Impressed and inspired by the results of German, but increasingly also of international research in the field of conceptual history, a group of Dutch scholars in the 1990s decided to initiate a research project in Dutch conceptual history. In this initiative they were much aided by the award of a research group at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) during the academic year 1994-1995 and which resulted in the pilot study ‘History of Concepts; Comparative Perspective’s edited by Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans and Frank van Vree in 1998. The Dutch project, which now is part of the research program of the Huizinga Institute, the Netherlands Graduate school for Cultural History, as it has developed since then is, certainly in comparison to the existing German projects, relatively modest in scale. The aim of this article is to explore the late-medieval and early-modern development of the concept of citizenship in the Netherlands in a comparative perspective. This also means that the paper seeks to transcend the hitherto dominant national framework for studying the history of concepts. There are two main ways to attempt this, both of which are explored in the paper. The first and most obvious one is systematically to compare conceptual histories, that is, to compare the history of the key concept of citizenship in different European countries over a longer period of time in the hope of illuminating the parallels and differences in national conceptual development. To compare the history of the Dutch concept of citizenship with that of the same concept in Germany, England or France, for example, is to derive important insights into both national peculiarities and shared patterns of development. But although such cross-national comparisons may be crucial, they cannot capture the entire story of the international dimensions that are involved in conceptual development, as part of a normative discourse on citizenship. In order to bring this latter aspect out in all ...