Discovering the Riches of the Word: Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

The contributions to Discovering the Riches of the Word. Religious Reading in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe offer an innovative approach to the study of religious reading from a long term and geographically broad perspective, covering the period from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century and with a specific focus on the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries.
Challenging traditional research paradigms, the contributions argue that religious reading in this “long fifteenth century” should be described in terms of continuity. They make clear that in spite of confessional divides, numerous reading practices continued to exist among medieval and early modern readers, as well as among Catholics and Protestants, and that the two groups in certain cases even shared the same religious texts.

Contributors include: Elise Boillet, Sabrina Corbellini, Suzan Folkerts, Éléonore Fournié, Wim François, Margriet Hoogvliet, Ian Johnson, Hubert Meeus, Matti Peikola, Bart Ramakers, Elisabeth Salter, Lucy Wooding, and Federico Zuliani.

Sabrina Corbellini is Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the University of Groningen (department of Medieval History). Her current research is concerned with the reconstruction of the readership of religious texts in late medieval Europe. From 2008 to 2013, she was Principal Investigator of the ERC-Starting Grant project “Holy Writ and Lay Readers”.

Margriet Hoogvliet is a lecturer and researcher at the University of Groningen. Her current research is concerned with readers of biblical and religious texts in French during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. She has also published extensively on text-image relations, political communication in the period of Catherine de Médicis, and the history of cartography (Pictura et scriptura: textes, images et herméneutique des mappae mundi (XIIIe–XVIe s.), Turnhout: 2007).

Bart Ramakers is Professor of Historical Dutch Literature at the University of Groningen. He specialises in medieval and sixteenth-century drama and has a particular interest in the intersections between performative and visual culture. He is an editor of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art (NKJ).