Publicaties

Our paper is concerned with the role of legal specialists in Flanders, a county that came to belong to a composite union known as the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries. The Valois Dukes of Burgundy and their Habsburg successors not only centralized fiscal and military resources, but they also articulated an increasingly ambitious project of legal innovations and a strong claim to sovereignty. We explore the nature and impact of these ...

The recent debate between Chris Wickham and Shami Ghosh exposes different interpretations of the political economy of Europe, with Wickham arguing for the persistence of the feudal economy up to about 1700, and Ghosh imagining a distinct phase in which economic development was not yet capitalist but was no longer decisively shaped by the demands of lords. This article contributes to the discussion with the story of Flanders, where two ...

In 1724, the prosecutor-general of the Grand Council of Malines, the supreme court of the Austrian Netherlands, opened a judicial investigation into the marquis of Westerlo, one of the highest aristocrats in the Low Countries. It was alleged that he had abused his power against a peasant from Herselt, one of the villages in the marquisate of Westerlo. The investigation ultimately led nowhere, but its records do reveal frequent and far-reaching ...

In April 1713 France, Great Britain, the Dutch Republic and other minor states concluded peace in Utrecht. Together with the treaties of Rastatt and Baden in 1714, which also included the Habsburg Monarchy and the Holy Roman Empire, the Peace of Utrecht ended the brutal War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1713/14). Utrecht had not settled every issue, yet the treaties of 1713-14 finally halted the aggressive foreign policy of Louis XIV ...