For review see: J. van Goor, in: Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden, jrg. 110, afl. 1 (1995); p. 137-140.

Winner of the 2019 Menno Hertzberger Encouragement Prize for Book History and Bibliography In Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century Arthur der Weduwen presents the first comprehensive account of the early newspaper in the Low Countries. Composed of two volumes, this survey provides detailed introductions and bibliographical descriptions of 49 newspapers, surviving in over 16,000 issues in 84 archives and libraries. This work presents a crucial overview of the first fledgling century of newspaper publishing and reading in one of the most advanced political cultures of early modern Europe. Seventy years after Folke Dahl’s Dutch Corantos first documented early Dutch newspapers, Der Weduwen offers a brand-new approach to the bibliography of the early modern periodical press. This includes, amongst others, a description of places of correspondence listed in each surviving newspaper. The bibliography is accompanied by an extensive introduction of the Dutch and Flemish press in the seventeenth century. What emerges is a picture of a highly competitive and dynamic market for news, in which innovative publishers constantly adapt to the changing tastes of customers and pressures from authorities at home and abroad.

Masterpiece of medieval manuscript production and decoration, its Latin text glossed throughout in Old English, the Lindisfarne Gospels is a vital witness to the book culture, art, and Christianity of the Anglo-Saxons and their interactions with Ireland, Italy, and the wider world. The expert studies in this collection examine in turn the archaeology of Holy Island, relations between Ireland and Northumbria, early Northumbrian book culture, the relationship of the Lindisfarne Gospels to the Church universal, the canon table apparatus of the manuscript, the decoration of its Canon Tables, its systems of liturgical readings, the mathematical principles underlying the design of its carpet pages, points of comparison and contrast with the Book of Durrow, the Latin and Old English texts, the nature of the glossator’s ink, and the meaning of enigmatic words and phrases within the vernacular gloss. Approaching the material from a series of new perspectives, the contributors shed new light on numerous aspects of this magnificent manuscript, its milieux, and its significance.

Before Amsterdam developed into Europe's most important commercial hub in the seventeenth century, demanding and controlling manufacture of maps and sea-charts, a major School of Cartography already flourished in the so-called 'Kop van Noord-Holland', the region just north of Amsterdam. This School specialised in the production of small-scale charts of larger areas, like European coastlines, the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean.

This volume offers an expansive survey of the role of single-sheet publishing in the European print industry during the first two centuries after the invention of printing. Drawing on new materials made available during the compilation of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, the twenty contributors explore the extraordinary range of broadsheet publishing and its contribution to government, pedagogy, religious devotion and entertainment culture. Long disregarded as ephemera or cheap print, broadsheets emerge both as a crucial communication medium and an essential underpinning of the economics of the publishing industry.

What role did images play in the mania for indulgences during the decades prior to the Protestant Reformation? Rubrics, Images and Indulgences in Late Medieval Netherlandish Manuscripts considers how indulgences (the remission of time in Purgatory) were used to market certain images. Conversely, images helped to spread indulgences, such as those attached to the Virgin in sole and the Mass of St Gregory. Images also began depicting the effects of indulgences: souls escaping Purgatory. Drawing on numerous unpublished sources, Kathryn M. Rudy demonstrates how rubrics modified behaviour and expectations around image-centred devotion. Her work is the first to analyse systematically the way that indulgences and images interacted – indeed, shaped each other – prior to the Reformation.