07/04/2026 - 12:45 - Doyen 22

Rossana Scebba

(UCLouvain, LIDAM, IRES)

will give a presentation on

Network-mediated screening under uncertainty: Evidence from early modern academic publishing (1500-1800)

Abstract

In markets with limited information about individual quality, economic agents might turn to relational structures to screen unknown counterparts, even more so in times of uncertainty. I study this mechanism in the early modern academic book trade of the historical Low Countries. The Low Countries occupied a unique position in the European Reformation: as the Habsburg dynastic heartland and home to the Catholic bulwark of the University of Louvain, they were at the forefront of systematic anti-heresy censorship as Calvinist and Lutheran ideas spread rapidly across the region. This generated an unusually intense and well-documented sequence of regulatory shocks, until the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648) fractured the market into a censorial Catholic South and a tolerant commercial North, with the 1585 Fall of Antwerp marking a sharp divergence in censorship regimes. Using scholars' affiliation records from the Repertorium Eruditorum Totius Europae (RETE) to reconstruct collegial ties based on co-presence at European university faculties, and inferring professional ties between academic authors and printers/publishers from bibliographic records of the Short Title Catalogues of Flanders and the Netherlands (STCV; STCN), I examine whether reputational spillovers shaped access to first publication and whether censorship-induced uncertainty amplified their role.

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