Calculating sameness: Identifying early-modern image reuse outside the black box

In this article, we present a method for identifying image reuse in a corpus of 358 books printed between the 15th and 17th century. The approach is based on image hashing, an establishedmethod for finding near duplicates of images. Our historical interpretation of the method's result produces two important insights hinting at a radical material and epistemological change taking place around 1530. We then evaluate the image hash approach against amethod that employs a neural network for image recognition.