A core interest of our cluster members concerns processes of reception, transformation and (interlingual and intermedial) translation in medieval and early modern art, literature and media from diachronic and synchronic perspectives (in time, space, and between media).

Researchers within the cluster are committed to the close and expert analysis of the materiality and content of the arts, literature and media they study. Different types of media bring various aspects of this core interest to the fore.

It is integral to many cluster members’ research to use Medieval and Early Modern Arts as a lens for studying the medieval and early modern periods at large:

The role of transnational, non-institutional networks in the opening up of British transatlantic trade at the end of the 17th/beginning of the 18th century

How were the Russians, under early modern conditions, able to incorporate this distant, undeveloped and, because frequent nomadic attacks, dangerous territory? And what role did the Kolyvan-Voskresensk plants play in this process?

Book historian Erik Kwakkel found an intriguing snippet of text earlier this week, that bears unexpected evidence of some of the problems encoutered by early printers: censorship and the affiliated fuss of seeking and printing Church approval.

How are compromises struck in Dutch politics? Why are some compromises better than others? And to what extent do characteristics of the politicians involved affect the moral quality of a compromise? In 2016, assistant professor dr. Patrick Overeem will conduct a research project on these questions.

The KNAW Early Career Award 2019 has been awarded to lecturer in children’s rights Stephanie Rap. She receives the award for her research into international children's rights.

A new study reveals how ancient Chinese farmers managed soil fertility and water resources over thousands of years. By analyzing carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes in millet crops, the research provides long-term isotopic evidence of farmland management practices in the Guanzhong Basin—the political…

Professor Joanita Vroom, together with the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) offered the course Byzantine Rome in September 2023. The course, co-taught by Vroom, Letty ten Harkel and various guest lecturers, investigated the transition of the city of Rome from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages,…

Archiving Medieval and Post-Medieval Archaeological Fieldwork Data from the Eastern Mediterranean (600-2000)

Digital edition of the correspondence between the philosopher Gerardus Johannes Petrus Josephus (Gerard) Bolland (1854-1922) and the philologist Pieter Jacob Cosijn (1840-1899), consisting of 46 letters covering the period 1879 to 1899.

Children in the Netherlands develop prejudices based on ethnicity at an early age. Ymke de Bruijn (27) came to this conclusion in her dissertation ‘Child Interethnic Prejudice in the Netherlands: Social Learning from Parents and Picture Books’. For her PhD project she took a closer look at the behaviours…

Children who lost their fathers in early modern England ran the risk of being sold to the highest bidder. Although Shakespeare wrote about it in his plays, the practice disappeared from collective memory for a long time. University lecturer Lotte Fikkers is bringing it back to light in a new Vidi research…

Astronomers from Leiden Observatory have developed a new method to find distant quasars and better distinguish them from other objects that look like them, using machine learning techniques. The research result has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. It is the last…

Central to the research of several cluster members are the social function and contexts of the production and consumption of medieval and early modern art, literature and media:

An Introduction and Field Guide, Second and Revised Edition (15 December 2014)

Last week, the EARLI SIG 24 Workshop 2024 took place from 25 to 27 September at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies (CWTS) in Leiden, the Netherlands. 25 researchers from 10 different countries came together to work on fostering researcher independence.

The Centre is the proud home of several research programmes.

Femke Bakker, PhD candidate at Leiden University‘s Institute of Political Science, has been appointed to the Early Career Committee of the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP).

The central aim is to systematically study differences in gendered crime patterns in the records of different types of courts in various English and Dutch cities in the early modern period.

Why is Crossnational and Cross-cultural agents such as Henrich Carloff and Willem Leyel important when studying Early Modern expansion?

LUCAS’ Medieval and Early Modern (MEM) cluster brings together expertise in the fields of art, literature and media. It focuses on the arts in society in Europe and beyond during a vast period of time, from the 7th through to the 18th centuries CE.

Conference

LUCIS produces various video series and MOOCs to showcase the variety of expertise available at Leiden University.

New Texts and Studies on Christian Nubian Culture

Tapping into a combination of court documents, urban statutes, material artefacts, health guides and treatises, Policing the Urban Environment in Premodern Europe offers a unique perspective on how premodern public authorities tried to create a clean, healthy environment.

A comparative study on the spatial origin and development of towns in the northern Netherlands, 700-1400.

Nadine Akkerman's book Invisible Agents is the very first study to analyse the role of early modern women spies. The book foregrounds the agency of early-modern women, offering a corrective to the gender bias implicit in modern historiography.

More than 600 staff members and students of Leiden University did not survive the war. Two of them were Caroline van Loen and Elsa Oppenheim .