Since 2018, the Heritage Library Hendrik Conscience and Museum Plantin-Moretus, with the support of the Nottebohm Foundation and the Book and Literature Endowment Fund, have offered an annual travel grant to encourage research on the history of the printed book in Antwerp. Two foreign researchers will thus receive financial support to carry out several weeks of research in the Antwerp library collections during 2024.
Georgina Wilson is a Stipendiary Lecturer in English at Brasenose College, Oxford, and the Postdoctoral Research Associate on 'Print Matters' at the University of York. An early modernist by training, she is interested in the relationship between literary criticism and book-making from the late medieval period to the present day. Her monograph Paper and the Making of Early Modern Literature is forthcoming in summer 2025 with the Material Texts series at Penn, and she has edited, with Zachary Lesser, a special issue of Journal of Early Modern Studies on 'The Politics of Book History: Then and Now'. Her work spans archival, creative, and theoretical approaches, and she is now editing with Orietta da Rold and Vona Groarke a critical-creative issue of Critical Quarterly entitled 'Paper and Poetry: Interventions in Theory and Practice' which brings together literary scholars with curators, paper artists, and creative writers.
Mitchel Gundrum (he/they) is a rare book conservator and researcher of historical bookbinding structures, 18th-century block-printed and paste-decorated book papers, and the history of pigments. He currently works as a Book Conservator at The Huntington Library in Pasadena (California, USA). While in Antwerp, Mitchel will trace the development of historical bookbinding techniques through the earliest known European manual on the topic, an incredibly rare dual-language manuscript in a stunning dos-a-dos binding written and bound for the monks of St. Bernard’s Abbey by Anshelmus Faust in 1612. Through analysis of trade archives, ledgers, and contemporary bindings from the Abbey library held by the Museum Plantin-Moretus and the Hendrik Conscience Heritage Library, he will investigate the history of the Abbey, the as-yet unsettled life of Faust, and the influence of his instructions on 16th- and 17th-century European book production.
