IV LECTIO Summer School 2025 (KU Leuven): ‘Epistolography in the Pre-Modern and Early Modern World’

From 3–4 September 2025, the KU Leuven Institute LECTIO held its fourth Summer School at the Old Abbey of Kortenberg, near Leuven, and invited early career researchers (PhD candidates and postdocs) currently working on letters and letter collections. This year, the Summer School’s programme was dedicated to the topic: ‘Epistolography in the Pre-Modern and Early Modern World’.

The two-day programme consisted of interactive masterclasses led by experts in the field, shedding light on the study of letters and letter-writing from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Each session was accompanied by short presentations from participants on their ongoing research. Topics covered included the challenges of large corpora, late antique Syriac letters, letters as literature and political instruments, and the social dynamics and the performative nature of letters, as well as issues of authorship. Each day concluded with a hands-on session on Digital Humanities topics (editing letters with digital tools; letters, databases and networks).

As a postdoctoral researcher on the DFG-Project ‘Monasticism and Local Self-Organisation: Monastic Letters, Horizontal Binding Forces, and Urban Community in Late Antiquity’, Dr Sandra Erker was invited to participate in the programme and presented her current research project on the monastic letter collection of Isidore of Pelusium.

The Summer School was organised by the committee: Reinhart Ceulemans (KU Leuven), Philip Forness (KU Leuven), Daria Kohler (LECTIO), Christian Laes (Universiteit Antwerpen), Beatrijs Vanacker (KU Leuven), Lieve van Hoof (Universiteit Gent) and Pietro Zaccaria (KU Leuven).