Public lecture

Lecture by Historians Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen

01/15/2019 - 16:00 - 18:00

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Tuesday 15 January 2019, 4 pm

Tallinn City Archives (Tolli St. 4)

Lecture by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen: The Bookshop of the World.  Making and Trading Books in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic

Abstract

In the seventeenth century, the Dutch took fame by storm: a new country, a new way of governing, a new culture.  The untold part of this story is the Dutch conquest of the European book world. This was the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, and Dutch art has always held centre stage; but the Dutch published many more books than pictures, and bought and owned more books per capita than any other part of Europe.  Key innovations in marketing, book auctions and newspaper advertising, brought stability to a market where elsewhere in Europe publishers faced bankruptcy: the Dutch made money from books, and created a population uniquely well-informed and politically engaged.  This paper explores how the Dutch developed such a firm grip on the European book market, focussing in particular on their ruthless colonization of the book market in northern and eastern Europe.

 

Andrew Pettegree is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue. He is the author of over a dozen books in the fields of Reformation history and the history of communication including Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge University Press, 2005), The Book in the Renaissance (Yale University Press, 2010), The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014) and Brand Luther: 1517, Print and the Making of the Reformation (Penguin, 2015). His recent projects include ‘Preserving the World’s Rarest Book’s, a collaboration with the international library community funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Arthur der Weduwen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews and the author of Dutch and Flemish Newspapers of the Seventeenth Century (2 vols., Brill, 2017). An earlier version of this work won St Andrews University’s Gray prize, and the Elzevier–De Witt prize in the Netherlands.  His PhD (2018) is a study of government attempts to shape public opinion in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. He is a long-term associate of the Universal Short Title Catalogue project.  His most recent book, The Bookshop of the World. Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (co-authored with Andrew Pettegree), will appear in 2019 with Yale University Press (in English) and Atlas Contact (in Dutch).