Notes on Contributors
Sabrina Corbellini
is Professor of “History of Reading in Premodern Europe” at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). She specializes in the reconstruction and study of religious reading activities in premodern Europe, in particular during the “long fifteenth century” (1350–1520). Together with Wim François (KU Leuven, Belgium) she led from 2017 to 2022 the project “In Readers’ Hands: Early Modern Dutch Bibles from a Users’ Perspective.” She has published extensively on (religious) reading and has edited the volumes Instructing the Soul, Feeding the Spirit and Awakening the Passion: Cultures of Religious Reading in the Late Middle Ages (2013) and Discovering the Riches: Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2015).
Renske Hoff
is Assistant Professor of Middle Dutch History at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). Her research is concerned with religious book history of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, with a particular focus on the use and transmission of biblical texts. She has published in international journals such as the Journal of Early Modern Christianity, Quaerendo, and the Yearbook for Dutch Book History. Her monograph on the use of sixteenth-century Dutch Bibles has recently been published with Brill.
Wim François
is Professor of Early Modern Church and Theology, as well as Academic Librarian of the Maurits Sabbe Library at the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies of KU Leuven (Belgium). His field of research is the history of Christianity in the early modern era (1450–1650), with a special interest in the space vernacular Bible reading occupied in the life of the faithful in that period. In addition, he is doing research into the Latin Bible commentaries edited by the Louvain and Douai theologians during the so-called “Golden Age” of Catholic biblical scholarship (1550–1650). Other research interests relate to the Bible and the visual arts, the rhetoricians’ plays, and other areas of early modern biblical culture.
Henrike Manuwald
is Professor of Medieval German at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen (Germany). Her research interests cover book history, the materiality of transmission, the relationship between text and image, translation, the theory of editing as well as the connection between law and literature. She has published widely on all these areas; her most recent monograph focusses on a devotional booklet “Das Andachtsbüchlein aus der Sammlung Bouhier (Montpellier, Bibliothèque Universitaire Historique de Médecine, H 396)” (2022).
Bert Tops
studied history and theology and religious studies at the KU Leuven (Belgium) and obtained an advanced master in archival sciences. He worked in several projects to inventory late medieval and early modern archives at the Belgian State Archives and in multidisciplinary projects with archaeologists. He obtained a doctorate in a double degree at KU Leuven and the University of Groningen (the Netherlands; 2024) on the Bibles of Willem Vorsterman (1528–45) from a users’ perspective.
Mack P. Holt
is Professor Emeritus of History at George Mason University (Fairfax, VA, USA), where he taught early modern European history for thirty years. His research focuses on the French Wars of Religion, the history of wine, and the history of the book including sixteenth-century vernacular Bibles in French. His most recent book is The Politics of Wine: Religion and Popular Culture in Early Modern Burgundy, 1477–1630 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). His most recent article is “Marginalia and the Reception of French Bibles,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and the Reformation, ed. Jennifer McNutt and Herman Selderhuis (Oxford University Press, 2024).
Joanna Pietrzak-Thébault
teaches at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw where she directs the Chair of Italian Literature. Her interests revolve around the history of publishing and the history of books as well as translations of the Bible into Polish during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She is the author of numerous articles in journals and thematic volumes. In 2018, she published the book [S]Łowna kotka: Obrazy, funkcje, przemiany włoskiej książki XVI wieku (A Cat Catchwords: Images, Functions, Evolutions of the Italian Book in the 16th Century). She has edited a dozen books including Word of God, Words of Men: Translations, Inspirations, Transmissions of the Bible in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Renaissance, Refo500 Academic Studies 43 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019).
Jeremy Specland
is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC (USA), where he teaches in and helps administer the Cornerstone humanities program. His essays have appeared in Renaissance Quarterly, Milton Studies, and the Journal of Early Modern Christianity (co-authored). He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled “Psalm Reading and the Lyric Sequence in Renaissance England.”
Walter S. Melion
is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, GA (USA), where he directed the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (Emory’s institute for advanced study in the humanities) between 2017 and 2023. He is author of three monographs and a critical edition of Karel van Mander’s Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting, co-author of two exhibition catalogues, editor or co-editor of more than twenty-five volumes, and has published more than one hundred articles. Melion is editor of two book series: Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History and Lund Humphries’ Northern Lights. He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. He is president emeritus of the Sixteenth Century Society, current president of the Historians of Netherlandish Art, and a board member of the Print Council of America.
Herculano Alves, OFMCap
is a Portuguese Capuchin friar. He received his doctorate in Biblical Theology from the Pontifical University of Salamanca. He is Professor Emeritus of Sacred Scripture at the Catholic University of Portugal. Currently he is still a researcher at CLEPUL, the “Center for Lusophone and European Literatures and Cultures” (University of Lisbon, Portugal), as well as at CEHR, the “Centre of Religious History Studies” (Catholic University of Portugal), and IEAC-GO, the “Institute for Advanced Studies in Catholicism and Globalization” (Lisbon). He is the author of the six volumes A Bíblia em Portugal, published between 2017 and 2021, among several other publications.
Tadhg Ó hAnnracháin
is Full Professor of History at University College Dublin and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. His work concentrates largely on religious change in early modern Europe. His publications include Catholic Reformation in Ireland: The Mission of Rinuccini, 1645–49 (Oxford University Press, 2002), Catholic Europe, 1592–1648: Centre and Peripheries (Oxford University Press, 2015), Confessionalism and Mobility in Early Modern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2021), four major co-edited books and over 50 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. He is currently the History editor of Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy.
Joshua Calhoun
is an Associate Professor of English and Faculty Affiliate with the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) who specializes in early modern poetry, the history of media, book microbiomes, publicly engaged research, and the environmental humanities. He is author of The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England (UPenn Press, 2020), and his work has been published in PMLA, Shakespeare Studies, and Environmental Philosophy.