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I found my Holy Grail

Marianne C.E. Gillion has a PhD in musicology. In her Miraeus Lecture on 27 March 2019 she will talk about the liturgy of the Antwerp Cathedral of Our Lady and St. James’ Church. In this interview she gives us a preview.

You suggest, we digitize

Can we support your research by scanning one or more publications from our collection? Submit your request here.

Miraeus lecture Margriet Hoogvliet

On 15 May Dr. Margriet Hoogvliet gave a Miraeus Lecture on the religious reading culture of lay people in the region between Paris and Antwerp in the fifteenth century. The lecture (in Dutch) is now available.

The collection of broadside ballads

The Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library holds a large collection of broadside ballads, ranging from the seventeenth century to the 1950’s and mostly printed in the Southern Netherlands and Belgium. Ballad singers often performed on public markets, hence the Dutch name ‘marktzangers’ and ‘marktliederen’. The last traditional ballad singers performed in the 1950’s.

Blogpost Fabio Della Schiava

Fabio Della Schiava is visiting professor in the history of humanism and neo-Latin Literature at the University of Leuven. Currently, he is working on a project about the reception of St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei. On 17 May he took his students in Latin Literature to the Hendrik Conscience Library for a workshop on Humanism. In this blogpost he gives us a vivid account of their visit.

Verhoeven newspapers digitized

The Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library has a large collection of newspapers. A highlight is the collection of early newspapers published by the Antwerp engraver and printer Abraham Verhoeven (1575-1652). All of Verhoeven’s publications in our collection have been digitized.

Travel grant to Antwerp awarded to two international researchers

Earlier this year, the Plantin-Moretus Museum and the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library launched a fellowship programme for research into the history of the early printed book (15th-18th century) in Antwerp. Today this scholarship is granted for the first time.

Become a friend or make a donation

You can join our association of friends, the Endowment Fund for Books and Literature, or you can make a donation.

Oscar Nottebohm

The Nottebohm Room in the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library is named after the Antwerp patron Oscar Nottebohm (1865-1935). This particular descendant of the Nottebohm family was a grandson of Diederich Wilhelm Nottebohm who moved to Antwerp from Bielefeld in 1811.

Egyptian Cabinet

There is a remarkable piece of furniture in the Nottebohm Room: The Egyptian Cabinet. It holds twelve unique and impressive volumes containing a total of nine hundred lithographs by Eberhard Weidenbach. The book itself is the ‘Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopiën’ by Karl Richard Lepsius, the result of a three-year expedition along the Nile Valley starting in 1842.