• Vita

    Luke Giraudet is a historian specialising in the political and legal history of the late-medieval and early modern Low Countries and France. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Early Modern History Research Group at KU Leuven and collaborateur scientifique at UCLouvain, where he previously held a fellowship at the Centre d’histoire du droit et de la justice. Since 2021 Giraudet has contributed to the BRAIN 2.0 PARDONS project, which examines pardon letters granted in the Habsburg Low Countries. His current research focuses on over 20,000 petitions for pardon submitted to the Privy Council in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of pardon narratives with legal evidence, including criminal inquests, witness depositions, and coroner reports. This research informs his new project, "Witnessing Violence, Restoring Order, and Performing Justice," which explores how ordinary legal actors, especially witnesses, shaped evolving understandings of remissible crime in the early modern Low Countries. Giraudet completed his PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of York in 2020 under the supervision of Professor Craig Taylor. His doctoral thesis, examining political communication and public opinion in early fifteenth-century Paris, was awarded the Mark Ormrod Prize in 2021 and developed into the monograph Public Opinion and Political Contest in Late Medieval Paris, published by Brepols.

  • Forschungsprojekt

    Legal Plurality and the Princely Regulation of Crime in the Early Modern Habsburg Low Countries

    My project examines divergent approaches to pardoning and regulating violence between central and provincial juridical councils in the Habsburg Low Countries (16th–17th centuries). Amid judicial centralization, the Privy Council in Brussels played a key role in reviewing pardon petitions, working alongside provincial councils with distinct legal traditions. By surveying over 3,000 rejected petitions from 1560–1633, the study explores how the Privy Council navigated conflicting legal interpretations, shaping debates on sovereignty, justice, and legal pluralism.

    The project addresses three questions: (1) How did judicial centralization impose a uniform understanding of pardonable violence? (2) Why did rejection rates vary across time and regions, especially during the Eighty Years’ War? (3) What legal and rhetorical strategies influenced pardon decisions, and how were rejections contested?

    The study draws on pardon petitions preserved in the Belgian State Archives, many with supporting documents like witness depositions, legal reports, and provincial council recommendations. These sources offer insight into the judicial process behind pardoning decisions, revealing how provincial and central authorities collaborated or clashed over legal interpretations. By tracing negotiations surrounding rejections, the research illuminates the evolving relationship between law, custom, and sovereign authority in the early modern Low Countries.

  • Einschlägige Veröffentlichungen

    Giraudet, Luke, Public Opinion and Political Contest in Late Medieval Paris: The Parisian Bourgeois and his Community, 1400-1450. Turnhout: Brepols, 2023.

    Giraudet, Luke, ‘Witnesses, Witnessing and the Crafting of Pardon Letters: The Case of the Habsburg Privy Council of the Spanish Netherlands (1540-1633)’ in Niewe Tijdingen. 'Voor ons sijn verscheenen'. (Oog)getuigen en hun verklaringen in de vroegmoderne periode', ed. Dries Raeymaekers & Gerrit Verhoeven, Leuven, 2024, 41–66.

    Giraudet, Luke, ‘Nicolas Confrant, author of the Journal d’un bourgeois de Paris?’, Romania, Vol. 139 (June 2021), pp. 114–40.

    Giraudet, Luke/ Gielis, Gert/ Verreycken, Quentin. ‘Crime and the Application of Legal Knowledge: Pardon Letters Granted to the Students of the University of Louvain in the Early Modern Period’ in Innovationes Lovanienses. Crossroads of Knowledge Transfer between Antiquity, Middle Ages, and Renaissance around the premodern University of Leuven, ed. Wouter Druwé, Wim François and Violet Soen (accepted, in press).

    Giraudet, Luke, ‘Bourgeois Networks and Commemorative Strategies in Fifteenth-Century Paris: The Epitaphs of the Church and Cemetery of the Holy Innocents’ in Tomb Monuments in Medieval Europe, ed. Paul Cockerham and Christian Steer (forthcoming).