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.