FSU Art Historians Participate in Emory Conference on Customized Books in Early Modern Europe
In October 2021, Art History doctoral candidate Britt Boler Hunter and professor Stephanie Leitch participated in Emory University’s Lovis Corinth Colloquium XI: Customized Books in Early Modern Europe 1400-1700. The conference was originally scheduled for April of 2020, but had been postponed three times due to the pandemic. Dr. Leitch and Britt were delighted to finally gather with colleagues from around the world to share their research. International participants from Europe joined virtually as the whole conference was broadcast through Zoom. The proceedings of the conference will be published in the Intersections series of Brill, which focuses on interdisciplinary topics in Early Modern studies.
Britt Boler Hunter presented dissertation related research in her paper titled, “The Wellcome Apocalypse and its printed precedents,” in which she demonstrates the non-evolutionary book production dynamics of late fifteenth-century central Europe. By establishing printed media as manuscript source material, Hunter argues that the Wellcome scribe/artist relied on some of the most visually accessible imagery of the day to convey important existential issues. In her forthcoming essay, Hunter will elaborate on the role of reproducible visual information in late medieval didactic books.
Dr. Leitch presented “A Catalogue of Printed Knowledge: Repurposed Prints in an Encyclopedic Hausbuch, c. 1524,” in which she documents and examines the fascinating mutability of printed models to form new frameworks of knowledge. Among Leitch’s most unusual discoveries is the use of actual botanical specimen as printing stamps.
