Dr Gloria Moorman
PhD in Renaissance Studies - University of Warwick (UK);
MA, BA - Universiteit Leiden (the Netherlands).
She investigates the visual representation of power across early modern Italy, with a special emphasis on Rome.
Her new project, supported by the Mellon Foundation and provisionally entitled 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, this project aims to further our understanding of the global reception of cultural interconnectivity in the Mediterranean, newly revealed through the lens of book ownership.
Rome has been at the heart of Gloria's thinking ever since her prize-winning dissertation on Joan Blaeu's Admiranda Urbis Romae (Amsterdam, 1663), which argued for the Eternal City's significance as a stage for the rise of the Dutch Republic.
She co-edited Contending Representations I: The Dutch Republic and the Lure of Monarchy (Brepols, 2023), which was termed 'an indispensable addition to the literature' on early modern colonialism in The Burlington Magazine (2024).
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, power and imagery.
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.
Gloria is always happy to get in touch with those wishing to pursue postgraduate studies at Warwick's Centre for the Study of the Renaissance, and especially keen to discuss possibilities for professional development and research in both the United Kingdom and Italy.
In 2017, she herself had the opportunity to spend an internship period working in the historical library of the Correr Museum in the heart of Venice.
Collaborations
Most recently (2023-2024), Gloria has worked on the AHRC project 'Envisioning Dante, c. 1472–c. 1630: Seeing and Reading the Early Printed Page,' based at Oxford and Manchester. This project is led by Guyda Armstrong and Simon Gilson.
Supported by the Visual Geometry Group (VGG), 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.
Previously, Gloria was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Padua (2020-2023), and a visiting fellow at her alma mater, the Universiteit Leiden, at the Kunsthistorisch Instituut in Florence, and at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome.
In 2019, she was awarded a Brill Fellowship at the Scaliger Institute (Universiteit Leiden) to continue the research that led to 'Medici Rule Reimagined: Cosimo III, the Dutch Republic, and Grand Ducal Aspirations for Seventeenth-Century Tuscany (c.1667–1723),' published in Erudition and the Republic of Letters (2022).
This article newly argues that the splendour of the Dutch seventeenth century, once considered a golden age, proved the ideal décor to reimagine the past and present renaissances of Medici Tuscany. It features case-studies on transnational pineapples, a foreign professor of Greek in Pisa, and the marvels of Amsterdam as magazzino del mondo.
She is also a member of the TextDiveGlobal project, led by Warren Boutcher at Queen Mary University of London. In her chapter for Textuality and Diversity: A Literary History of Europe and its Global Connections (OUP), 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, the Netherlands, Italy, the United States, and Brazil, including a panel on New World Narratives at the Renaissance Society of America's Annual Conference 2023 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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).
Select Academic Distinctions
Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of the Renaissance,
University of Warwick
Mellon Foundation Long-Term Fellow, The Newberry Library, Chicago (2025)
Denis E. Rhodes Essay Prize (La Bibliofilia, 2020)
First recipient of Elsevier-Johan de Witt Prize (2014)
