Three researchers are involved in the project The Art of Reasoning:

Irene van Renswoude, postdoc researcher at Huygens ING and co-applicant of the project. Irene studied Language and Culture Studies in Utrecht, with a specialization in medieval history and literature. She held various positions at Utrecht University including that of research adviser, coordinator and PhD coach. In 2004 she started a PhD programme in early medieval history in Utrecht, which she concluded with a thesis Licence to speak. The rhetoric of free speech in Late Antiquity and the  early Middle Ages in 2011 (Cambridge, forthcoming). For her research on fee speech she received the Praemium Erasmianum Research Award in 2012 and the Heineken Young Scientist award in 2014. She published on subjects such as perceptions of time, self-fiction, censorship, heresy, history of debate, and (the lack of) trust. She co-edited volumes on Strategies of writing (Turnhout 2008), Ego trouble  (Vienna 2010), Religious Franks (Manchester 2016) and, together with Mariken Teeuwen, The annotated book (Brepols, forthcoming). Her present interests include medieval practices of censorship and social norms of debate. In 2016 she held a guest-professorship at the University of Vienna, teaching on the intellectual foundations of the European knowledge society. As of 2011 she works at the Huygens ING as a postdoctoral researcher, first in the project Marginal scholarship, then in the new project The Art of Reasoning.

Irene O’Daly, postdoc researcher at Huygens ING. Irene (sorry for the confusion of having two Irenes in one project!) studied History and Political Science at Trinity College, Dublin, and at the University of Cambridge, where she did her MPhil and PhD on the political thought of John of Salisbury. After a period lecturing in Trinity College Dublin, and University College Dublin, she was appointed a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University in Prof.dr. E. Kwakkel’s NWO-Vidi project Turning over a new leaf: Manuscript innovation in the twelfth-century Renaissance. There, she studied the use of diagrams as a scholarly technique to summarize and clarify text, to add new information and transform old knowledge into something new, focusing specifically on the presence of such diagrams in Ciceronian rhetorical texts. In 2014, she returned to the UK to take up a position as a Research Fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester, where she coordinated the MA programme Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Manuscripts and special collections were her main focus. As of March 2017, she joined our research team of The Art of Reasoning.

Mariken Teeuwen, senior researcher at Huygens ING, and Professor at the University of Utrecht, Department of History and Art History. Mariken is the main applicant of the project, and coordinator of the team. She studied Musicology and Medieval Studies in Utrecht, and Manuscript Studies in Leiden. In 2000, she was awarded her PhD for her dissertation on the reception of the art of music in Martianus Capella’s  De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii – a fifth century pagan handbook on the seven liberal arts which became very popular in the Carolingian period. She started working for the Huygens Institute in 1998, when she started collaborating with Olga Weijers on a project which mapped the terminology of medieval intellectual life. This resulted in a book in 2003, after which Mariken returned to her earlier research interest: the oldest commentary traditions on Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis. She was awarded a NWO Veni project to set up a first digital edition of the oldest commentary tradition, and to produce a full analysis of the Carolingian scholarship that surrounded Martianus’s encyclopedia. In 2011, she expanded her research to the phenomenon of writing in the margin and in between the lines of early medieval manuscripts, which was the topic of her NWO Vidi project (2011-2016). Together with Irene van Renswoude, she followed this up with a new project, also focusing on writing in the margin, but taking a larger slice of history and a narrower view on a particular theme: techniques of scientific reasoning. She is fascinated, in general, in the world of knowledge, books and intellectual culture. She is keen to explore digital tools for this kind of scholarship, and committed to invest in the development of such tools.