Notes on Contributors
Nina Adamova
is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at St Petersburg State University. Having worked on early modern religious transatlantic migrations and ideas of exceptionalism for her PhD (2015, Russian Academy of Science), she currently focuses on the history of reading of religious texts in Reformation Europe. In 2018, she was a British Academy Visiting Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, researching early modern English readerships of sacred history.
Flavia Bruni
is a specialist librarian at the Central Institute for the Unique Catalogue of Italian Libraries and Bibliographic Information (ICCU), and an Honorary Research Fellow in Book History at the School of History, located at the University of St Andrews. She has an MA in the History of the Reformation from the Sapienza University of Rome, an MA in Early Printed Books from the University of Siena, a PhD from the University of Bologna, and a Diploma from the Vatican Library School. From 2009–2015, she worked as a Research Assistant for the Universal Short Title Catalogue project at the University of St Andrews, and has held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Rome, Sapienza and Udine. Since 2001, she has worked on sixteenth-century booklists of Italian religious houses as part of the Ricerca sull’Inchiesta della Congregazione sell’Indice (RICI) project team, and is currently working on her second monograph on censorship in Counter-Reformation Italy.
Catherine Evans
is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include early modern religious literature, book history, women’s writing and the philosophy of time. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Sheffield in 2019, and has held fellowships at the Huntington Library, the John Rylands Library, and UCLA-William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Kathryn Hurlock
is a Senior Lecturer in Medieval History at the Manchester Metropolitan University, and an expert on the religious history of medieval Wales. She has published works on Wales and the Crusades, 1095–1291 (2011) and Medieval Welsh Pilgrimage c. 1100–1500 (2018), as well as several articles on aspects of British lay religious history and medieval chronicles.
Rosamund Oates
is a Reader in Early Modern History at Manchester Metropolitan University, specialising in the culture of the post-Reformation Church. Her monograph, Moderate Radical: Tobie Matthew and the English Reformation, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. She currently runs the international network, ‘Communities of Print’ (
Jessica G. Purdy
is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her thesis, ‘Reading the Reformation: Parish Libraries and the Practice of Reading in Early Modern England, 1558–1709’, examines the foundation, uses and impact of parish libraries in early modern England. Her work focusses specifically on the reading practices of the ‘middling’ sorts of people and the impact these readings had on the popular experience of the Reformation. Her general research interests include the history and physicality of the book and reading, the courts of Tudor and Stuart monarchs, and the roles of women in power in the medieval and early modern periods.
Julianne Simpson
is Rare Books and Maps Manager at the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. She has worked in London, Oxford and Melbourne and completed an MA in the History of the Book at the University of London in 1997. She has previously used the Plantin archives in her research on the sales and distribution of the Biblia Regia, the polyglot Bible published by Christopher Plantin between 1568 and 1573. Her research interests include the international book trade in the sixteenth century, early modern private libraries and the study of provenance and annotation in early printed books.
Michael A.L. Smith
is an early career researcher who received his PhD from the University of Manchester in 2017. Michael works on the history of emotions and religious culture in the early modern period, and attempts to read emotions back into the religious cultures of England between 1649 and 1745, where narratives of a ‘reaction against enthusiasm’ have otherwise dominated the historiography.
Tim Somers
is a PhD graduate from Queen’s University Belfast. His thesis was titled ‘John Bagford and the Collection of Cheap Print in Later Stuart Britain’. He has published on the role that tradesmen played in later seventeenth-century scientific and antiquarian culture, as well as the concept of impartiality in print culture.
Forrest C. Strickland
is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews and the 2018 Arminius Fellow at Leiden University. His thesis is entitled ‘The Devotion of Collecting. Ministers and the Culture of Print in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic’. He is the author of the forthcoming Protestant Ministers and their Books in the Dutch Republic, 1607–1700 (2 volumes, Brill).
Drew B. Thomas
is a postdoctoral research assistant for the Universal Short Title Catalogue at the University of St Andrews. His PhD thesis was on the growth of the Wittenberg printing industry during Martin Luther’s Reformation, drawing on quantitative analysis of local print production and the design elements adopted by printers to market Luther’s works. Most recently, he was awarded an Early Career Research Fellowship Grant by the John Rylands Research Institute at the University of Manchester.