Notes on Contributors
Paola Cifarelli
is full professor of French at the University of Turin; she studies the diachrony of French in 15th- and 16th-century literary texts and is particularly interested in short narratives, French-Italian cultural relations and the transition of medieval texts from manuscript to print.
Paul Pelckmans
is Emeritus Professor of French and General Literature at Antwerp University. His publications on literary anthropology are essentially focused on French 17th- and 18th-century novels and correspondences. Recent books: Op wereldreis met Voltaire (2020) and Sterven in brieven (2022).
Stefan Schoettke
was an assistant at the University of Geneva, a lecturer at Yale and a FNRS fellow at Paris III. From 1998 to 2024, he was a lecturer at the Geneva School of Business Administration (University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland). His research focuses on 17th-century French literature, in particular the works and the reception of La Fontaine, on the relationship between fables and emblems, and on the iconography of fables in the decorative arts of the first half of the 18th century.
Lisanne Wepler
is an art historian and graphic artist who owns her own company, drukdrukpaint. From 2022 till 2025 she worked as an art historical researcher and curator of 17th-century Dutch paintings (2023 ad interim) at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. She is author of Bilderzählungen in der Vogelmalerei des niederländischen Barocks (2014) and Tierfabeln von Ãsop bis La Fontaine in Gemäldeserien seit 1600 (2021). She has expanded her interest to trees in art, for which she is developing a research project (artist book: Bomen â onze buren, 2025).
Céline Zaepffel
is a Lecturer in French Literature and Culture at Leiden University. She was Johan Huizinga Fellow at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 2022â2023. Her research focuses on the role of literature and visual culture in the transmission of knowledge and ideas, with a particular interest in childrenâs literature, popular culture, and the history of education. Her work also explores the uses of fiction in educational and ideological contexts. She is the author of Apprendre encore les Fables de La Fontaine. Itinéraire de la fable ésopique illustrée dans la pédagogie française (1500â2020) (2025) and The Goose and the Machine: Board Games in the Dutch Industrial Revolution (2026).