Welcome to JHNA Summer 2010. Those of you with sharp eyes and minds will immediately note our renumbering of this issue and guess the reason: to gain more flexibility in timing the publication. From now on, JHNA will publish a winter and a summer issue.
This current issue begins with two articles on manuscript illumination. The first, by Kate Rudy, focuses on grime left by readers on prayer book pages. It presents a new tool for research, the densitometer, which measures the darkness of a reflecting surface. The article brings nine books of hours to life, evaluating their devotional roles by gauging the intensity of their handling. The second piece, by Debra Taylor Cashion, contextualizes the copies after Albrecht D¸rer and others made by Nikolaus Glockendon, a master illuminator of his time. This wide-ranging study treats the practice of finishing illuminated manuscripts; the entrepreneurial trends in book illustration after the invention of printing; the standards of value for sixteenth-century German craftsmanship; and much else.
The third of the articles by Lotte van de Pol, the well-known historian of early modern Dutch prostitution draws on extensive research to analyze the real-life situations of seventeenth-century prostitutes and their bawds in relation to visual constructions of prostitution. A translation rounds out the issue: an iconographical discussion of a rare early seventeenth-century depiction of a current event. Expanding on two articles previously published in Maandblad Amstelodamum, Norbert Middelkoop focuses on a painting by Gillis Coignet of the nighttime lottery held to benefit the Amsterdam Madhouse.
Since translations will appear from time to time in JHNA, we solicit your nominations for articles or book chapters that you’d like to see published in English.
JHNA is archived by Portico, an electronic service initiated by JSTOR and supported by the Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, and the Library of Congress. During the last half year, we have acquired membership in CrossRef, an organization that allows us to register each of our articles with a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), the best means of citation for digital content. You’ll find the DOI for every article inserted at the end of the abstracts. Since summer 2009 we have been partnered with H.W. Wilson Company for indexing, and more recently we signed an agreement with EBSCO Publishing for inclusion of JHNA in their Art and Architecture Complete database. In due course, we will apply to ISI Web of Knowledge, a database run by Thompson Reuters. We hope that JSTOR will soon decide to include on-line journals.
Many have helped to produce the present issue of JHNA of whom Cindy Bohn, our copy editor, Heidi Eyestone, Visual Resources Curator, Carleton College, and Nicole Conti, University of Texas, Austin, should be singled out for thanks. Even more fundamentally, without the expertise, persistence, and patience of Fiona MacNeill, Academic Technologist for Art and Art History, Carleton College, this issue would not have come into being.
A note on funding: In order to gain the widest possible audience, JHNA offers the journal free of charge not just to HNA members but to everyone. This open-access policy can continue only if we receive your help. Many of our members responded generously to the fund-raising campaign that originally allowed us to set up the journal, and you’ll find their names here under Contributions. As for ongoing costs, membership dues cover some of them, but we need your ideas for fundraising opportunities and possibilities.
We urge you to consider JHNA as a venue for your own publications. With your support we can make JHNA one of the premier journals of Netherlandish art. The deadline for articles for the Summer 2011 issue is March 1, 2011, although we encourage earlier submissions.
Editorial Board
Alison M. Kettering, Editor-in-Chief, William R. Kenan Professor of Art History, Carleton College
Molly Faries, Associate EditorProfessor Emerita, Department of the History of Art, Indiana University
Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Associate Editor, Kay Fortson Chair in European Art, University of Texas, Austin
Advisory Board
Ann J. Adams, Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara
Wayne E. Franits, Professor, Department of Art and Music Histories, Syracuse University