Preliminary Programme

It has been pointed out many times, that the common law took its first flight outside of England in Ireland, and indeed that as a colony, Ireland was a useful laboratory and testing ground for English colonial policies. More recent legal and social histories of Ireland have confirmed that in many regards this is still the case. There is also a long history of law-making in Ireland and legal administration, that would suggest that the staffing, the law, the policy, and the administration of criminal justice in Ireland was heavily based upon the English model and that Ireland followed very closely what was already established form in England. The fact that the late Tudor period had seen an end to independent Gaelic lordship and law meant that the large parts of Ireland represented a blank canvas on which a new system could, in theory, be imprinted.
Seventeenth-century Ireland gives us a unique looking glass that will allow us to examine these assertions, and theories relating to criminal law and criminal justice more generally might be examined more closely. Although the Irish parliament did not meet often, it had an important role in passing a large number of reforming acts over a number of parliaments that relate to criminal law and criminal justice policy in Ireland. This paper will examine whether the legislation followed an English model and to what extent it was tailored to early modern Ireland specifically. It will question to what extent this represented the enforcement of a colonial system of criminal justice, and whether the local executive in Dublin or the MPs that sat in parliament gave it genuine consideration. Overall, this paper will question what those in varying positions of power felt about the criminal justice system in Ireland, about the importance of bringing Ireland into line with England, and to what extent it is possible to speak of normative forms in relation to a kingdom as diverse as Ireland was in the seventeenth century. (Show less)

Early modern European states struggled for survival, making it impossible for them to ‘reinvent the wheel’ each time a problem arose. Hence, it was of tremendous importance to copy, adapt and implement normative rules that were already proven successful elsewhere – at least, that is a hypothesis I seek to verify. I want to shed light on the entangled history of state-building and governance by using the plakkaatboeken (books of ordinances) of various provinces in the Dutch Republic and Habsburg Netherlands. In this way, I want to visualise how problems arose and solutions spread throughout the Low Countries – and possibly expand this to adjacent German territories.
The Low Countries consisted of seventeen unique but connected entities. The rift that was caused due to e.g. religious and economic issues caused a separation between the North and South in the late sixteenth-century. While the South remained loyal to its Spanish ruler, the North opted for finding a new head of state – ending up being entirely independent with the Estates General as the highest governmental body. Sharing a long history with the South, it is interesting to see what differences occurred in governance, state-building and state-formation: Did they go their separate ways?
This contribution will make use of about fifty books of ordinances that have been published within the Low Countries. Through a digital humanities-project at the Royal Library in The Hague the author will be able to apply a machine-learned algorithm to train metadata (categorisations) on the individual texts contained in these books. A categorisation by a machine-learned algorithm will offer ample possibilities to computer-search for similar topics within texts and to do content-based longitudinal searches, as the actual titles of texts may not always be so helpful to modern readers. The combination of a longitudinal search based upon content rather than the index or title within overview based upon several states (e.g. provinces) has been impossible so far. It will disclose the entangled histories of neighbouring provinces, due to synchronic and diachronic comparisons of approximately 15.000 texts on location – allowing for a wider search and implementation in other projects Europe-wide.
This contribution will focus on ordinances published within the Northern and Southern Netherlands in order to give us an idea of the differences and similarities between a monarchical and a non-monarchical-federation of states. It will not merely show statistical output, but also compare the language and solutions within the category of social order. By focussing on texts published between 1579 (Unions of Utrecht and Atrecht) and the start of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701), it will provide an overview of periods of war, peace and changes in government, and will hence provide ample possibilities for comparing the normative output and offering insights in the diffusion of norms and the problems that triggered the norms in the first place. (Show less)