The Veni project asked a deceptively simple comparative question. Both the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation were federation-republics in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries — both were multi-confessional, both relied on contested sovereignty distributed across constituent provinces or cantons, both governed substantially through normative texts issued at provincial or cantonal level. How did their normative repertoires diverge or converge, in form, in subject matter, and in the mechanisms of their implementation?
Methodologically, the project combined classical comparative legal-historical work — close reading of ordinances, attention to the institutional provenance of each text — with the digital methods I had developed during the Rubicon project (segmentation, automatic metadating, multilingual classification). The Bern Mandatenbücher corpus, digitised within the project, has become the empirical core of the forthcoming Klostermann monograph.