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)

The Centre is the proud home of several research programmes.

This dissertation the role of the English dissenting minister Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) as a grammarian is studied.

Exploring the language of the lower classes in the nineteenth century

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

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.

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

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

For a long time, even many researchers thought that guide dogs were a relatively modern invention. An accidental encounter with archival material showed university lecturer Krista Milne that guide dogs helped their blind owners as far back as the Middle Ages. Milne now has received an NWO XS grant to…

Death, fire and identity in North-West Europe

This book explores the links between maritime trading networks around Europe, from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the North and Baltic Seas.

In late medieval and early modern times, books, as well as the people who produced and read (or listened to) them, moved between regions, social circles, and languages with relative ease. Yet, in the multilingual Low Countries, francophone literature was both internationally mobile and firmly rooted…

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

Richard Chancellor, the English Willem Barentsz, discovered the North Cape during the first English expedition to attempt to find a northeast passage. But the ship, the Edward Bonaventure, was ‘robbed by Flemings on its return in 1554.’ Historian Louis Sicking and legal expert Remco van Rhee found the…

New Approaches to Understanding the Eastern Mediterranean during Byzantine and Ottoman Times

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

What is the name of the medieval Persian poet Nezami (✞ ca. 1209) doing on the cover of an Eric Clapton rock album? Asghar Seyed Gohrab, associate professor at the Institute for Area Studies, talks about it in a new blog for the Leiden Medievalists Blog.

Loneliness and social isolation have become a significant problem in contemporary Japan. The financial burden associated with an ageing population has severely constrained the ability of local authorities to address the problem. As a result, policymakers have sought cost‐effective methods of tackling…

Smart digital infrastructures predicated on myriads of sensors distributed in the environment are often rendered as key to contemporary urban security governance to detect risky or suspicious entities before or during a criminal event takes place. At the same time, they often involve surveillance of…

This subproject examines how memories of flight and persecution shaped new social and religious identities in the Netherlands.

What are the foundations of the regulation of blasphemy, and in which manner, in legal as well as in extra-legal terms, has blasphemy developed over the last decades?

New Methods and Techniques in the Study of Archaeological Materials from the Caribbean.

In the Brill series Intersections a new volume has been published, entitled Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe.

Aristocratic dynasties have long been regarded as fundamental to the development of early modern society and government. Yet recent work by political historians has increasingly questioned the dominant role of ruling families in state formation, underlining instead the continued importance and independence…

On 18 December 2019, Marianne Lochs defended her thesis 'Contempt of court'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. C.P.M. Cleiren and Prof. J.H. Crijns.

This volume discusses practices of memory in early modern Europe.

The Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) is one of the few research institutes in the world in which researchers in the field of literature, art, architecture, design and media studies come together to conduct research into the cultural production of the western world, from classical…

Lecture, Research Seminar Medieval and Early Modern History

What kinds of vocal music were not typically transmitted in written musical notation? Can specific ‘lost’ song forms - siciliane, giustiniane, le Grechesche, gli stili “regionali“ nel canto del quattrocento - be more precisely identified than they have been until now, both in musicological research…

Early Medieval Grave Reopenings in the Low Countries

Today’s performances of medieval polyphony have a lot in common with those of other ‘classical’ or ‘early’ music. Ensembles perform pieces written by known or lesser known composers, which the listener can revisit by listening to recordings or reading a score.