License & Attribution
The Lions of Flanders research project is openly licensed to support academic citation, translation, and scholarly reuse. The terms below explain how the license applies to the different kinds of material on the site — project-authored analysis, primary source transcriptions, website code, and third-party material.
Research content — CC BY 4.0
The narrative prose, analytical commentary, diagrams, dossiers, and bibliography annotations authored by Michael Van Flandern and Constance Van Flandern for this project are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). You may cite, quote, translate, adapt, and build upon this work — including for commercial purposes — provided you credit the project and link back to the original page.
A suggested citation format for academic use: Van Flandern, M. & Van Flandern, C. (2026). [Page title]. Lions of Flanders / Van Vlaenderen Research Project. https://vanvlaenderen.org/[path]. Retrieved [date].
Primary source transcriptions
The project reproduces verbatim passages from primary sources — charters, tomb inscriptions, schepenbank records, parish registers — in the research dossiers. The underlying texts are long out of copyright and are in the public domain. The transcriptions themselves represent scholarly labour: locating the source, reading the hand, resolving contractions, collating variant readings against other editions.
When citing a specific transcription from this site, please cite both the underlying primary source (with its full archival signature where given) and this project as the transcribing intermediary. That way the chain of custody from original document → project transcription → your work remains legible to the next reader who wants to verify.
Website code — MIT
The website's React + TypeScript source code, build scripts, and component library are separately licensed under the MIT license, not CC BY 4.0. The two licenses cover different kinds of work: CC BY for scholarly content, MIT for software. The MIT license is standard for open-source web projects and permits reuse of the code with attribution.
Third-party material
Collaborator-compiled family registers (such as Pieter Antheunisz van Vlaenderen's Stamreeks in the bibliography), published third-party works cited throughout the site, and any images or heraldic material reproduced from external sources remain the property of their respective authors and rights-holders. The project's CC BY 4.0 license does not extend to these materials — consult the original source for its own terms.
Questions
For questions about reuse that don't fit cleanly into these categories — or for collaborations, translations, or citations in peer-reviewed publications where a more specific permission statement would be helpful — please get in touch via the Contact page.
License terms last reviewed: April 2026.