Early Modern Political-Institutional History

This is the field in which I was trained, and which informs my reading of every other archival source I encounter. The central question concerns how early modern governments produced and distributed the normative rules that structured political and everyday life — and how provincial estates and corporate actors contested those rules across linguistic, confessional, and territorial boundaries.

My dissertation, defended at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2016 and published in 2021, approached this question through three cases — the Duchy of Jülich, the Landgraviate of Hesse-Cassel, and the Province of Brittany — chosen precisely because they are not the standard cases in the historiography of early modern political thought. What emerges is a picture of normative governance as a legally-embedded, institutionally-mediated practice: 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.

The subsequent NWO Veni project extended the comparative frame considerably, moving from the Holy Roman Empire and France into the federation-republics of the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation, asking how normative governance operated in polities that lacked a strong central monarchy. The result is a richer, more comparative picture of how early modern states — not only monarchical ones — generated, distributed, and contested the legal texts that structured everyday life.

Journals in which I work in this area include The Seventeenth Century, Early Modern Low Countries, Parliaments, Estates and Representation, Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter, and the BMGN — Low Countries Historical Review.

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