein-Herz, eds. by Hartmut Beyer and Peter Burschel, Medium Buch 3 (2021) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2022).
Laurence Grove
is Professor of French and Text/Image Studies and Director of the Stirling Maxwell Centre for the Study of Text/Image Cultures at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on historical aspects of text/image forms, and in particular ‘bande dessinée’. He is President of the International Bande Dessinée Society. As well as serving on the consultative committees of several journals, he is co-editor of Glasgow Emblem Studies (book series) and of European Comic Art. Laurence (also known as Billy) has authored (in full, jointly or as editor) twelve books and approximately seventy chapters or articles. He co-curated Comic Invention (Hunterian, Glasgow), Frank Quitely: The Art of Comics (Kelvingrove, Glasgow) and Demon Drink (Hunterian) and is co-author of their accompanying books. He is currently working towards exhibitions for Brussels and for the Western Isles on comics and their iconography. His ongoing book project, The Collapse of the Canon, looks at shifts in cultural norms away from ‘Great Books’ listings and asks why this should be so.
Britta-Juliane Kruse
is associate Professor (PD Dr.) at the Free University Berlin, research focus on Literature and Cultural History for the Late Medieval and Early Modern Era. Studies of Ancient and Modern German Literature, Art History and Classical Archaeology in Bonn and Berlin, PhD and Habilitation at the Free University Berlin. Her doctoral thesis dealt with recipes of gynecology: ‘Die Arznei ist Goldes wert’ – Mittelalterliche Frauenrezepte (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1997). For 15 years she has been active in various research projects for the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. This has resulted in two monographs in recent years: Korrespondenznetzwerke am Wolfenbütteler Hof. Briefwechsel von Julius und Hedwig von Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1550–1600), to be published 2024 by de Gruyter; Gelehrtenkultur und Sammlungspraxis. Architektur, Akteure und Wissensorganisation in der Universitätsbibliothek Helmstedt (1576–1810) (Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2023).
Stefan Laube
is associate Professor (PD Dr.) at the Institute for Cultural Studies at the Humboldt University Berlin; since 2006 various research tasks at the Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel, development of a research focus on alchemy, the monograph Alchemie&Augenschein. A History of Knowledge and Media will be published shortly by Matthes&Seitz Berlin, research interests: Visual Languages of Knowledge, Media History and Material Cultures, Collection and Museum History. Publications in selection: Einladende Buch-Anfänge. Titelbilder des Wissens in der frühen Neuzeit (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2022); ‘„Wer langweilig ist, der kauffe mich“. Beiläufiges zum ‘Büchlein’’, in Ephemera. Abgelegenes und Vergängliches in der Kulturgeschichte von Druck und Buch. Festschrift für Petra Feuerstein-Herz, eds. by Hartmut Beyer and Peter Burschel, Medium Buch 3 (2021) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2022), pp. 115–136; Der Mensch und seine Dinge. Eine Geschichte der Zivilisation erzählt von 64 Objekten, (Munich: Hanser, 2020); ‘Medium & Magie. Wandlung und Wirkung in der Aufklärung’, Das Achtzehnte Jahrhundert, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Gesellschaft für die Erforschung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts 43 (2019) (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2019). Further information at www.stefanlaube.de.
Andrea van Leerdam
is curator of printed works at the Special Collections of Utrecht University Library. As a book historian, she has a special interest in early modern visual cultures and reading practices, and in digital approaches of print culture. A revised version of her dissertation Woodcuts as Reading Guides: How Images Shaped Knowledge Transmission in Medical-Astrological Books in Dutch (1500–1550) has been published by Amsterdam University Press in 2024. She co-edited, with Anna Dlabačová and John J. Thompson, Vernacular Books and Their Readers in the Early Age of Print (c. 1450–1600) (2023).
Sven Limbeck
Dr. phil., Herzog August Library Wolfenbüttel, Deputy Head of the Department Manuscripts and Special Collections; research interests in cultural, gender, and media history of the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Age (piety and liturgy, pictoriality of knowledge, mediology of manuscripts). Co-initiator of the network Historische Wissens- und Gebrauchsliteratur [https://hwgl.hypo theses.org/]. Publications (selection): with Rainer Falk (eds.), Casta Diva. Der schwule Opernführer, Berlin: Querverlag, 2019, ‘Alchemische Überlieferung in Kodex und Manuskript. Mediologische Aspekte ihrer Erschließung’, in Alchemie – Genealogie und Terminologie, Bilder, Techniken und Artefakte. Forschungen aus der Herzog August Bibliothek, eds. by Petra Feuerstein-Herz and Ute Frietsch, (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2021), pp. 27–48; with Rainer Schmitt and Sigrid Wirth (eds.): Musik im Umbruch. Studien zu Michael Praetorius (Wolfenbüttel: Herzog August Bibliothek, 2022); for more information see https://www.hab.de/author/dr-sven-limbeck/.
Robert Maclean
is a rare books librarian in University of Glasgow’s Archives & Special Collections’ Engagement Team. His current role sees him responsible for learning & teaching engagement, historical bibliography and book history enquiries, and rare book cataloguing. He has worked in University of Glasgow Library for the last twenty years. He occasionally publishes articles on the collections, the most recent being on the library’s eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century legal deposit acquisitions, with another article forthcoming on the library of a seventeenth-century Scottish sea captain.
Tillmann Taape
is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher in history of medicine and science at the Charité in Berlin. He obtained his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University in 2017 and was subsequently a postdoctoral scholar at the Making and Knowing Project at Columbia University and Senior Editor of the Project’s digital critical edition, Secrets of Craft and Nature. Tillmann has published on early modern alchemy, artisanal knowledge, and visual culture. His first monograph, Crafting Medicine, presents the first in-depth study of the Strasbourg surgeon Hieronymus Brunschwig and his influential printed books, published around 1500, which articulate a new way of knowing and practicing medicine. At present, Tillmann is working on a new history of distillation and is studying the Berlin physician and alchemist Leonhart Thurneisser.
Sergei Zotov
is a PhD student at the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance of the University of Warwick. His thesis focuses on the analysis of alchemical allegorical images from European, mainly German and English treatises of the fifteenth and sixteenth century. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Philology and Literature in Saratov State University (Russian Federation), and his Master of Cultural Studies from Russian State University of the Humanities (Moscow). Sergei authored and co-authored five monographs and popular books on European medieval and early modern religious art, icons, votives, magic, and alchemy (in Russian). In 2017–2022 he worked at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel as a junior researcher in Stefan Laube’s and Gia Toussaint’s projects on iconography of alchemy and medieval nuns.
Simone Zweifel
is a independent researcher in the field of Early Modern History and Book History. She received her Master of Arts in History and German Studies from Basel University, and her PhD in ‘Organisation and Culture’ with a focus on history from the University of St. Gallen. Her doctoral research focused on the production of early modern ‘Books of Secrets’ in a case-study on the publications of Johann Jacob Wecker (1528–1586) and his collaborators. Her dissertation was published in 2021 by De Gruyter: Aus Büchern Bücher machen: Zur Produktion und Multiplikation von Wissen in frühneuzeitlichen Kompilationen.