Dr Elise Watson

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

Biography

Background

I am a historian of early modern gender, labour, and the book. After completing a PhD at the University of St Andrews, I worked for the Universal Short Title Catalogue project (ustc.ac.uk) and as Managing Editor for Brill's Book History Online bibliography. In 2024, I was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. I am broadly interested in the printed book as it intersects with gender, religion, and social and cultural history.

 

Research Profile: https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/elise-watson

Research summary

Places: 

  • Low Countries
  • France
  • British Isles
  • Europe

Themes: 

  • Gender
  • Labour
  • Religion
  • Culture
  • Communication

Periods: 

  • Early Modern
  • Eighteenth Century

Current research interests

My current project focuses on collaborations between women in the early modern book trade. While many women worked in the print industry at all levels in this period, from rag-sorters for paper to master printers, their legal and social precarity as labourers meant that they were either unable to work under their own names, or their contributions went unrecognised. Despite this, female friendships and business partnerships produced hundreds of printed books across Europe between 1450 and 1800. This project examines how this labour was gendered, and uncovers untold stories of women's essential labour in the business of making books. My first book Gender and the Book Trades (Leiden: Brill, 2025), co-edited with Jessica Farrell-Jobst, proposes a new approach to the study of the book by using gender as a tool of analysis, exploring its use as a methodology rather than a subject in book history, with twenty-five pioneering case studies that stretch from colonial Peru to modern Delhi.

Past research interests

My doctoral thesis, completed in 2022, investigated the impact of the interconfessional book trade on practical questions of toleration and co-existence in the post-Reformation landscape, using as a case study the trade of Catholic books in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. The production, distribution and censorship of these confessional texts, as well as their import from abroad, shaped the lives of the large minority Catholic population and the work of the Dutch Mission. Books, acting as repositories of faith, holders of memory and objects of devotion, helped to create and shape Catholic experience. Through an examination of a large body of print and manuscript sources including previously undocumented printed ephemera, this work demonstrated both the importance of books to the Catholic minority in the Dutch Republic, and the value of Catholic books in the Dutch book trade.

Knowledge exchange

I have presented on the history of the book and the Reformation both in museums and for history societies in the UK.

In February 2024, I appeared on an episode of BBC Free Thinking (Radio 3) on ‘The Dutch Connection‘- available to listen here (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0hfqgs8).

Books 

Editor along with Jessica Farrell-Jobst, Gender and the Book Trades (Leiden: Brill, 2025). 

 

Journal Articles  

‘Swapping gossip, swapping profit: the book barter economy in the early modern Low Countries’, Library & Information History 40.2 (2024), pp. 118-131. https://doi.org/10.3366/lih.2024.0174 

‘Queering the Language of Dynasty in Imprints and Bibliographic Metadata’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 118.2 (2024), pp. 223-243. https://doi.org/10.1086/730317 

‘Bibliotheken en katholieke kennisoverdracht in ballingschap’, trans. Hanna de Lange, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Kerkgeschiedenis, 26.2 (2023), pp. 73-79. 

‘Education in partibus infidelium: Catholic Catechisms and Controversy in the Dutch Republic’, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, 29.1 (2022), pp. 4-31. https://doi.org/10.5117/JNB2022.002.WATS 

‘The Jesuitesses in the Bookshop: Catholic Lay Sisters’ Participation in the Dutch Book Trade, 1650-1750’, Studies in Church History, 57 (2021), pp. 163-184. https://doi.org/10.1017/stc.2021.9 Received the Michael Kennedy Prize for best postgraduate communication. 

 

Book Chapters 

‘Learning Your Papist ABCs: Gender and Print in Clandestine Catholic Schools in the Dutch Republic’, in Elise Watson and Jessica Farrell-Jobst (eds.), Gender and the Book Trades (Leiden: Brill, 2025). 

‘Lost Saints: Printed Catholic Ephemera in the Dutch Republic’, in Arthur der Weduwen and Malcolm Walsby (eds.), Reformation, Religious Culture and Print in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2022), pp. 215-234. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004515307_015 

‘Networks of Devotion: Auction Catalogues and the Catholic Book Trade in Amsterdam, 1650-1700’, in Arthur der Weduwen, Andrew Pettegree and Graeme Kemp (eds.), Book Trade Catalogues in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2021), pp. 193-211. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004422247_009. 

 

Reviews 

Review of Valerie Wayne, Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England (London: Bloomsbury, 2020) in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 118.1 (2024). https://doi.org/doi/10.1086/729001 

Review of Renaud Adam, Rosa De Marco, and Malcolm Walsby (eds.), Books and Prints at the Heart of the Catholic Reformation in the Low Countries (16th-17th Centuries) (Leiden: Brill, 2022). https://doi.org/10.51769/bmgn-lchr.18936 

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