Testamentary practices in the periphery of the ius commune tradition: freedom and oppression (c. 1420-1620)

Objective

TESTAMENT, an interdisciplinary consortium of social and legal historians from the universities of Leuven, Kraków, Jena, Prague and Warsaw, will study dynamics of freedom and 'unfreedom', of power and oppression, through the lens of testamentary law and practice in Western and Central Europe (c. 1450-1620), with a particular focus on the regions in the 'periphery' of the late medieval and early modern academic tradition. The project members will develop a language to transcend the traditional dichotomy between 'freedom' and 'unfreedom' and will single out criteria that can be used to situate specific cases on this continuum. On the basis of thorough archival and doctrinal-historical research, the project will single out the family, policy, jurisdictional and jurisprudential dynamics that determined the extent to which people could dispose of their goods post-mortally. To this end, the consortium will train promising junior scholars into professional, critically-minded, communicative, cooperative and digitally competent social and legal historians. The Ph.D. students will be integrated in a unique international network of scholars from both law and social history. They will be trained in both disciplinary and transferable skills at summer and winter schools, at monthly online seminars, through a secondment at another academic partner abroad and also through meaningful experiences in collaboration with non-academic actors (especially archives and musea). This project will open new scientific perspectives for research by using digital methods (especially HTR-tools) and will add new unedited material to existing open access databases for further research. Through social media, blogposts, (online) exhibitions, course materials for secondary school teachers, interdisciplinary university seminars and presentations at alumni events, the consortium explicitly aims to introduce new approaches to the past through lesser-known historical documents to a wide range of audiences.