Evina Steinová

Biography

Evina Steinová (1986) is an NWO VENI postdoctoral research at Huygens ING since February 2018. Her project entitled Innovating Knowledge: Isidore’s Etymologiae in the Carolingian Period deals with the emergence of innovations in the early medieval Europe, the intellectual networks through which these innovations spread, and the role the most important encyclopaedia of the Middle Ages played as a vehicle of their dissemination and survival. She tries to answer questions such as how and why certain innovations became successful in the early medieval Europe and others not, what made some of these innovations widespread and long-lasting, while others were restricted to a limited area or short-lived, and what their pattern of spreading tell us about the intellectual infrastructure in this period.

In 2017-2018, Steinova was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, where she worked on the early transmission history of the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, while maintaining her affiliation with Huygens ING.

From 2011 to 2016, Steinova was a PhD student in the project ‘Marginal Scholarship. The Practice of Learning in the Early Middle Ages (c. 800-c. 1000)‘, supervised by Prof.Dr. Mariken Teeuwen. Within the project, she focused on the use of symbols in annotating early medieval texts. The result was a dissertation titled ’Notam superponere studui’. The use of technical signs in the early Middle Ages, which was defended on 18 March 2016 at the University of Utrecht and awarded a cum laude. A book stemming from the PhD research is coming out with Brepols in early 2019.

Steinova was born in Slovakia and received her first diploma in Classical and Medieval Latin at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic; her second diploma – a Research Master in Medieval Studies – was obtained at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. As a student in Utrecht, she worked on the use of the Bible in the Latin apocryphal Acts of the Apostles as part of the project ‘The Dynamics of Apocryphal Traditions in Medieval Religious Culture’ (supervised by Els Rose from Utrecht University). Her research interests include early medieval intellectual history, the history of science, digital humanities, Christian textual culture of the Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and medieval Judeo-Christian relations. Since 2016, she is also a co-investigator of the Caroline Minuscule Mapping Project.

Apart from publishing in a number of outstanding journals, Steinova is also involved in scholarly communication and collaborates with several platforms, where she publishes on various aspects of pre-modern European history.

Research output in Pure