This project proposes a diachronic study of princely record-keeping in the Low Countries during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. In particular, it studies how the Burgundian-Habsburg princes repurposed the pre-Burgundian comital archives in Flanders to enhance their regional politics and
administrative policies. To achieve this goal, it applies a three-pronged social-anthropological approach to a source corpus including inventories, cartularies, registers, and individual records from the comital ‘Trésor de Flandre’ collection: (1) a pragmatic-organisational; (2) a political-ideological;
and (3) a socio-cultural approach. By treating archives as dynamic instruments of power and memory, this study takes a holistic approach by examining archival tools as part of an organised system, the 'archival bond'. This perspective will provide a better understanding of how princely
record-keeping policies were perceived and transmitted across generations of different types of government. It will also shed light on how these policies adapted to shifting ideologies amid state formation, and bureaucratic innovation. As the first diachronic study of princely archival management
in the Low Countries, bridging multiple generations of rulers and different state structures from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, it will advance future research on how rulers reshaped their past into a strategic tool for governance, political identity, and dynastic memory.