Georges Eekhoud: the Belgian Maxim Gorki

The Belgian author Georges Eekhoud (1854 – 1927), who lived in Flanders but wrote in French, was one of the first authors who wrote positively about homosexuality. Eekhoud’s personal library is a key collection in the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library.

Forgotten chansons de geste?

New acquisition of a rare 16th-century romance of chivalry

Recently a rare copy of a Dutch epic poem (chanson de geste) printed in 1576 in Antwerp turned up at an auction. With the help of the Patronage Fund for Books and Literature the Heritage Library Hendrik Conscience acquired this copy of the romance of Roncevale.

Google Books in the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library

Beyond the pandemic

In February 2020, we announced that Google Books, the Hendrik Conscience Library and the Plantin-Moretus Museum were starting a project to digitize 100,000 books from our collections that are in the public domain. Just a few days later, the country went into lockdown. How has the project proceeded over this eventful year?

The Fragment of John Holt’s grammar 'Lac puerorum or Mylke for Chyldren'

A blogpost by Dr. Hedwig Gwosdek

This short paper is a preliminary contribution to my study on John Holt’s grammar 'Lac puerorum or Mylke for Children'. As school texts of the sixteenth century and beyond are extremely rare, this copy deserves to be examined in more depth in a scholarly article. I hope to be able to examine it in person in the Heritage Library Hendrik Conscience in the near future.

Assessing the significance of early printed mathematical books

In the Spring it was exactly 400 years since the death of the mathematician Simon Stevin (1548-1620). In order to better understand the world in which Stevin lived and wrote, five flemish heritage libraries assessed their collection of early printed books in the field of mathematics. The Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library was one of the partners participating in this collection assessment project.

Pornography in the library

Interaction between porn and literature in Flanders

Until recently, pornography has mostly been neglected by literary scholars and historians. Academic attention to pornographic texts was confined to a small range of literary authors with a canonical status, such as the notorious libertine author Marquis de Sade. Similarly, librarians were not interested in pornographic publications, which usually circulated in a secondary circuit of junk reading. As a result of this, the mass of these pulp publications, printed on low-quality paper and deemed unworthy of keeping, has vanished through time.

Ulysses to Baedeker

Three centuries of travel advice in pocket size

Gerrit Verhoeven is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of History of the University of Antwerp. As an urban historian, he specialises in early modern Europe, particularly – but not only – the Low Countries and Western Europe. He has published on travel and tourism, on time awareness and human capital, on the resilience of social relations, and on book history. In this blogpost he writes about the research potential of travel guides kept in the collection of Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library.

City of Antwerp and Google put more than 100,000 books online

The City of Antwerp and Google signed an agreement to digitise a large portion of the collections of the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library and the Plantin-Moretus Museum.

New acquisition: Albertanus de Brescia, Liber de arte loquendi et tacendi

In December 2018 the Endowment Fund for Books and Literature acquired a rare Antwerp incunable, which it donated to the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library. The Liber de arte loquendi et tacendi by Albertanus of Brescia was printed in Antwerp in 1485 by Gerard Leeu.

Podcasts Miraeus Lectures

Together with the Flanders Book Historical Society and the Antwerp Bibliophile Society, the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library organizes book-historical lectures that place book history in the Netherlands in an international perspective. Browse our archive of a few past lectures and listen to the podcasts.