In our latest ‘Fellow in Focus’ discussion Dr Nina Lamal, Visiting Research Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub, spoke with Dr Ann-Marie Hansen, Project Manager of the prized Fagel collection at Trinity College Library. In recent years, through the ‘Unlocking the Fagel Collection’ initiative, a collaboration between the Library of Trinity College Dublin and the KB National Library of the Netherlands funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the collection has benefited from digital cataloguing, opening up new possibilities for research.
During her PhD and postdoctoral studies at the University of St Andrews, Dr Lamal learned about Trinity’s Fagel Collection from former Hub fellow Professor Andrew Pettegree, who had worked on the Fagel pamphlets.
What followed was a trip to Dublin to attend Trinity’s 2023 Fagel conference ‘Unlocking the Fagel Collection: The Library and its Context’. It was here, Dr Lamal told Dr Hansen, that her interest was piqued when she was able to go and view the collection for herself.
Dr Ann-Marie Hansen and Dr Nina Lamal
She was mainly interested in Dutch readers of Italian history and writing given her own research looking at Italian news reports, political debates and historical writing on the Revolt in the Low Countries.
“Now here I am finally working on the history books in that collection”, she told Dr Hansen. What is significant to note, she said is that much of the Fagel collection was divided at auction. Part of the important work that is now taking place is piecing together different items from the collections here and in the Netherlands—including how the books relate to the letters and the maps.
While the Fagel library has always been viewed as a private family collection, Dr Lamal’s research project aims to show how the library functioned as a state archive of the Dutch Republic and as a “tool of statecraft” by the powerful Fagel regent family.
Recounting how the Fagels started their careers as secretaries in the Dutch States-General during the second half of the 17th century, Dr Lamal said she continues to be amazed by how they hold this position “for more than 100 years.” Dr Lamal argues that this means a wealth of knowledge that passes on from one member of the family to another about the state.
Dr Lamal whose own research focuses on early modern political history, diplomacy, the transnational histories of the book, seeks to examine how the Fagel Library was used by the Dutch state for political education, referencing and networking.
The fact that members of the Fagel family purposefully thought of how to organise their collection, “is an important part of the story”, Dr Lamal said. She noted, that “compared to other European nations, the Dutch had not thought about how to organise their own archives”, because “born out of rebellion, they didn’t have anything in place.” The Fagels recognised the need for “a paper trail” for state decisions.
“There are all these interesting connections that can now be made with this disparate material”, Dr Lamal said as she alluded to the recent digitization and cataloguing projects, and discussed how Trinity’s Collection can now bring the Fagel library at Trinity into dialogue with the Fagel Archives in The Hague.
More about Dr Nina Lamal:/prod01/channel_3/media/tcd/long-room-hub/images/news/2025/Nina-Lamal-cover.png)
Dr Nina Lamal is an early modern historian based at the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam. Her research focuses on early modern political history, diplomacy, the transnational histories of the book, and digital humanities.
She studied early modern history at the KU Leuven. In 2014, she received her PhD from the KU Leuven and St Andrews University for her thesis on Italian news reports, political debates and historical writing on the Revolt in the Low Countries (1566-1648). Her book Italian Communication on the Revolt in the Low Countries was published with Brill in 2023.
From 2015-2017, Lamal worked as postdoctoral research assistant at the Universal Short Title Catalogue project (university of St Andrews). In 2017, she moved to the university of Antwerp, after she had obtained a three-year individual postdoctoral fellowship of the Flemish Research Council. From 2020-2024, she was postdoctoral researcher on project Inventing Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe and editor of the correspondence of Christofforo Suriano, the first Venetian envoy in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. (suriano.huygens.knaw.nl/).