Tuesday 15 September 2026 from 8:00 to 9:30 CEST
Programme
- 8.00 pm Welcome and introduction
- 8.10 - 8.40 pm Ministers, Merchants, Magisters, and Mendicants: The Interconfessional Dutch Clients of the Officina Plantiniana, 1579-1723 - Elise Watson
- 8.40 - 8.50 pm Q&A
- 8.50 - 9.20 pm Description and Instruction for the Secret and Renowned Art of the Bookbinder’s Craft: The Earliest Known European Manual on Bookbinding (1612) - Mitchel Gundrum
- 9.20 - 9.30 pm Q&A
Speakers
Elise Watson - Ministers, Merchants, Magisters, and Mendicants: The Interconfessional Dutch Clients of the Officina Plantiniana, 1579-1723
What did an esteemed Reformed minister, an international vendor of fine art, a pious Latin schoolteacher, and a roving Franciscan monk have in common in the seventeenth century? All were clients of the Officina Plantiniana who ordered liturgical books directly from the firm to the neighbouring Dutch Republic to use and sell in their communities. This talk, based on research undertaken at the Museum Plantin-Moretus and Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library and made possible by the Nottebohm grant, will outline a vast network of buyers and books between the Protestant Northern and Catholic Southern Netherlands, revealing a remarkably lively and interconfessional trade of sacred texts in a time of religious violence and persecution.
Elise Watson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She earned her PhD from the University of St Andrews in 2022, where she also worked as a postdoctoral researcher for the Universal Short Title Catalogue project. She is the author of Print and Catholic Persistence in the Dutch Golden Age (Boydell & Brewer/IMEMS Press, 2026), and editor of Gender and the Book Trades (Brill, 2025) alongside Jessica Farrell-Jobst. She has published widely on print, gender, and early modern Catholicism.
Mitchel Gundrum - Description and instruction for the secret and renowned art of the bookbinder’s craft: the earliest known European manual on bookbinding (1612)
Prepared by the German bookbinder Anshelmus Faust for the monks of St. Bernard's Abbey in Antwerp in 1612, Beschrijvinghe des Boeckbinders Handwerck/Prescription de la Manifacture des Relieurs is the earliest known manual on European bookbinding methods. In 2024, the Nottebohm Fellowship facilitated a project to re-study the manual in its spectacular contemporary dos-a-dos binding, digitize its parallel Dutch and French texts, and translate the full text into modern Dutch and French, English, and German. Publication of this unique firsthand perspective on 17th-century bookbinding practice will, we hope, prompt new investigations into the development of book production across Europe in the early modern era.
Mitchel Gundrum is a bookbinder, conservator, and researcher of historical book structures and decorated book papers. He earned a diploma in traditional bookbinding and repair methods at North Bennet Street School in Boston, a bachelor's in technical writing from the University of Arkansas, and a master's in the conservation of cultural heritage from West Dean College. He has previously worked at the US National Archives, the American Antiquarian Society, and UCLA, and taught workshops in book repair and related arts at North Bennet Street School, Pyramid Atlantic Art Center, and the International Printing Museum. He currently works as a rare book conservator at The Huntington in San Marino, California.