Projects
Family's wishes, children's choice. Parental authority over marriage formation and the consumption of justice in the late medieval Low Countries. KU Leuven
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 ...
RETHINKIN - Rethinking legal kinship and family studies in the Low Countries Hasselt University
Shared interest or mutual competition? The organization of voluntary jurisdiction in the Southern Low Countries during the late Middle Ages (1278-1433). Ghent University
Public opinion in Belgium recently began to question and criticize the relevance of its current notariate. The notary's prominent position in recording and authenticating agreements among individuals is thus at stake. Notaries nowadays are no longer considered as self-evident and, moreover, this research project argues that they have never been so throughout the course of their history. However, historiography into late medieval voluntary ...
A Pragmatic Reality: The Performance and Codification of Collective Agency in the ‘Age of Freedom’ of Urban Communities in the Southern Low Countries and Northern France (late 11th - early 13th Centuries) Ghent University
Research on the early development of urban communities in Western Europe has long been determined by a political and institutional approach of the liberties, laws and customs these communities were granted by their rulers in the form of so-called ‘borough charters’. As a result of this narrow focus, we still remain ignorant of the pragmatic context in which these laws and rights were negotiated and materialized, of the socio-economic ...
Shared interest or mutual competition? The organization of voluntary jurisdiction in the Southern Low Countries during the late Middle Ages (1273-1433). Ghent University
The narrow research focus on late medieval public notaries has led to a distorted view on the organization and recording of voluntary jurisdiction in the Southern Low Countries. Starting from a comparative bottom-up approach, this project will assess how notaries co-existed and interacted with other legal actors, and will finally result in a more fine-grained understanding of this contemporary complex juridical reality.