Research project P4S/251/FLARE (Research action P4S)
For the State Archives in Flanders, archives of castellanies are counted among the last uncharted great ancien régime archival collections. Especially during the 16th-18th C., this rural administrative and judicial intermediary level - topical again in 21st C.-Flanders! - created vast archives (3 km in total), of which only a few are easily accessible in full (f.e. Aalst, Dendermonde), or partially (f.e. Waas).
To complicate things further, castellanies varied in composition, organisation and competence. Explaining to an archive user what exactly a castellany did, and whether one should start looking for a particular topic there or at another level of government, is by no means easy and requires an answer with many contextual, regional and even local nuances. That answer is currently lacking. On the one hand, because archives of castellanies - with a few exceptions - are poorly catalogued; on the other hand, because there is virtually no recent research available.
FLARE aims to make a significant contribution to this. A research assistant will be assigned within the State Archives to compile a modern overview of all the Flemish castellanies and their archives. Inspired by the ICA ISDF standard, the initial focus will be on both place and time-related fluctuations in competences, so that archive users can be directed to the correct administrative level or archive collection for content-related queries in each region. A second focus, namely a macro-inventory of the most important castellany series, ties in with this and paves the way for a possible future digitisation of core series. Finally, he/she will also investigate funding opportunities for the further cataloguing of castellany archives and draw up a strategic plan to this end. In doing so, experiences can be exchanged with the supervisor, who has undertaken to tackle the inventory of the Oudburg castellany.
A postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University will be appointed for 1 year to compile and analyse a dataset of 12th-16th C. castellany regulations, laws and privileges. These sources predate the homologation of the customs and date from a period in which the various castellany functions were not yet reflected in the (later) archival records. In other words, the resulting archive guide will form one of the pillars on which the project assistant at the State Archives will continue to build. At the same time, this postdoc fits perfectly within Ghent University’s current research priorities, and this collaboration opens the door to exchange with a broad group of researchers working on medieval and early modern state formation at various levels of government.
Finally, the project partners will work together to engage with a diverse target audience through a combination of workshops, news updates, a small in-house exhibition and a closing conference.
