Projects

The imperial expansion to the Indies and the dissatisfaction with absolutism were major societal convulsions that marked the early modern period. In response to them, moral theologians of the School of Salamanca developed a Catholic theory of natural rights. However, as the confessional strife had become overly antagonistic, in the first half of the 17th century scholars pleaded for a secularisation of natural law doctrine, which eventually ...

If still largely underexplored, proto-Belgian 18th-century literature in turn has to date mainly been described from a nation-state, monolinguistic perspective. The present project aims to broaden this perspective by investigating the extent to which proto-Belgian literature was subject to transcultural influences, as well as how it was in turn actively involved in the process of European literary exchange. The specific focus of the project ...

In the early modern period, the Low Countries performed a key role in trade and commerce on the European continent. In their ‘Golden Ages’, Antwerp and Amsterdam attracted merchants from all over Europe, and even beyond. The development of commerce and finance within this transregional reality raised new normative questions on how to deal with novel financial techniques. At the same time, public, private and ecclesiastical debtors were in a ...

This project offers an innovative perspective on medieval insurgency. An in-depth analysis of the 'illicit speech' of commoners will reveal whether the role of urban commoners in sustaining and spreading contentious beliefs was an essential one. Instead of considering protestors as violent rebels whose collective actions were harmful to political progress, as scholarship has often done in the past, this project sees citizens as creative ...

Church law explicitly allowed individuals to marry without familial consent from the twelfth century onwards. That much we know, but what impact did these canon law rules had in a society characterized by strategic marriage? In this dissertation, I engage with this scholarly debate by examining partner choice conflicts, particularly abductions for marriage, within middling sorts of families in the late medieval Low Countries. It is in such ...