Spreker: Anna Dlabacova (Universiteit Leiden

22 maart 2023 om 18u30 in de Nottebohmzaal van de Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience in Antwerpen (Hendrik Conscienceplein 4).

Abstract
Prayer books in Middle Dutch were one of the most commonly read book in the late medieval Low Countries. The mainstay of this vast corpus is the Book of Hours in the translation into Dutch ascribed to Geert Grote, initiator and founder one of the period’s most powerful religious reform movements: the Devotio Moderna. Estimates of extant manuscripts range from c. 800 to over 2000; Van Oostrom (2013) has even suggested that their original number must have amounted to over 10.000. The popularity of the Middle Dutch Book of Hours was sustained by a complex web of interconnections between scribes, patrons, readers, texts, images, devotions as well as the books themselves that can best be characterized as an ecosystem. The lecture focuses on the influence of a new type of actor within this ecosystem: the printer. What happened to the Middle Dutch Book of Hours after it was first introduced on the printing press in Delft in 1480? I will provide a first survey of the circa thirty printed editions focusing on their materiality, contents, and copy specific information to uncover the private and societal role(s) of these printed prayers.

Anna Dlabacova is universitair docent aan het Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society.

De lezing is gratis, maar graag vooraf inschrijven via dit formulier.

De Vlaamse Werkgroep Boekgeschiedenis organiseert deze lezing in samenwerking het project IMPRESSVM van de Vlaamse Erfgoedbibliotheken.