Notes on Contributors
Renaud Adam
is a book historian of the early modern period. He earned his PhD in 2011 at the University of Liège. He currently works for Arenberg Auctions (Brussels), an auction house specializing in old & rare books, old manuscripts, drawings, prints, atlases, maps and photographs. Adam has mainly published books and papers dedicated to the history of the book in the Southern Low Countries from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. He is the author of Vivre et imprimer dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux (des origines à la réforme) (2 vols., Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), co-author with Nicole Bingen (Haute école Francisco Ferrer, Brussels) of Lectures italiennes dans les pays wallons à la première modernité (1500–1630) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), and co-editor with Chiara Lastraioli (CESR, Tours) of Itinéraires du livre italien à la Renaissance. Suisse romande, anciens Pays-Bas et Liège (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019).
Daniel Bellingradt
is Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Book at Erlangen-Nuremberg University, Germany. He is the author of around 30 articles and chapters on aspects of media and communication history and of three books on early modern pamphlet culture, on magical manuscripts, and on the paper trade in Amsterdam, as well as co-editor of the annual journal Jahrbuch für Kommunikationsgeschichte. Among his most recent edited volumes are Books in Motion in Early Modern Europe. Beyond Production, Circulation and Consumption (with Jeroen Salman and Paul Nelles, Palgrave 2017) and A History of Early Modern Communication. German and Italian Historiographical Perspectives (with Massimo Rospocher, il Mulino 2019). His new projects include a public history app for early modern Hamburg as part of the collaborative European project „PURE“ (PUblic REnaissance: Urban Cultures of Public Space between Early Modern Europe and the Present) funded by HERA.
Frank Birkenholz
is a doctoral candidate working in the Early Modern History Department of the University of Groningen. In his PhD project ‘The Paper Company: the Impact of Paper on the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the 17th and 18th Centuries’, he investigates the role of paper within the VOC. He does so by specifically exploring how the Company acquired, used, and preserved paper. He holds a research master degree in Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies from the University of Groningen. His MA thesis on the symbolic role of diplomatic gift-exchange between the Dutch Republic, the VOC and the Moroccan Sa’adi-Sultanate, the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire, and the Mughal Empire was the basis for an article published in the Routledge volume Practices of Diplomacy in the Early Modern World, ca. 1410–1800 (2017).
Simon Burrows
is Professor of History and Professor of Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University and lead investigator of the prize-winning digital project ‘The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe’ (FBTEE) and its follow-up project ‘Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment’. He is author of French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (Royal Historical Society, 2000); Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution: London’s French Libellistes, 1758–1792 (Manchester, 2006); A King’s Ransom: The Life of Charles Théveneau de Morande (Bloomsbury, 2010); and Enlightenment Bestsellers (Bloomsbury, 2018) and has co-edited collections on Press Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge, 2002); Cultural Transfers: France and Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century (Voltaire Foundation, 2010); Gender, Espionage and Politics: The Chevalier d’Eon and his Worlds (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Studies (Oxford Studies on Enlightenment, 2020). Co-founder and founding Director of the Centre for the Comparative History of Print at the University of Leeds and now Leader of the Digital Humanities Research Group at Western Sydney, he is also currently an Investigator on the University of Liverpool based AHRC project on ‘Libraries, Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic’.
Orietta Da Rold
is University Lecturer in Literature and the Material Text, 1100 to 1500 in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College. She has published extensively on the intersections of medieval literature and manuscript studies, including detailed codicological and textual studies. Her publications include The Dd Manuscript: A Digital Edition of Cambridge University Library, MS Dd. 4.24 of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (2013) and Paper in Medieval England: From Pulp to Fictions (2020). She has co-edited several books and, recently, the Cambridge Companion to British Manuscripts with Elaine Treharne (2020).
Michael Falk
is Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Kent. He is a digital humanist with interests in text analysis, network analysis and artificial intelligence, and served in this capacity as the developer for The French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project from 2018 to 2019. His own research focuses mainly on questions of selfhood in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. He has published on the history of the Bildungsroman, colonial Australian Romanticism, and the structure and syntax of the Romantic sonnet, and has work forthcoming on tragedy and on the problem of artificial stupidity. He is working on his first monograph, entitled Frankenstein’s Siblings, and is developing a new project on the Global Origins of Modernity with colleagues at Kent and University College Dublin.
Anna Gialdini
is a librarian and bookbinding historian based at the Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento. She has a background in Classics and History as well as Archival Studies and Library Science; her book history research is interdisciplinary and uses textual, material and visual sources. Her PhD, completed at the Ligatus Research Centre (University of the Arts London) in 2017, focused on Greek-style bookbindings in Renaissance Venice; she has also written about the social history of book-makers, book collecting practices, and medieval and early modern archival practices in various parts of Europe. She has held grants and fellowships from the Bibliographical Society of America, the Huntington Library, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
Rachel Hendery
is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University. She is a linguist by background and works on language contact and change, and how digital tools and techniques allow us to research these in new ways. She is a CI on several Australian Research Council funded grants at present, including “Waves of Words: Mapping and Modelling Australia’s Pacific Past”; “Howitt and Fison’s Archive: Insights into Australian Aboriginal Language, Kinship and Culture”, and “Mapping Print; Charting Enlightenment”. She is the author of Relative Clauses in Time and Space (Benjamins, 2012), and One Man is an Island (Battlebridge, 2015), among other publications. She co-leads the Intergener8 Living Lab at Western Sydney University, is the Treasurer of the Australasian Association of Digital Humanities and the NSW coordinator for the Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad. She is a member of the Centre of Excellence for Language Dynamics and the Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage.
