Inaugural Lecture by Prof.dr. Nadine N.W. Akkerman on the acceptance of her position as professor of Early Modern Literature & Culture at Leiden University on Friday 3 May 2024
Oratie uitgesproken door Prof.dr. Nadine N.W. Akkerman bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar Vroegmoderne Literatuur en Cultuur aan de Universiteit Leiden op vrijdag 3 mei 2024
Lucy Russell (née Harington) (1581–1627), Countess of Bedford, daughter of John Harington, 1st Baron Harington of Exton (1539/40–1613) and Anne Keilway (c. 1554–1620), was Queen Anna of Denmark’s... Show moreLucy Russell (née Harington) (1581–1627), Countess of Bedford, daughter of John Harington, 1st Baron Harington of Exton (1539/40–1613) and Anne Keilway (c. 1554–1620), was Queen Anna of Denmark’s First Lady of the Bedchamber from 1604 to 1619 and one of the most powerful courtiers of the Jacobean period. While her husband shunned public life, she wielded cultural and political influence through literary patronage of male authors including Ben Jonson and John Donne, the masques put on by Queen Anna’s court, and her frank correspondence with both her former lady-in-waiting and close friend Lady Jane Cornwallis Bacon (1581–1659) and collector and diplomat Sir Dudley Carleton (1573–1632). Her interests included garden design and collecting visual art, coins, and medals. She also wrote poetry and shared at least one elegy with Donne, in effect agreeing to its scribal publication. The fact that she worked hard to restrict the circulation of her verses, however, perhaps explains why only one of her poems survives, and that with but eight manuscript witnesses. Show less
Shining a light on the clandestine machinations of high-ranking spy Jane Whorwood, who worked for King Charles I during the English Civil War. Her story is one of mystery, intrigue, coded letters,... Show moreShining a light on the clandestine machinations of high-ranking spy Jane Whorwood, who worked for King Charles I during the English Civil War. Her story is one of mystery, intrigue, coded letters, codenames, ambiguous and strained relations, high stakes, high drama and personal disappointment. Show less
Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans of damaged historical documents, but have so far been limited to scrolls, books, and documents with... Show moreComputational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans of damaged historical documents, but have so far been limited to scrolls, books, and documents with one or two folds. The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes. We present a fully automatic computational approach for reconstructing and virtually unfolding volumetric scans of a locked letter with complex internal folding, producing legible images of the letter’s contents and crease pattern while preserving letterlocking evidence. We demonstrate our method on four letterpackets from Renaissance Europe, reading the contents of one unopened letter for the first time. Using the results of virtual unfolding, we situate our findings within a novel letterlocking categorization chart based on our study of 250,000 historical letters Show less
