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.

"Antwerp is a colonial city"

Historian Bas De Roo has been scouring our collection for books on Belgium’s colonial past for his dissertation on the flow of taxes and customs duties in Congo Free State. After his dissertation, De Roo worked at the University of Leipzig, where he researched the role of the Congolese elite in the governance of the Free State and Belgian Congo. Today, De Roo is a researcher at Geheugen Collectief, which offers historical research in an accessible way to a broad public in the form of exhibitions, historical walks, apps, publications ...

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.

A virtual visit to the Nottebohm Room

Hidden gem now available online

The Nottebohm Room is a true hidden gem. The first 150,000 items in the library’s catalogue are preserved here in this breath-taking, historical setting. The doors only swing open for exhibitions, lectures, concerts or guided tours. And when they do, it’s like a breath of magic. Until now. Now you can visit this magical room from home.

In search of Paradise

Dr. Claire Eager (The College of Wooster, Ohio) visited the Heritage Library Hendrik Conscience in the summer of 2019. Her research concentrates on the works of the English poet Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599), who wrote The Faerie Queene, and the similarities with the work of the Flemish poet Jan van der Noot (c.1539-c.1595). We interviewed her about her research.

Nottebohm travel grant awarded to Marlena Cravens and Elise Watson

Marlena Cravens investigates how Spanish texts and translations were used to transform the languages and cultures of the original population of the Americas. Elise Watson will investigate how Antwerp printers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century applied their presses to the benefit of catholic people in the Dutch Republic.

A Tale of Two Books: Two Sammelbände given to Antwerp by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

Assistant Professor Liza Blake examined two rare books which were donated to the Antwerp city library by the English noblewoman and author Margaret Cavendish, Marchioness of Newcastle (1623-1673). In this article she stresses the importance of this donation and explains why these particular copies merit further investigation.

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.

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