During the English Reformation, William Barlow and John Foxe found an unlikely champion for the translation of scripture into the vernacular in the prolific thirteenth-century Flemish author Jacob van Maerlant. His fame in England was based on the only known recorded mention of a Middle Dutch author by name in a Middle English text, and rested on…[Read more]

This paper will investigates some of the pre-existing Anglo-Dutch infrastructure on which the ‘Stranger’ communities of the middle of the sixteenth century could build, focusing on five people involved in the burgeoning printing industry and book trade: William Caxton, Jan van Doesborch, Jacob van Meeteren, Steven Mierdman and Nicolaes van den Ber…[Read more]

A quotation of verses from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the work of Leiden University professor of History and Rhetoric Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn (1602-53) has been cited as evidence for acquaintance with Chaucer’s work in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, though scholars have expressed surprise that Boxhorn attributed the verses not to C…[Read more]

Translated title of the contribution: The Middle Dutch Brut Chronicle: Propaganda from the English Rose Wars for a Dutch-speaking audience.

In 1480 rolde in Utrecht de Middelnederlandse vertaling van de Fasciculus temporum [Een bundel van tijden] van de drukpers van Johan Veldener. Al twee keer eerder was de drukker betrokken geweest bij de…[Read more]

Review article of:

Johan Huizinga, Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen, Studie over levens- en gedachtenvormen der veertiende en vijftiende eeuw in Frankrijk en de Nederlanden, edited by Aton van der Lem (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020).

Johan Huizinga, Autumntide of the Middle Ages, A Study of Forms of Life and Thought of the Fourteenth and…[Read more]

Like early modern marginalia, tweets are used to engage with text in a plethora of ways: to annotate, explain, comment, cross- reference, call attention, memorise, disparage, satirise, ridicule, praise, translate, summarise, &c.—and to make apparently entirely extraneous, sometimes unintelligible, comments. Twitter is used by scholars in Early M…[Read more]

The early sixteenth century was a period of intense experimentation in Dutch history writing. The little-known author Jan van Naaldwijk, whose two Dutch chronicles of Holland are preserved in autograph manuscripts in the British Library, participated in these developments. An amateur writer, but – importantly – an expert reader, Jan compiled chron…[Read more]

The little-known author Jan van Naaldwijk, whose two early sixteenth-century Dutch chronicles of Holland are preserved in autograph manuscripts in the British Library, wrote at a moment reputed to be the turning point between medieval and Renaissance modes of historical writing. While he primarily relied on the medieval historical tradition of…[Read more]

The Renaissance Studies Book Prize was established in 2011, first suggested by Professor Claire Jowitt, with the aim to reward work in any area of Renaissance Studies – literature,history, art history, philosophy, history of science, book history, and so on – that has made a significant difference to scholarship. In 2012 the inaugural SRS Book Pr…[Read more]