Early Modern Political History

This is the field in which I was trained, and which shapes my reading of every other source I encounter. Its animating question is how early modern communities — principalities, provinces, urban republics, federations — produced, distributed, and contested the normative texts and symbolic practices that made political life legible. It draws simultaneously on political-institutional history, on the Kulturgeschichte des Politischen (the cultural history of the political, in the sense developed by Stollberg-Rilinger and the Münster school: the performative, ceremonial, and symbolic dimensions of political order), and on legal history as a lens on the formal and informal mechanisms through which authority was claimed and resisted.

My dissertation, defended at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2016 and published as Protecting the Fatherland (Springer, 2021), worked across three cases — the Duchy of Jülich, the Landgraviate of Hesse-Cassel, and the Province of Brittany — chosen because they fall outside the canonical cases of early modern political thought. What the comparison reveals is how noble and corporate actors deployed the vocabulary of patria and legitimate authority in lawsuits before the Reichskammergericht, in petitions to the Estates General, and in printed pamphlets circulating across language borders: normative governance as a legally-embedded, institutionally-mediated practice.

The subsequent NWO Veni project extended this frame into the federation-republics of the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation, and into the full corpus of their police ordinances — the everyday normative texts that regulated trade, morality, public order, and poor relief. The result is a more comparative and textually grounded picture of how early modern states, including non-monarchical ones, generated and contested the rules that structured daily life.

I publish in The Seventeenth Century, Early Modern Low Countries, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter, and the BMGN — Low Countries Historical Review.

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