Silvia Hufnagel
Is a postdoctoral researcher at the project “Paper Trails: A Material History of 16th and 17th Century Icelandic Books from Paper Production to Library Collection” at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík. She earned a PhD in the sociology of literature from the University of Copenhagen and has held postdoctoral positions in Denmark, Iceland and France, as well as a Marie-Skłodowska-Curie fellowship at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Her research interests are post-medieval manuscript studies, quantitative codicology, Old Norse literature and paper history.
Jean-Benoît Krumenacker
has a PhD in history from the University of Lyon and is a fixed-term lecturer in modern history at the University of Aix-en-Provence. He researches the history of books between the Middle Ages and modern times and the beginnings of the print trade in Lyon. He is the author of half a dozen articles and chapters about the production, ownership, and materials of books in Lyon in the 15th and 16th century.
Katherine McDonough
is a historian of eighteenth-century France working at the intersection of political culture and the history of science and technology. She has taught and collaborated on DH projects at Bates College, Western Sydney University, and Stanford University. She is now a Senior Research Associate on the Living with Machines Project at The Alan Turing Institute in London. Her first book manuscript, ‘Public Work: Making Roads and Citizens in Eighteenth-Century France’ is a history of the corvée, the forced labor regime used for highway improvement. At the Turing, Katie works on developing geographic information retrieval and computer vision methods for historical sources. With the GéoDisco project, she studies the history of geographic information in French encyclopedias from the seventeenth century to the present. She was a Research Associate with the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe/Mapping Print, Charting Enlightenment Project in Australia from 2016–2017.
Krisztina Rábai
is an historian, medievalist, classical philologist and curator of old and rare prints. She conducts her research on historical source editions (Hungarian related charters from the 14th century, and Jagiellonian royal accounts from the 15th–16th centuries), auxiliary historical sciences (filigranology, palaeography, diplomatic, codicology, sigillography), paper history (watermark research), and the history of medicine (hereditary syphilis as recorded in the written sources of the 15th and 16th century). She is the author of about 30 articles and chapters concerning her above mentioned research. Among her published books are the historical source editions of Jagiellonian royal accounts, such as Jagelló Zsigmond herceg udvarának számadáskönyve (1504–1507): The Court Account Book of Sigismund Jagiellon (1504–1507) (Szeged, 2014) and Mezi periferií a centrem jagellonského světa. Registrum dvořanů knížete a krále Zikmunda I. Jagellonského z let 1493–1510: Between the Periphery and the Centre of the Jagiellonian World: The Register of Courtiers of Prince and King Sigismund I Jagiellon from 1493–1510 (with Petr Kozák, Opava 2015).
Anna Reynolds
is a Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews. Prior to this she was an Associate Lecturer at the University of York, where she received her PhD in 2018. She works on the intersection of material practices and imaginative thought in early modern England, focusing in particular on the physical biography of paper and the metaphorical life of books, loose sheets, and textual fragments. She has published an article on early modern encounters with binding waste in The Journal of the Northern Renaissance (2017) and has chapters on waste and material texts forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook to the History of the Book in Early Modern England and The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English. With Adam Smyth (University of Oxford) and Megan Heffernan (DePaul University) she is designing an open-access, online database of early modern printed waste paper.
Benito Rial Costas
teaches Book History at the Facultad de Ciencias de la Documentación of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His interests range widely across Book History, Analytical Bibliography, Typography, and Historiography. He has recently published the edited volumes Aldo Manuzio en la España del Renacimiento (Madrid, 2019) and New insights into an old issue: Book historical scholarship on the relationship between the Low Countries and Spain: 1568–1648 (Quaerendo, 2018). He has lectured in different American and European Universities and Research Centres; and he is a member of the scientific committee of several international journals, international granting bodies and conferences.
Tapio Salminen
is a Research Fellow at TRIVIUM (Tampere Centre for Classical, Medieval and Early Modern Studies) at Tampere University, Finland, and holds a title of docent in the Faculty of Humanities at Turku University, Finland. His PhD thesis ‘Obscure Hands – Trusted Men. Textualization, the Office of the City Scribe and the Written Management of Information and Communication of the Council of Reval (Tallinn) before 1460’ (Tampere, TUP 2016) focused on the role of city scribes in the organisation of record keeping in the late-medieval towns and cities of the Baltic Sea area. He has published some 40 articles and several monographs on the history of communication, infrastructure and administration in Finland and the Baltic Rim from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries.
Helen Smith
Helen Smith is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Head of the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her publications include Grossly Material Things: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (2012), as well as edited collections on Renaissance Paratexts (with Louise Wilson, 2011), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England (with Kevin Killeen and Rachel Willie, 2015), and Conversions: Gender and Religious Change in Early Modern Europe (with Simon Ditchfield, 2017). She is a big fan (or other folded object) of early modern paper and its numerous uses.
Jan Willem Veluwenkamp
(1951) was associate professor of early modern history at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands, until he retired in 2017. He has published on the history of early modern entrepreneurship, trade and transport. Until his retirement, he was scholarly project manager of Sound Toll Registers Online, the electronic database for the complete Sound Toll Registers at
Andreas Weber
is an assistant professor in the department of Science, Technology and Policy Studies (STePS) at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He researches the historical relationship between science, everyday materials, and governance in the context of the former Dutch colonial empire in insular Southeast Asia and Europe. He is co-editor of the book series Emergence of Natural History (ENH) and associate editor of the journal Itinerario: Journal of Imperial and Global Interactions. More recent publications include: “Collecting Colonial Nature: European Naturalists and the Netherland Indies in the Early Nineteenth Century,” BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 134:3 (2019), 72–95 and the co-edited volume Locations of Knowledge in Dutch Contexts (with Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis and Huib Zuidervaart, Brill 2019).
Megan Williams
is assistant professor in early modern history at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. This chapter is part of her larger study, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), into how paper affected diplomatic practice and political communications in the early modern world.