Law and Order in the Low Countries — The Role of Institutions in Creating Legislation (1550–1700s)

The Rubicon project moved my research geographically (from the Holy Roman Empire into the Habsburg Netherlands) and methodologically (from philological-institutional comparison toward digital legal history). Hosted at Ghent University and supervised in collaboration with Belgian colleagues (notably Klaas Van Gelder and Nicolas Simon), the project asked how the Raad van Vlaanderen and equivalent provincial councils in Holland participated in the production of normative texts between roughly 1550 and the early eighteenth century.

The 2018 conference Creating “Law and Order” in the Low Countries at Brussels (co-organised with Nicolas Simon) and the contributions in the Nieuwe Tijdingen and BMGN — LCHR journals are direct outputs. The infrastructure developed during the project — the Transkribus models, the classification work that became RHONDA — has carried forward into all subsequent projects.