The Dr. C. Louise Thijssen-Schoute Stichting promotes the study of the history of ideas, especially that of the seventeenth century. The foundation helps fund scholarly publications and conferences and maintains two special chairs. With its fellowship program, the foundation, in cooperation with the Huygens Institute, aims to help young researchers further develop research in this field. One Thijssen-Schoute fellow is selected each year.
Stipend and support
The stipend is €2000 per month and is provided for a period of three months. The fellow has a workplace within the Knowledge and Art Practices research group at the Huygens Institute. At the end of the fellowship, the fellow accounts to the board of the Foundation with a brief report on the course of the project and its outcomes. The fellowship is open to advanced doctoral students and recent doctorated (PhD-defense no longer than 3 years ago at the time of application). The 2027 fellowship procedure will be announced in the first months of 2026.
Fellow 2026
For 2026, the fellowship is awarded to Holly Riach. She is a PhD candidate at Leiden University working on Professor Nadine Akkerman’s ERC-consolidator FEATHERS project. Her doctoral thesis, which is expected to be submitted in July 2025, explores the creative and scribal agencies inherent in the making of collaboratively and communally produced manuscript miscellanies in early modern England, c. 1558–1642.
Her fellowship project is Modelling Miscellaneity: Early Modern Knowledge Production through the Lens of Historical Reconstruction. This project aims to develop a new, experiential method for the study of one distinctive form of early modern textual collection: the manuscript miscellany, a genre of text which stands central to our understanding of how knowledge was collected and circulated throughout the early modern world. Manuscript miscellanies were typically produced over long periods of time, oftentimes in a non-linear manner, and by the hands of numerous different scribes. Therefore, they often survive as unwieldy and thus impenetrable objects. Indeed, the complexities of their production have the capacity to obscure the methods through which they were made and how they grew over time, the contributions made to them by individual scribes, and the potential organizational structures that might lie beneath their surface.
As recent scholarship has shown, first-hand experience can significantly alter our understanding of historical artefacts and the ways in which they were made. This project, therefore, will explore how a hands-on research practice can help us make some scholarly sense of early modern manuscript miscellanies with complex material and textual histories, and the vast array of texts they contain. This will involve the production of flexible and multi-layered models (or replicas) of these complex volumes, for use not only as a research tool, but also in classrooms and workshops, which will have the potential to radically change how we study manuscript miscellanies and illuminate early modern practices of knowledge production and organization more broadly.
Questions
For questions about the fellowship, please contact the secretary.