Dr Gloria Moorman
PhD in Renaissance Studies - University of Warwick (UK);
MA, BA - Universiteit Leiden (the Netherlands).
Her new project Catacombs, Sacred Archaeology, and the Early Printed Book: The Global Ownership of Discovery (c. 1578-1700) looks at the historical appropriation of the Jewish, Christian, and pagan catacombs (subterranean cemeteries) of the former Roman Empire. By studying their representation over time, Gloria's second book project aims to further our understanding of the global reception of cultural interconnectivity in the Mediterranean, newly revealed through the lens of book ownership.
Gloria was finalist for the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome’s biennial prize in Italian Studies (Van Woudenberg dissertatieprijs) and first recipient of the Elsevier-Johan de Witt Prize for "best MA thesis on the Dutch Golden Age."
With Alessandro Metlica and Joris Oddens, she co-edited the open access volume Contending Representations I: The Dutch Republic and the Lure of Monarchy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023).
Her identification of the hand-colored presentation copy of the Theatrum Sabaudiae (Amsterdam, 1682; held at the Royal Library, Turin) as the work of master-colourist Dirk Jansz. van Santen - testifying to the transnational splendour of the connected art and book worlds of the Baroque - was featured among selected essays by researchers "aged under 35" in the Italian journal La Bibliofilia.
Current Position
Gloria currently works on the AHRC project ‘Envisioning Dante, c. 1472–c. 1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page,' which is based at Oxford and Manchester. The project is led by Profs Guyda Armstrong (PI) and Simon Gilson (co-PI).
'Envisioning Dante' is deeply situated in the early print collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Supported by the Visual Geometry Group (VGG)Link opens in a new window, the project uses cutting-edge machine vision technologies and AI to explore the evolution of the graphic design of Dante’s Divine Comedy through time and across different languages and reading communities.
Throughout all strands of her work, Gloria adopts art- and book-historical approaches to investigate the cultural agency of early modern printed artefacts, at the intersection of materiality, (para)text, and imagery.
She takes a special interest in Renaissance geography (the reception of Ptolemy) and the representation of cities in word and image (city praise in verse and prose, across Latin and European vernaculars; evolving visual languages from print antiquarianism to painterly vedutismo).
Rome has been at the heart of Gloria's thinking ever since her prize-winning MA thesis on Joan Blaeu's Admiranda Urbis Romæ (Amsterdam, 1663), which was published as 'A Changing Perspective on the Eternal City Revealed' in Quaerendo (2015).
Collaborations
Gloria is also a member of the TextDiveGlobalLink opens in a new window project, led by Prof Warren Boutcher (Queen Mary University of London). In her chapter for Textuality and Diversity: A Literary History of Europe and its Global Connections (Oxford University Press), she will juxtapose the political and commercial realities of Dutch colonial enterprise in Brazil - relatively short-lived, ultimately unsuccessful - with its versatile, editorial afterlife.
This strand of Gloria's research - characteristically interdisciplinary in approach and transnational in scope - came about as the serendipitous result of collaborations with colleagues based across the United Kingdom, Italy, and the Netherlands, including the seminar Dutch Brazil in Print and Poetry, co-organized at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) with Dr Matthijs Jonker, Dr Giacomo Comiati, and Dr Arthur Weststeijn.
In 2019, she was awarded a Brill Fellowship at the Scaliger Institute (Special Collections, Leiden University Library) to continue the collaborative research that led to Medici Rule Reimagined: Cosimo III, the Dutch Republic, and Grand Ducal Aspirations for Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (c. 1667–1723), co-authored with Ingeborg van Vugt and published in Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 7:4 (2022).
The article features exciting case-studies on transnational pineapples, a foreign professor of Greek in Pisa, and the marvels of Amsterdam as "magazzino del mondo.” During his famous sojourns in the Dutch Republic (1667–1669), young Prince Cosimo III de’ Medici (1642–1723) encountered an enticingly modern strain of republicanism. Together, Ingeborg and Gloria argue for the first time that the splendour of the Dutch Golden Age proved the ideal décor to reimagine Tuscany’s own, administrative past and present.
This project built on past and present engagement with Florence and Tuscany "In the Forgotten Centuries," markedly the happy months of Gloria's NIKI Fellowships at the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Instituut in Florence (2016-17; 2017-18).
Previously, Gloria was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua (2020-2023), and visiting fellow at the Scaliger Institute (Leiden University Library) and the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Instituut (NIKI) in Florence. Over the years, her work has benefitted especially from the generous support of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR), the Newberry Library (Chicago), the Bibliographical Society, and the Society for Renaissance Studies.
Research Interests
- Book history, provenance, patronage, and the history of libraries;
- The representation of cities in word and image;
- Early modern cosmography, court culture, and colonialism;
- Intellectual and artistic exchange between Italy and the Low Countries
(especially during the 16th and 17th centuries).
Selected Academic Associations
Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, University of Warwick
Incoming Mellon Foundation Long-Term Fellow, The Newberry Library, Chicago (2025)
