Arnoud Visser is Professor of Textual Culture in the Renaissance in the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication. He is director of the , the Dutch national research school of cultural history.
His research has focused on early modern intellectual culture, with particular attention to humanism, (counter-) reformation and the history of reading. He is currently completing a cultural history of the know-it-all from Antiquity to the present, aimed at a general readership. The book traces how knowledge and learning can provoke irritation, explaining a deep tradition of anti-intellectual resistance. He has also just published an edited volume about the history of fame in the Renaissance, part of a diachronic project about the long-term history of fame and celebrity. He is furthermore directing Annotated Books Online, a digital platform for the study of early modern reading practices (a collaborative venture together with partners at Gent, University College London, York and Princeton).
His publications include:
- (forthcoming in 2025 with Princeton University Press)
- A Cultural History of Fame in the Renaissance (London: Bloomsbury Academic in 2025)
- (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
- (Leiden: Brill, 2005)
- together with Karl Enenkel (eds.), Mundus Emblematicus: Studies in Neo-Latin Emblem Books (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003)
Chair
Textual Culture in the Renaissance
Inaugural lecture date
27.11.2013