The Rise of Public Law and the Re-Constitution of the Habsburg Netherlands

This research has two interlinked goals. The first aims to analyze to what extent did the Louvain professors of civil law Petrus Gudelinus (1550-1619) and Antonius Perezius (1583-1672) avail themselves of the discourse of natural law as part of a strategy to define, defend or limit royal authority, and how that contributed to the emancipation of public law and, by extension, for a new conception of the law of nations (Ius Gentium). The second seeks to observe how the new legal conceptions reach the classrooms of these same teachers before the printing of their own treaties: this will be done using handwritten sources from students who have attended their classes comparing them with later published works.