Junior Researcher or Postdoctoral Researcher PRAYER

Junior Researcher or Postdoctoral Researcher PRAYER

Leiden University was founded in 1575 and is one of Europe’s leading international research universities.

Applying is possible until: 15 maart 2026

The Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS) invites applications for a Junior Researcher (0.8 fte for 2 years) or Postdoctoral Researcher (0.7 fte for 18 months) in the ERC Starting Grant project "Pages of Prayer:
The Ecosystem of Vernacular Prayer Books in the Late Medieval Low Countries,  (PRAYER)".

The Junior or Postdoctoral Researcher will be working on a subproject within the ERC Starting Grant research project PRAYER, funded by the European Research Council (ERC) for , and directed by Dr.

A. (Anna) Dlabačová (Senior University Lecturer in Book History at Leiden University). Vernacular prayer books were by far the most commonly read books in the late medieval Low Countries. The mainstay of this vast corpus is the Book of Hours in the translation by Geert Grote, founder of one of the period’s most powerful religious reform movements, the Devotio Moderna. PRAYER sets out to conduct the first large‑scale investigation of this unique corpus by introducing a new approach – network philology – that studies all aspects of vernacular prayer books in their mutual interdependence.

The project aims to chart the entire ecosystem of Dutch‑language prayer books over a long period of time by combining quantitative digital analysis with advanced qualitative analysis. The nature of the material requires this research to be tackled within a multidisciplinary project: sections of the ecosystem are analysed in subprojects that focus on the production and reception of manuscripts, the poetics of prayer, the function of images, and changes and continuities in relation to religious movements and the advent of print.

PRAYER aims to yield an integrative understanding of the role of prayer books in the late medieval Low Countries on the threshold of the medieval and early modern era.

The Junior or Postdoctoral Researcher will work on the subproject The Poetics of Prayer in Manuscript Prayer Books:
Texts, Co-transmission, and Religious Practice
, focusing on the textual and literary analysis of (groups) of prayer texts and their (co-)transmission in manuscripts. Depending on the researcher’s background, the analysis can be either quantitative and digital – using the data collected in the PRAYER database – or qualitative, or a combination of both. Possible research angles include, but are not limited to: the analysis of a group or set of prayers which were transmitted together in manuscripts, the function(s) of a group of prayers within a manuscript as a whole and the way(s) in which they relate to each other within a group;

the structure, poetics and rhetoric strategies of prayers, the ways in which they engage the reader, evoke emotions and/or mental images and the intended (transformative) effects on the reader. A literary analysis may also be conducted in tandem with an analysis of the lay-out/spatial arrangement of these texts within the handwritten codices: how does lay-out affect the (intended) function of the texts?

Finally, the cultural, social and religious environment within which the manuscripts were used may be taken into account, as well as treatises containing instructions about reading and praying in the Dutch vernacular.

Depending on the candidate’s career phase, the researcher will be appointed either as a Junior Researcher (0.8 fte for 2 years or equivalent) or as a Post-Doctoral Researcher (0.7 fte for 18 months or equivalent).

• You will conduct research on Middle Dutch manuscript prayer books
• You will (co-)author at least one article in a peer-reviewed journal
• You will contribute to the acquisition of data on prayer books in Middle Dutch in the PRAYER database (the database has been set up in Heurist; (Use the "Apply for this Job" box below).)
• You will participate in meetings of the project research group
• You will (co-)present papers at conferences, both in the Netherlands and internationally
• You will contribute to the…