Griet Vermeesch

• Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Die eingeschränkte Zugänglichkeit der Gerichtshöfe im frühneuzeitlichen Europa ist sowohl ein sehr wichtiges als auch sehr weites Forschungsgebiet. Es betrifft zahlreiche Themen aus der Historiografie wie Staatenbildung, Professionalisierung, Verrechtlichung, das Entstehen der Hohen Gerichte und die erhöhten Prozessführungskosten. Bis heute hat sic...

This special section presents new research on the ways in which unmarried parents – particularly women – negotiated illegitimacy, how they interacted with urban institutions, and what legal resources they had. Throughout the early modern period, extramarital pregnancies were an important issue of concern to urban authorities and city dwellers. In l...

This article assesses the wide range of experiences of illegitimacy in eighteenth-century Antwerp. It exposes many instances of pauper agency, yet also cautions against simply assuming that all single mothers were similarly forceful in their dealings with illegitimacy. Four key factors affected the options a single mother had at her disposal in dea...

Between 1600 and 1900 the towns in Western Europe, the Kingdoms in Eastern Europe, the Empires in Asia and the Colonial States in Asia and the Americas were all characterised by a plurality of legal orders resulting from interactions and negotiations between states, institutions, and people with different backgrounds. Through exploring how justice...

Daniëlle Teeuwen, Financing Poor Relief through Charitable Collections in Dutch Towns, c. 1600-1800 (PhD Utrecht University 2014; Amsterdam Studies in de Dutch Golden Age 29; Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016, 230 pp., ISBN 978 90 8964 793 1).

The history of illegitimacy has evolved since the 1970’s from pessimistic assessments that perceived single motherhood as a form of deviance among impoverished and mobile sections of the population, to recent optimistic assessments that stress the agency of single mothers, their relative local belonging and the leniency of local governments towards...

In this article historiography on early modern legal practice is reviewed regarding the relative accessibility of law courts in early modern Europe. References on England and France and to a lesser extent on the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Spain and the Low Countries are used to assess what is known about the extent to which lower social groups could...

This article assesses the social positions of the plaintiffs and defendants who appeared before a small claims court, namely the Peacemaker court (Vredemakers) of the city of Leiden in the Dutch Republic in the eighteenth century, a low threshold law court that boasted a quick and inexpensive procedure. Analysis of the social positions of the court...

This a survey of recent research on the history of Antwerp carried out at the history departments of Flemish universities (UA, UGent, KUL, and VUB).

Were entitled to petition their city governors free of charge, because of their destitution. Which 'poor' qualified for such entitlement is hard to derive from normative sources. Historiography offers inconsistent interpretations. Simona Cerutti, on the one hand, has asserted for eighteenth-century Turin how poverty related first and foremost to ig...

Medieval and early modern rulers commonly proclaimed that protecting the legal entitlements of the personae miserabiles, who included widows, orphans, the chronically ill and the poor, was among their principal duties. The entitlement of the poor to legal services was not a matter of grace but was in fact their good right. For example, widows, orph...

Abstract Historians have underscored the crucial importance of petitions both in early modern political practice and for relations between rulers and ruled. However, little is known about how formal requests were actually presented to rulers or the role of professional lobbyists. This article describes these individuals, using materials from a well...

This article examines three important aspects of how the Dutch Republic organized warfare during the Dutch Revolt. The regulations for the billeting of soldiers, the building of fortifications and the collection of direct taxes are analysed in two garrison towns, namely, Gorinchem and Doesburg. The billeting of soldiers and the collection of taxes...

The late medieval and early modern accounts of the town of Doesburg are preserved relatively well. This source allows for an analysis of the town's finances on the mid-term during the period of the Habsburg-Guelders wars and the Dutch Revolt (1492-1648). The decades of war had a varying impact on the finances of Doesburg. During the Habsburg-Guelde...