Cultural Evolution of Book Diversity in Europe 1600-1900: Popular Literacy, Secularization and New Written Language Communities

The project studies book history during the emergence of popular literacy. Popular literacy emerged in different communities across Europe at different times, and the project looks at whether there are similarities in how different communities develop. For this, the project will rely on aggregated bibliographic data and methods from evolutionary approaches to culture. The focus is on three themes: the impact of literacy on processes of secularization, the population dynamics in the formation of new native written language communities, and the geographic patterns of the diversity of books. The studies will use quantitative methods to analyse each of these cases, centered on critical periods in selected communities, with an initial focus on Northern and Western Europe 1600-1900. Combining expertise from cultural evolution and bibliographic data science, the project develops a new field of cultural evolution of books. The project advances data-intensive studies in the humanities.