Project description
Examining feud and the law in Renaissance Germany
The Prince-Bishopric of Würzburg offers a unique window into early modern social relations, state dynamics, and the history of feuds in Germany. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the SOCRESTA project will investigate how peasants, burghers, and lesser nobles settled disputes through both violence and legal means between 1500 and 1600. Focusing on the Prince-Bishopric of Würzburg, the project will explore how gender and class shaped these conflicts, as well as the role of the state in mediating them. As the first systematic study of how ordinary people used violence and the law following the 1495 ban on feuds in the Holy Roman Empire, SOCRESTA challenges the traditional idea that feuds were exclusively a noble privilege.
Objective
SOCRESTA is the first systematic exploration of how ordinary people used violence and the law to resolve their disputes in Renaissance Germany after the 1495 ban on feud or Fehde in the Holy Roman Empire. To ensure its feasibility, the project focuses on the Prince-bishopric of Würzburg in 1500-1600. A central German territory, marked by the social upheaval of the Peasants’ War, religious discord of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and aristocratic conflicts, it presents an ideal laboratory for analysing early modern social relations and the state.
SOCRESTA’s objective is to qualitatively and quantitatively investigate how early modern peasants, burghers and lesser nobles characterised, experienced and settled their disputes; how they used violence and the law to pursue their enmities; how interpersonal violence was shaped by gender and class expectations; how effective was the state in mediating disputes and controlling violence.
SOCRESTA adopts a multidisciplinary approach rooted in legal anthropology and comparative social, legal, gender and women’s history and history of emotions to fill significant gaps in the history of feud in early modern Germany. By centring on the lower orders who remain critically underexplored, the innovative project goes well beyond normative discourses and legislation to address actual social phenomena and deconstruct the dominant views on Fehde as a medieval institution and prerogative of the nobility. Thereby, the project also contributes to a broader history of European social relations, the state, violence and the law.
Finally, SOCRESTA’s programme enables the fellow to expand his existing knowledge in the field of history and acquire new techniques, especially in digital humanities, substantially advances his networking and dissemination skills, and enhances his teaching.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
YO10 5DD York North Yorkshire
United Kingdom