معرفی
Cora Zwart is a researcher at the University of Groningen's Faculty of Arts, affiliated with the Research Centre for Historical Studies (CHS). Her work focuses on late medieval religious practices, urban social connectivity, and the material culture of religious books in the Low Countries. She holds a Master of Arts (MA) and completed her doctoral thesis in 2024 titled 'Religious book owners and their networks', which examines lay religious practices through manuscript ownership.
Her research interests center on how urban populations engaged with religious texts and institutions, challenging traditional narratives of lay passivity in religious life. She has published extensively on topics such as Hanseatic merchants' book collections, marginalia in medieval manuscripts, and the religious lives of urban elites like Dirck Borre van Amerongen and Elisabeth De Grutere.
Zwart's work bridges history, book studies, and urban sociology. She has contributed to peer-reviewed journals like Hansische Geschichtsblätter and Madoc, as well as edited volumes such as Religious Connectivity in Urban Communities. Her findings were recently featured in the Dutch newspaper Reformatorisch Dagblad (August 2024), highlighting her discovery that medieval laypeople actively engaged with religious texts and formed independent theological opinions.
Her research employs interdisciplinary methods, combining codicology, prosopography, and socio-cultural analysis to reconstruct the lived religion of pre-Reformation urban communities.
