@drewbthomas.bsky.social
Historian at UCD working on early modern printing, counterfeiting, visual communication and AI • THE INDUSTRY OF EVANGELISM out now from Brill • FRHistS
Title page of 16th century book with woodcut illustration cut out
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.
05.08.2025 16:15 — 👍 64 🔁 11 💬 10 📌 2
Does stamping butter predate the Gutenberg press?
23.07.2025 10:47 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Bookworms in the news! 📖🐛(ok, in this case, beetles) wapo.st/44FIveA
16.07.2025 09:42 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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...
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.
30.06.2025 16:45 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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.
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.
16.06.2025 11:11 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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.
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 📚
What a fantastic find! In Harvard’s archives, British scholars find a lost Magna Carta
www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/0...
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...
A Chicago Pope implies the existence of an MLA Pope and APA Pope
08.05.2025 17:36 — 👍 29142 🔁 8234 💬 39 📌 780
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...
"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..."
06.03.2025 10:54 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
A 1476 woodcut from Augsburg depicting the Ascension of Christ with Jesus leaving behind two footprints.
"Divine or not, mom's going to be mad about the footprints." (Augsburg, 1476)
06.02.2024 13:54 — 👍 16 🔁 3 💬 0 📌 0
