Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · Aug 29

She kept her red Bible in the center of a row of white (vellum) books with the rows above and below bound in black (leather).

Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · Aug 29

Interior designers in 2025: “Arrange your books by color, it’s chic ✨”
Lady Bindloss in 1671: “Been there, done that.” 📚🎨

earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com/2025/08/20/l...

Lady Bindloss Buys Some Books (1676)

Of the various kinds of documents that provide evidence of book ownership in the early modern period, purchase records are among the scarcest survivals: most booklists take the form of wills, inven…

earlymodernfemalebookownership.wordpress.com

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Reposted by Drew Thomas

Marsh's Library @marshslibrary.bsky.social · Aug 5

Vandalism! At some stage in its nearly 500 year history, someone cut out the printer's ornament from the title page of our 1544 copy of Aesop's Fables.

Title page of 16th century book with woodcut illustration cut out

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Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · Jul 23

Does stamping butter predate the Gutenberg press?

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Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · Jul 16

Bookworms in the news! 📖🐛(ok, in this case, beetles) wapo.st/44FIveA

Hungary's oldest library is fighting to save 100,000 books from a beetle infestation

A medieval abbey in Hungary is battling a beetle infestation threatening its ancient book collection

wapo.st

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Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · Jul 2

When did libraries realize their Luther pamphlets were fakes?
My new Open Access article, "Provenance and Deception: Tracking Counterfeit Luther Pamphlets in Wittenberg", traces how centuries of provenance work slowly brought them to light.

📚 Read here: doi.org/10.1080/1357...

Provenance and Deception: Tracking Counterfeit Luther Pamphlets in Wittenberg

This article explores the phenomenon of counterfeit copies of Martin Luther’s pamphlets within the Reformationsgeschichtliche Forschungsbibliothek (RFB) in Wittenberg. Following the rise of Luther,...

doi.org

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Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · Jun 30

I had a great time in Saint-Étienne recently, speaking about multi-modal computer vision and Iconclass. Got to see a bit of Lyon too.

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Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · Jun 16

Excited to present this week at "Computer Vision for the Investigation of Ornaments and Ancient Documents" @ Université Jean Monnet! My talk: Captions, Codes & Clusters—on using multimodal AI to map visual culture & religious messaging in the Reformation.

Program for "Computer Vision for the investigation of ornaments and ancient documents" at the Jean Monnet University in Saint-Etienne, France, June 19-20, 2025.

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Reposted by Drew Thomas

Daniel Bellingradt @dbellingradt.bsky.social · May 15

Among the many characteristics of being the Catholic King of #France in seventeenth-century Europe was to burn and ban Protestant books.

In this image from 1691 you see Louis le Grand banning, burning and condeming books by Luther and Calvin. A symbolic #bookburning event and a religious #bookban 📚

Claude-François Menestrier's „Histoire du roy Louis le Grand“ (Paris 1691), page 50. You see the French King, a Catholic, centered in a complex image showing, among many other details, a bookburning of Protestant books.

A detail of page 50 is highlighted: books from Calvin and Luther are falling into a fireplace.

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Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · May 15

What a fantastic find! In Harvard’s archives, British scholars find a lost Magna Carta

www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...

In Harvard’s archives, British scholars find a lost Magna Carta

At a moment when Harvard is battling the Trump administration, a scholar who helped discover the charter said it was an “almost providential” find.

www.washingtonpost.com

Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · May 13

Exciting that my book "The Industry of Evangelism" just got a great review in the latest Renaissance Quarterly:

“Definitive... a major contribution to early modern European print culture that cannot be overlooked.”

📖 Review: doi.org/10.1017/rqx....
📘 Book info: doi.org/10.1163/9789...

Reposted by Drew Thomas

Hector Diaz @iamhectordiaz.com · May 8

A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope

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Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · Apr 16

Giving a talk in 2 weeks on how AI is transforming historical image analysis. Illustrations, iconography, and algorithms collide. Join me!
📍From Text to Image
📅 29 April | 11:00-12:30
📡 Hybrid event at Italian-German Historical Institute, Trento
🔗 RSVP: isig.fbk.eu/en/events/de...

From text to image: Visual and multimodal AI in the Digital Humanities

While text-based AI applications are well established, images present unique challenges: they are not inherently machine-readable, posing significant challenges for large-scale analysis.

isig.fbk.eu

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Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · Mar 6

"Tell your students you will be giving the same essay question to a tool such as ChatGPT. They will be marked on how much better their version is than the machine’s: how much more original, creative, perceptive or accurate..."

Margot Finn @eicathomefinn.bsky.social · Mar 6

Great article this. Informed by lecturers who are actually setting and marking assessments. More like this please.

Students must learn to be more than mindless ‘machine-minders’

[FREE TO READ] Generative AI is a tempting short-cut that can prevent those at university from gaining foundational skills

www.ft.com

Drew Thomas @drewbthomas.bsky.social · Feb 6

"Divine or not, mom's going to be mad about the footprints." (Augsburg, 1476)

A 1476 woodcut from Augsburg depicting the Ascension of Christ with Jesus leaving behind two footprints.

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