TOME

News from April – August 2025

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Lenka Kašová
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  • Lucie Storchová gave a talk titled “Reconstructing the Hassenstein Library: Identity and Memory Politics of Prague Humanists in 1570” at the 71st Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America Conference (2025) in Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to her presentation, she also chaired the panel “Libraries and Early Modern Education Across Europe,” contributing to the rich scholarly discussions at the event.
  • Vojtěch Kaše and his group has made a great progress with his work on the new versions of WEEMS, and of the iWEEMS, and AMeD [Automatic Metaphor Detector] apps. WEEMS model was re-trained, improved, and then released as the versions 0.3.7, 0.3.9, and 0.4 respectively.
  • Jana Švadlenková’s assistance has been very helpful in exporting the 16th-century EMLAP digital corpus from Transkribus to the project’s OwnCloud provided by CESNET. Finally, it seems that the graphical user interface (GUI) dedicated to the EMLAP corpus of 100 highly curated transcriptions of 1500-1650 Latin prints is much closer than ever. Jo Hedesan and her groupmates are working incredibly hard on publication of the EMLAP GUI as soon as possible; the interface will have advanced search features and will show the user both the source scanned documents and their top-quality human-supervised transcription. Many thanks go not only to the group leader Jo Hedesan, but also to Jindra Kubíčková, Ondřej Kříž, Alexander Huber, Jana Ředinová , and, of course – as always with an IT and AI stuff – Vojtěch Kaše; the emerging GUI will be of great service for the broad international scholarly community. An excellent performance indeed, guys!
  • Márton Szentpéteri gave on 12 May 2025 a talk at the Institute of Philosophy, CAS, Prague, titled “Texts, Images and the Materiality of the Book: Architectonic Paratexts in Early Modern Natural Philosophy and the Bibliospace”.
  • Petr Pavlas and Vojtěch Kaše delivered a keynote address at a workshop in Abu Dhabí, with Jo Hedesan joining the party via videoconference.

  • In May, Lenka Řezníková gave a talk, titled “Metaphors in Theological Understanding: Early Modern Rhetorica Sacra between Encyclopaedism and Homiletics,” at the 2025 Comenius Conference on “Theology in Context” in Cluj/Kolozsvár.

  • At the end of May, we had a very productive joint project workshop with the team of VERITRACE in Pilsen. Here you can find the workshop programme and below some photos from this beautiful and fruitful event:
  • Two new TOME research papers by Lucie Storchová and Martin Žemla are now out! Moreover, Jo Hedesan published a journal article closely related to TOME.
  • “The Encyclopaedia as Metaphor. The Alphabetization of Knowledge, 1450-1950 [acronym TEAM]” – intended as a follow-up to TOME – was positively evaluated in the 2025 ERC CoG competition (score B).
  • Lucie Storchová is now back from the 19th Congress of the International Association for Neo-Latin Studies (IANLS), Aix-Marseille University, where she presented a poster of TOME, chaired a session on “Companion to Neo-Latin in Hungary II”, and gave a talk on “Metaphors of scholarly love and cooperation in 17th-century learned correspondence”.
  • Lenka Řezníková is now back from her study visit in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Vojtěch Kaše is back from Uppsala, where he delivered a paper at the annual conference of the European Association of Biblical Studies (EABS); with Jan Tvrz, he also visited a workshop in Burghausen organised by the University of Passau. Jo Hedesan is back from Antwerp where she presented a paper at the 28th Conference of the International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry (ISPC). Furthermore, in June, Jo Hedesan organised a big panel at the 14th International Conference on the History of Chemistry (14 ICHC) in Valencia where Petr Pavlas also took part. Last but not least, having been invited by Dana Jalobeanu, Petr Pavlas gave a talk at the University of Technology in Nuremberg (UTN) on 25 June within the Early Modern Lab’s Research Seminar.
  • Petr Pavlas, Lenka Řezníková, and Lucie Storchová are now finishing the 1/2025 special issue of Filosofický časopis [Philosophical Journal] 1/2025 on “Cognitive Metaphors and Encyclopaedic Knowledge: Exploring Semantic Transformations in Early Modernity”. It comprises an editorial and 6 wonderful studies:
    • Editorial (Petr Pavlas , Lenka Řezníková, Lucie Storchová)
    •  Georgics of the Mind: Cultivation of the Self as Agriculture in the Early Modern Age (Alessandro Nannini)
    •  From Circle to Book: The Evolution of Metaphors and the Birth of Early Modern Encyclopaedism (Petr Pavlas)
    • The Metaphor of Harmony in Early Modern Knowledge Organisation. Comeniusʼ Pansophy caught between Aesthetics and Mechanics (Lenka Řezníková)
    • Metaphors of the Human Heart and Their Epistemological Shifts after 1600: A Case Study in Changes in Wittenberg Natural Philosophy and Discourses of Power (Lucie Storchová)
    • See, Hear, Taste. Sensory Metaphors and Their Use before and in Paracelsianism (Martin Žemla)
    • Metaphors of Universal Architecture and the Architecture of Vanities in Miklós Bethlen’s Works (Márton Szentpéteri)
    • About authors (short biographies of the authors)
      At this moment, the texts are in the phase of final formal editing/proofreading (“Redaktion”) by the journal’s assistant editor Jana Křížová. We expect to have the issue out by the end of 2025.
  • Lucie Storchová, Lenka Řezníková, ane Petr Pavlas look forward to continue in the early modern encyclopaedic endeavours within a new, EU-OP-funded project titled “TRUST: Knowledge in the Age of Distrust” (2025-2028).
  • Jo Hedesan is going to publish a series of co-authored articles about EMLAP and related stuff (Ambix, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Journal of Open Humanities Data); she also submitted a paper proposal for the 2025 Computational Humanities Research conference in Luxembourg (co-author Petr Pavlas).
  • To get back to the Computational-Historical Group again, Vojtěch Kaše submitted a data paper (co-authored by Jan Tvrz, Jana Švadlenková, Jo Hedesan, and Petr Pavlas) on WEEMS and iWEEMS to the Journal of Open Humanities Data; moreover, he submitted a paper proposal for the 2025 Computational Humanities Research conference in Luxembourg (co-authored by Sarah Lang, the head of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and Petr Pavlas). Last but not least, Vojtěch attended a small international workshop in Umea (Sweden) while exerting continuous and industrious effort to create an exceptionally large corpus of Greek and Latin textual documents from antiquity to the modern era (GreLa) and conceptualizing his own large-scale future research project on the cultural evolution of meanings and ideas.
  • Petr Pavlas will present TOME’s results at a Digital Neo-Latin workshop, organised by Johann Raminger, in Aarhus on 25 September 2025. Furthermore, Petr Pavlas and Lenka Řezníková will attend a three-day workshop in the Jesuit College Refectary in Klatovy (Czechia), 22-24 October 2025: the theme is “Object of Perfection in Early Modernity” and the thematic sessions are (1) BOOK, (2) WISH LISTS, and (3) LUXURY. Petr also attends international conference “Trinitarian Synthesis of Wisdom” to take place on 3-5 December 2025 in Olomouc.

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