Abstract:
The KU Leuven Research Unit Roman Law and Legal History, which is a department of the Faculty of Law and Criminology, is an interdisciplinary and internationally oriented research group, which currently consists of four professors and about ten junior researchers. Next to a research axis on the history of international law and colonial legal history, the department has a strong focus on and track record in the study of ius commune, especially in the early modern period (15th-18th centuries). From 1 March 2026 onwards, the Research Unit (prof. dr. Wouter Druwé) will also be coordinating an interdisciplinary European MSCA Doctoral Network on the history of testamentary law and practices in the early modern period, bringing together social and legal historians from five different universities and several archives and museums in four European countries.
The current vacancy is part of a project funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO) on "Stepchildren in the early modern Duchy of Brabant: the interplay between particular law and ius commune (1425-1629)" (G027826N). The project investigates how contractual and testamentary freedom, as developed in learned law and moral theology, could, already in the early modern period, be employed to moderate the legal ramifications of the distinction between consanguineous offspring and stepchildren in particular law. In the early modern Low Countries, there were many stepfamilies (blended families), partly because of the high mortality rate. The factual omnipresence of stepchildren contrasts with the limited attention that has been given to them in both early modern particular law and legal-historical scholarship today. The project focuses on the early modern Duchy of Brabant, where the number of jurists and moral theologians that had studied Roman law increased after the foundation of the Leuven university in 1425. Learned jurists took on several functions in legal practice, as judges, aldermen, and ducal councellors. Research into the archives of the university town of Leuven, the mercantile hub of Antwerp, and the administrative city of 's-Hertogenbosch on the basis of prenuptial agreements, last wills, and donations will uncover the extent to which the learned legal tradition was employed to deviate from customary law in addressing legal challenges encountered by stepfamilies.
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