Biography

Niels Fieremans is a postdoctoral fellow working at the intersection of legal, social, and economic history in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. His main research interest lies in the impact of law on society and how society, in turn, shaped these laws in the late medieval and Renaissance Burgundian Low Countries and beyond. He received his PhD in both law and history from Ghent University. The Royal Academy of Belgium awarded his dissertation the Eric Duverger Prize for an outstanding monograph based on archival sources. He has also published on the interplay between law and society in various journals, including a monograph Law, Leverage and Litigation: Foreign Merchants in a City of Justice (Edinburgh, 2025).

Project Summary

The project aims at a comparative study of the idea of justice under the influence of global trade networks. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Low Countries served as crossroads not only for international trade but also for the dissemination of ideas. While the Florentines were among the dominant trading groups in late medieval Bruges, they faced stiff competition in sixteenth-century Antwerp. These groups had to navigate evolving global trade patterns and contend with the emergence of new commercial actors. The project’s hypothesis is that the expansion of global trade routes also entailed shifts in conceptions of justice. Foreign merchants used their networks to transcend the various courts and bend the different form of conflict resolution to their will. By combining and analyzing previously unpublished archival materials from both the Low Countries and Florentine archives, the study seeks to understand how idea’s and expectations of justice were created and used as arguments to shape new realities.