Periodic Reporting for period 4 - STATE (Lordship and the Rise of States in Western Europe, 1300-1600)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-03-01 bis 2022-08-31
The first postdoc, Dr Erika Graham-Goering, prioritized the interplay of royal governance and seigneurial lordship in fourteenth-century Languedoc, which led to two important articles. The second postdoc, Dr Jim van der Meulen, focused on Guelders, and also published two important articles.
The first doctoral student, Gert-Jan Van de Voorde, follows the case-study of Languedoc in the fifteenth- and early sixteenth centuries, whereas the second doctoral student, Ysaline Bourgine de Meder, studies fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Normandy. Both doctoral students suffered greatly from the closure of the archives due to the Covid19 pandemic so that they had to refrain themselves from subsidiary publications next to the dissertation. Ysaline Bourgine de Meder will contribute a chapter to the conference proceedings of the closing conference of the ERC project, whereas Gert-Jan Van de Voorde has publications on side-projects.
The PI himself, together with one doctoral student that was not funded by the ERC but by the Flemish Research Foundation (FWO) and two research assistants, Mathijs Speecke and Sander Berghmans, tackled the most labour-intensive case-study of all, that is, Flanders between the mid-fourteenth- and mid-sixteenth century. This leads to a research monograph, authored by Frederik Buylaert and Miet Adriaens, next to a contribution to the conference proceedings of the concluding conference of STATE.
Next to this, the STATE project has yielded a highly unexpected but relevant bonus, in the sense that our data sets are highly relevant to ongoing debates on that other behemoth in European history, that is, the birth of capitalism. Economic historians are long puzzled as to why specific parts of the Low Countries were “cradles of capitalism”, i.e. displaying precocious trends towards economic innovation. Our mapping of seigneurial landscapes has revealed that these regions were relatively free of elite constraints in the form of seigneuries, a thesis that was articulated in New Institutional Economics in the 1970s, but which had defied empirical verification so far. We are happy to say that this project has killed two birds with one stone.