The project has yielded some results that go beyond the state of the art. The processes of legal change in seventeenth-century Holland, with regard to the themes of security interests and insolvency, have been analyzed. It was commonly thought that commerce was the main driver in the creation and perfection of legal rules. In fact, scholars often created law. They achieved coherence in doing so, while assembling new and existing rules into a whole. For example, Dutch authors distinguished between moratoriums that had been granted by the prince (in that case interests were suspended, secured creditors had to comply and the consent of creditors was no requirement) and moratoriums granted by the creditors (interests did not stall and secured creditors were exempted from the effects of the moratorium). This distinction was very coherent: the Dutch scholars crafted this distinction while integrating legislation with academic writings. But most importantly, this was done in a balancing act, preserving the existing proceedings but at the same time changing their effects so as to integrate them on the basis of the underlying idea. This result is very novel. Furthermore, it was found out that the efforts to establish coherence were determined by strife between different levels of government (central, municipal, different courts) and professions (judges, legislators, advocates, curators). As a result, it was necessary not only to distinguish between sources of law (scholarship, legislation), but also to draw up a scheme of different types of legal scholarly writings (academic, practical, formulaic). This has helped in finetuning the conclusions. The legal scholarly additions were mainly academic, and the search for rules of thumb was not driven by practice (or following on from strife among groups of legal actors), but rather by an aim to provide law as detailed and consistent as possible. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that coherence can be assessed in legal scholarly writings, reflecting consistent legal thought of authors. A careful reconstruction of ideas allows for assessing structure in legal writings that transgress the boundaries of legal Begriffe, even areas of law. It is expected that in the project research that remains to be done, the methodology to assess coherence will be refined further.
