Notes on Contributors
Bart Besamusca
is emeritus Professor of Middle Dutch Textual Culture from an International Perspective at Utrecht University and at the Utrecht Centre for Medieval Studies. He has published widely on medieval narrative literature, manuscripts, and early printed editions. He manages the research tools ‘Arthurian Fiction in Medieval Europe’ (www.arthurianfiction.org)and, together with André Bouwman, the ‘Bibliotheca Neerlandica Manuscripta & Impressa’ (https://bnm-i.huygens.knaw.nl/). He has recently edited, with Elisabeth de Bruijn and Frank Willaert, Early Printed Narrative Literature in Western Europe (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2019). He is currently supervising the NWO-funded research project ‘The Multilingual Dynamics of the Literary Culture of Medieval Flanders, ca 1200– ca 1500’ (2018–2022).
Jan Bloemendal
is a senior researcher at the Huygens Institute for the History and Culture of the Netherlands of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Latin (Neo-Latin) at the Ruhr University Bochum. He was editor or co-editor of Neo-Latin Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe (2013); Brill’s Encyclopaedia of the Neo-Latin World (2014) and Bilingual Europe (2015). He also edited G.J. Vossius, Poeticae institutiones (2010). He is executive secretary of the Erasmi Opera Omnia edition and principal investigator of the project funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) TransLatin: The Transnational Impact of Latin Drama from the Early Modern Netherlands. Together with James A. Parente, Jr. and Nigel Smith, he edited a special issue of Renaissance Studies, 36 (2021) on Transnational Exchange in the Early Modern Low Countries.
Frans R.E. Blom
is an expert in Dutch and Neolatin Literature of the Early Modern Period. Working at the University of Amsterdam, he studies Amsterdam as a creative city in its European context, with a focus on the city’s Grand Theatre, or Schouwburg. He is general editor of the ONSTAGE1 online data system for theatre in Amsterdam from the Golden Age to the present. Recently he published his new study on the Amsterdam theatre as an international cultural entreprise: Podium van Europa. Creativiteit en ondernemen in de Amsterdamse Schouwburg van de zeventiende eeuw (Amsterdam: Querido, 2021).
Youri Desplenter
is Professor of Historical Dutch Literature (Middle Ages) at Ghent University. His research topics include Middle Dutch religious literature, especially late medieval prayer literature, Bible translations, and the writings of the ‘mystical cook’ Jan van Leeuwen († 1378). He also supervises doctoral research in the fields of Middle Dutch chivalric literature and teaching methodology.
Lucas van der Deijl
is Assistant Professor in early modern Dutch literature at the University of Groningen. In 2022 he defended his PhD thesis A New Language for the Natural Light. Translating the New Philosophy in the Dutch Early Enlightenment (1640–1720) at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on language philosophy and linguistic politics in Dutch literary history.
Feike Dietz
is Professor of ‘Global Dynamics of Dutch Literature’ at the University of Amsterdam. In 2021 she published her monograph Lettering Young Readers in the Dutch Enlightenment: Literacy, Agency and Progress in Eighteenth-Century Children’s Books (Palgrave Macmillan), focusing on the way books for youths taught advanced literacy and knowledge skills. She is also publishing about women writers in the early modern Netherlands. Moreover, Feike is one of the project leaders of Language Dynamics in the Dutch Golden Age, funded by the Dutch Research Counsil (NWO), in which literary and linguistics strategies of language variation are analysed from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Lia van Gemert
is emeritus Professor of Dutch Literature prior to 1800 and former Director of the Amsterdam Centre for the Study of the Golden Age at the University of Amsterdam. She published widely on early modern Dutch literature and currently focusses on popular culture and cultural transfer.
David Napolitano
is attached as a Assistant Professor in Medieval History to the Department of History and Art History at Utrecht University. His research topics include ethical leadership and the building of political trust, theories of good government, and the history of democracy.
James A. Parente, Jr.
is emeritus Professor of German, Scandinavian and Dutch literature at the University of Minnesota. He is a specialist in early modern (1400–1750) German, Dutch, and Nordic literatures and cultures, and early modern Neo-Latin literature. He is the author of Religious Drama and the Humanist Tradition: Christian Theater in Germany and the Netherlands, 1500–1680 (1987). He has co-edited two anthologies of critical work on the early modern Holy Roman Empire, and has published numerous articles on early modern German, Dutch and Neo-Latin literature, especially drama; Renaissance humanism; gender and sexuality in the German Empire; the Dutch Golden Age; and early modern Nordic literatures. Together with Nigel Smith and Jan Bloemendal, he edited a special issue of Renaissance Studies, 36 (2021) on Transnational Exchange in the Early Modern Low Countries.
Paul Wackers
is emeritus professor of Historical Dutch Literature to 1500 at the University of Utrecht. He published on a wide range of subjects but the medieval Dutch and European tradition of fox stories take pride of place in his publication list. Very often he pays explicit attention to methodological issues and their consequences.
Frank Willaert
is emeritus professor of medieval Dutch literature at the University of Antwerp and member of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature. His main research topics are lyrical poetry and mystical literature. Het Nederlandse liefdeslied in de middeleeuwen ‘The Dutch love-song in the Middle Ages’ (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2021) is his most recent book.