Fellow 2027
For 2027, the fellowship is awarded to Henrike Scholten. She is an art historian and visual artist based in the Netherlands. Her PhD dissertation at Utrecht University takes place within the ERC-funded project DURARE (Dynamics of the Durable: A History of Making Things Last in the Visual and Decorative Arts). Het dissertation is titled “’t Is al maer water-verwe.” Watercolor and durability, 1585-1750. Scholten holds a Predoctoral Research Fellowship at the Center for Netherlandish Art in Boston. The current fellowship project is part of Scholten’s ongoing investigation into Jacob Berents’ oeuvre and manuscript.
Her fellowship project is Jacob Berents, miniaturist and “philo-mathematicus”. Jacob Berents (before 1679-ca.1747) was a miniature painter who signed his works as “J. Bêrents, Mathematicus”, occasionally expanding to “Philo-Mathematicus”. As a young man, Berents had immigrated from Hamburg to the Dutch Republic and ended up in the city of Breda, where he established himself as a miniature painter and drawing teacher for the children of the local (military) elite.
A recently rediscovered manuscript sheds new light on Berents’ oeuvre and on the way he deliberately positioned himself within his new environment as an artist, teacher, and “mathematicus”. Berents’ manuscript, written in a mixture of German and Dutch, collects art-technical instructions and recipes that go beyond his own watercolor miniature technique. Besides practical instructions, the manuscript also contains references to a large number of printed books, usually in the form of lists or short summaries, often noting where one could buy or borrow them. Well-known names such as Erasmus, Athanasius Kircher, and Anthonie van Leeuwenhoek feature in his reading lists, as well as a variety of authors on art, history, and mathematics. Approaching the manuscript as not simply an art-technical source but as a rich ego-document sheds light on Berents’ intellectual preoccupations, as well as the social processes of knowledge circulation.
During the Thijssen-Schoute Fellowship, Scholten plans to critically interrogate Berents’ hybrid self-fashioning as an artist and “mathematicus” by examining his reading lists and note-taking practice within an analysis of his social network. This takes the manuscript from traditional art-historical discourse into the history of knowledge, situating his notes within the reception history of printed books in the early modern period.
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.