Frederik Dhondt has posted Jurisdiction and Taxation in the Habsburg Netherlands: The Manuscripts of Goswin Arnould de Wynants, Emperor Charles VI’s Belgian Councillor, which also appears in Handelingen van de Koninklijke Commissie voor de Uitgave der Oude Wetten en Verordeningen van België /Bulletin de la Commission Royale pour la Publication des Anciennes Lois et Ordonnances de Belgique 59 (2025): 231-352:
Goswin-Arnould de Wynants (1661-1732), councillor (judge) in the Council of Brabant, and member of the High Council for the Netherlands in Vienna appointed by emperor Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire, was one of the most privileged observers of law and administration in the Spanish and then Austrian Netherlands at the turn of the eighteenth century. Most of his work has never been published, although copies of his manuscripts circulated relatively widely and can be found in various Belgian heritage institutions. Although Wynants is a reference for nineteenth- and early twentieth century legal historians, scholarship in legal history seems to have forgotten both the author and the eighteenth century in the Southern Netherlands. Part of the explanation lies with Wynants’s informal writing style and lack of explicit references, which render his work less suitable for handwritten text recognition and computational legal history. However, a traditional close reading highlights his extensive use of implicit legal reasoning and elements of broader legal culture. Building on the work of Ben Croon (1991) and the institutional study of Klaas Van Gelder (2016) as well as the comprehensive study of public law manuscripts of Martin Schennach for the Holy Roman Empire (2020), two of Wynants’s main works are analysed. First -for the battle over jurisdiction between secular and ecclesiastical power- his Memoirs on the institutions of the Austrian Netherlands. Secondly, the treatise on taxation in Brabant. Although it is still solid to see Wynants as a ‘regalist’ (Croon), defending the secular ruler against ecclesiastical competition and fiscal exemptions, this image has to be complemented. In fine, Wynants primarily defends the judge as a crucial actor in the early modern legal ‘cacophony’ of legal sources and languages (Herzog 2024).
--Dan Ernst