In Renaissance Florence, humanists wrote Latin poems fashioning their city as the new Rome, and members of the Medici family as Roman rulers. How can we explain this practice?

It is integral to many cluster members’ research to use Medieval and Early Modern Arts as a lens for studying the medieval and early modern periods at large:

Advanced biotechnology allows us to select or alter the genetic makeup of human embryos. What limits do we impose on biotechnological intervention in nature and the human body? And whose call is that?

A core interest of our cluster members concerns processes of reception, transformation and (interlingual and intermedial) translation in medieval and early modern art, literature and media from diachronic and synchronic perspectives (in time, space, and between media).

Subproject of

One way for governments to conduct foreign policy and promote national interests is through direct outreach and communication with the population of a foreign country. This is called public diplomacy. Historians such as Helmer Helmers and William T. Rossiter have shown that printed media were already…

At the end of the fifteenth century, two intriguing Christian epics were written in Virgilian Latin by the poets Sannazaro and Vida. They did so in accordance with the wishes of the pope. These epics, both praised and criticized by contemporaries, are often seen as innovative for their specific combination…

The KNIR has awarded Elisa Goudriaan the Ted Meijer Prize for her dissertation The Cultural Importance of Florentine Patricians. Cultural Exchange, Brokerage Networks, and Social Representation in Early Modern Florence and Rome (1600-1660).

An important award like the Spinoza Prize, the 'Dutch Nobel Prize', generates lots of media attention. An overview.

This three-year programme offers you a unique chance to gain a specialised qualification in a rich, valuable area of knowledge, plus the freedom to tailor the programme to your own ambitions. And what better place to study than in Leiden, international centre of Dutch studies?

As part of his PhD trajectory, Johannes Boer (PhD candidate at the ACPA), created a music theatre production La Tragedia di Claudio M. .

The spectacular “density” of artworks and architecture in Florence, a designated UNESCO World Heritage site (1982, 2015), reflects a nucleus of some of the most important collecting histories and museums in the world, ranging from the unparalleled Renaissance acquisitions of the Medici dynasty to the…

This programme aims to identify the intellectual contexts that were of importance for the architectural theory of the period, and especially to clarify the relation of architectural theory to primitivism.

When it comes to literature, people mostly talk about what characters see or hear. Rarely is it about what they smell. That’s a shame, thinks university lecturer Jan van Dijkhuizen. He has been awarded an Open Competition grant from NWO to expand academic knowledge about scent in literature, and to…