The New Monarchy project was an NWO-funded collaborative endeavour at Erasmus University Rotterdam, directed by Prof. Dr Robert von Friedeburg, which examined the seventeenth-century transformation of monarchical rule across France, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Low Countries, and the intellectual and constitutional resistances it provoked. The project brought together several PhD candidates and senior researchers around the question of how princely authority sought to redefine itself — through the discourses of raison d’état, interest of state, and the various early-modern reformulations of imperium — and how those discourses were contested by estates, magistrates, and noble corporations.
I joined the project in 2011 as one of the doctoral researchers. My dissertation, defended on 7 January 2016, examined the use of the terminology of fatherland, patria, and patriot in three geographically distinct but structurally comparable settings — the Duchy of Jülich, the Landgraviate of Hesse-Cassel, and the Province of Brittany — between 1642 and 1655. Subsequently revised and published as Protecting the Fatherland (Springer, 2021), the dissertation argued that the rhetoric of patria in the mid-seventeenth century was neither a sentimental inheritance from antiquity nor a precocious nationalism avant la lettre, but a deliberate, legally-coded argument about the proper limits of princely authority, deployed by noble and corporate actors in lawsuits, petitions, and printed pamphlets.
Several articles in my publication list — in The Seventeenth Century, the Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (BMGN), and the Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter, among others — emerged directly from the New Monarchy project. The intellectual debt of all my subsequent work to this period of training under von Friedeburg’s supervision is, I should add, considerable.