VUB Contextual Research in Law

  (image source: Università di Padova) Dr. Stefano Cattelan will present on Venetian neutrality in eighteenth-century diplomacy at the University of Padova on 22 May 2026. Read more here .

  (image source: openaire ) Prof. Frederik Dhondt published the dataset "Goswin Arnould de Wynants' Mémoires contenant des notions générales de tout ce qui concerne le Gouvernement des Païs Bas (Vienna, 1730)" on Zenodo. Description: Transcription (generated with Transkribus, manually corrected and tagged) of an undated copy of Goswin Arnould de Wynants' Mémoires contenant des notions générales de tout ce qui concerne le Gouvernement des Païs Bas, initially written in Vienna in 1730 (239 images). Wynants was a member (since 1717) of the High Council for the Austrian Netherlands, an advisory organ to Emperor Charles VI (1711-1740). Trained as a lawyer in Leuven, he had been an attorney and councillor (judge) at the Council of Brabant before. Wynants describes the institutional and constitutional, but also commercial and judicial organisation of the provinces of the Spanish (from 1713 on, Austrian) Netherlands, from the late Middle Ages on. The work is written in an in...

  (image source: cairn ) Joint PhD-candidate Antoine Leclère (FNRS/ULiège) published an article in the Revue du Nord . Abstract: Between 1785 and 1787, the ecclesiastical and imperial Principality of Liège witnessed a series of legal proceedings that were fundamental to the Liège revolution that followed in 1789 : l’affaire des jeux de Spa. This was above all an accumulation of trials before the territorial and imperial courts. From a simple quarrel over the practice of gambling, the trials quickly questioned the form of government of the Principality and the powers of the prince-bishop. The case was brought before the Imperial Chamber of Wetzlar (Reichskammergericht) from the outset and was characterised by two simultaneous trials in Liege and Wetzlar. This double procedure was unanimously condemned by the Empire, whose mission was to safeguard the perpetual peace defined at the Diet of 1495. The situation in Liège was therefore a clear infringement of the rights of the Chamber an...

  (image source:  Sjöhistoriska Samfundet  ) Dr.  Stefano Cattelan  published a book review on ' David Wilson, Suppressing Piracy in the Early Eighteenth Century. Pirates, Merchants and British Imperial Authority in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans’ in  Forum Navale, the journal of  The Swedish Society for Maritime History,   81 (2024), 177-179. The book review can be consulted open access on the journal's website .