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.

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.

Consult digital publications at home

Request temporary access for research

Users who want to consult copyright-protected publications from our digital collections for research or education purposes can now do so at home. A new application in our digital library makes this possible.

Travel grant brings Ashley Gonik (Harvard University) to Antwerp

Three research vlogs

In 2019, Ashley Gonik received a travel grant from the Nottebohm Foundation to conduct research on the collections of the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library and the Plantin-Moretus Museum. Are you curious about the life of an American researcher in Antwerp? In three short research vlogs she tells about her journey, research and experiences.

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.