Access to court files and access to justice. The Council of Brabant during the early modern era. (FEDTWIN3)

ACCESS encompasses making accessible a key early modern archival collection of the Belgian State Archives: the court records of the Council of Brabant, and valorising this collection through cutting-edge research. The Council of Brabant was a core institution in Belgian history, yet voluminous sections of its records have never been arranged or described, and have thus remained inaccessible for researchers and the wider public. ACCESS will help overcome this great void for Belgian history in three ways: it will arrange and describe 10,000 seventeenth and eighteenth-century case files of private persons; it will turn scanned sentence registers into machine-readable objects; and it will conduct ground-breaking research into the uses of justice in early modern Brabant.

Keywords:legal history, early modern history, digital history, Social History, low countries

Disciplines:Early modern history