Postgraduate Spotlight: Zachary Brookman

Zachary is a second-year History PhD candidate researching printing, bookselling, and library culture in the Swiss Confederacy on the eve of the Enlightenment.

When I was ten or eleven years old, as my parents love to remind me, I wanted to be a rabbi. As a youth I was an avid reader—I used to sit on the stoop and voraciously read the mail while my sister and the rest of the kids on our block played street hockey—and I was endlessly fascinated by the narratives of the Torah and the myriad of commentaries that attempted to legitimate and explain them. I think I also probably enjoyed the appeal of being an authority on something, a resource that others could call on for advice or guidance.

But then I had my first cheeseburger, and suddenly rabbinical studies were no longer an option. As I progressed through high school in my native Montreal, I thought I might scratch this existential itch with medical studies. Always the overachiever, I was chosen as one of only a handful of final-year students who would receive the opportunity to shadow doctors in a variety of specialisms at the Jewish General Hospital on a weekly basis ahead of the jump to post-secondary education. After a brush with a particularly dismissive dermatologist and two successive weeks in the colorectal surgery department, it became clear that medicine was not for me.

And so, I finally turned to my true calling, one that promised to provide me with all the exegetical intrigue of a rabbi and the problem-solving opportunities of a physician but with a fraction of the prestige, renown and salary offered by either position: the historian. I obtained my B.A. in History (Honours) with a minor in German at my hometown McGill University, during which time I had the opportunity to spend a semester abroad at University College London. I was much impressed by the comparatively smaller class size and seemingly higher attention to pastoral care, and vowed I would return to the UK as a postgraduate. True to my word, in 2021, with no Reformation course on offer that year, I was roped into an MLitt at this great University of St Andrews in the ‘History of the Book’. I have not looked back since.

I am now in the middle of the second year of my PhD, having traded the sixteenth century for the seventeenth, studying printing, bookselling, and library culture in the Swiss Confederacy on the eve of the Enlightenment under the supervision of Professor Andrew Pettegree and Dr. Arthur der Weduwen. The Swiss Confederacy was, in many ways, an anomaly of early modern European statecraft: A multilingual (German, French, Italian, Romansch, Latin) and bi-confessional (Catholic and Reformed Protestant) defensive alliance of administratively diverse cantons that existed over much of the area of modern-day Switzerland from the fourteenth century to 1798. The unique cultural and political makeup of the Swiss Confederacy, I would argue, had enormous consequences for the seventeenth-century Swiss book trade both at home and abroad, allowing it to reimagine and reorient itself away from traditional markets as the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) devastated most of Europe. By looking at the Swiss book trade as a whole and accounting for all languages spoken and printed in the Swiss lands, my project seeks to paint a more complete picture of the factors and figures that made the Swiss Confederation the centre of multilingual printing in Europe in the seventeenth century. I am supported in these efforts by the Universal Short Title Catalogue, for which I proudly work as a postgraduate team member, and the Canadian Centennial Scholarship Fund.

When I’m not drowning in (digital) piles of bibliographic references or questioning the voracity of a Genevan false imprint, you can likely find me at one of Fife’s many fabulous farmers markets with my brilliant partner Maud and our dog Bug or somewhere soliloquizing about Everton F.C.’s most recent outing. Although I read considerably less than I did when I was a boy (at least for pleasure), I am an avid collector of seventeenth-century Helvetica and am known to enjoy the occasional record fair as well.

Read more at the St Andrews School of History blog.