Alexandra Wingate, a Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering Ph.D. Information Science student, has received a $5,100 grant from The Willison Foundation Charitable Trust for her research involving private libraries and book selling in the northern Spain region of Navarre.
Wingate will go to Pamplona, Navarre, Spain next summer to conduct research as part of her Ph.D. dissertation. She will analyze libraries as well as booksellers to uncover what books were circulating in Navarre from the mid-16th Century to the end of the 17th Century, and how they were circulated.
The grant will support 11 weeks of research. Wingate said she will look at 128 court cases, plus other archival documents, with the hope of contributing to the qualitative information about book trade practices, as well as quantitative information about what books were circulating in Navarre during that period.
“This means researching the booksellers working at the time, what they were selling, what their business practices were, and who they were selling to,” Wingate said. She will search for surviving court cases and notary protocols in the different archives in Navarre.
“The most useful documents are inventories, basically lists of the goods that a particular person owned, often after they died,” she said. “For booksellers, inventories of their bookstore might be made which helps us understand the books that were on sale at a particular point while the inventories of private individuals tell us what kind of books were owned at the time.”
In addition to examining libraries and booksellers, Wingate said that she has also looked at court cases dealing with schools and literacy to think about where potential readers were in Navarre.
This follows up Wingate’s undergraduate research in 2018 that analyzed 35 private libraries of clergy, legal professionals and women to argue how individuals used books to construct their identity.
For her master’s thesis at the University of London in 2019, she studied the bookstore of Lorenzo Coroneu, a Pamplona bookseller who died in 1684. That thesis won the 2020 Rees-Davies Prize from the Royal Historical Society for best history MA thesis in the United Kingdom.
“This research award will support her to conduct research in Spain during the summer,” said Noriko Hara, chair of Information and Library Science, and professor of Information Science. “Alex has many accomplishments as a Ph.D. student. This award is another example of that. I want to congratulate Alex for her great achievement.”
The Willison Foundation Charitable Trust promotes the advancement of the history of the book in the world. It awards funding to researchers studying the production, transmission, circulation, dissemination and consumption of text and graphics such as maps, music and illustrations.