Rombert Stapel

Rombert Stapel (1983) studied Medieval History at Leiden University. He graduated in 2008 on a prosopographical study of the priest-brethren of the Teutonic Order in the Utrecht bailiwick (1350-1600). He then started working on a PhD dissertation at Leiden University and the Fryske Akademy (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) concerning a late fifteenth-century Middle Dutch chronicle of the Teutonic Order, the Croniken van der Duytscher Oirden or Jüngere Hochmeisterchronik. This text became an influential text in the Baltic region and beyond in the sixteenth century. He defended his thesis, cum laude, in 2017. 

He is currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the IISH on themes related to the socioeconomic history of the medieval and early-modern Low Countries and spatial humanities. Amongst others, he contributes to the projects Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations 1500-2000 and The Historical Dynamics of Industrialization in Northwestern Europe and China, 1800-2000.

Starting in September 2020 he is leading the NWO-funded project '(Re)counting the uncounted. Replication and Contextualisation of Premodern Dutch and Belgian Population Estimates (1350-1800)'. 

Rombert Stapel's current research interests include labour relations in various parts of the world (including the history of self-employment), medieval and early modern coin production, and the circulation of knowledge, goods, and people in the world. He is particularly interested in the spatial humanities: one project aims to create linked open data gazetteers of historical place names, and the other is an historical GIS atlas of late medieval and early modern administrative-judicial units in the Low Countries (cities and heerlijkheden). This projects brings together information from hearth taxes and historical cartography. Its aim is to replace or at least update the Geschiedkundige Atlas van Nederland by A.A. Beekman.