Dr Thibaut Maus de Rolley awarded a BA/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship for 2022-23

Dr Maus de Rolley will use the Fellowship to write a monograph provisionally entitled Jugglers: An Intellectual History of Street Performers (1500-1700). The book will argue that the popular and widely accessible performances of street conjurors, acrobats, tightrope walkers, fire eaters, ventriloquists —then collectively known as ‘jugglers’— occupied a surprisingly important place in crucial philosophical, theological, and scientific debates of the early modern period. As this project will show, the wondrous feats of itinerant street performers were a sustained object of curiosity and reflection for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century intellectuals in France, Italy, and England. By highlighting that the world was not as it appeared to be, juggling tricks allowed European intellectuals to think in novel ways about illusion, imposture, and the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural, the real and the virtual, the true and the false.

We send our congratulations to Dr Maus de Rolley for this success and we look forward to learning more about his research in the future.