Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West

Peace treaties were an important, dynamic, and varied element of late medieval and early modern diplomacy and international relations. But study of peace-making in the pre-modern period has often been limited to a focus on singular treaties and case studies, or presented as the historical prelude to the singular and inevitable 'universal' international order of the modern period. Seeking to counter this one-dimensional and Eurocentric teleology, this multi-authored volume conceives of peace treaties very broadly—as a range of successful and failed agreements, settlements, truces, oaths, and other forms conflict resolution—across a wide geopolitical and constitutional range of case studies not limited to Europe, but including also the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Considered in this way, they become a means to reevaluate thoroughly the premodern peace-making process and the broader flow of negotiations that shaped late medieval and early modern political interactions; not as a discrete series of treaties but as a constitutive element of politics (a 'political grammar'), both within and outside frontiers and borders, whose complexity and adaptability are reflected in the diversity of its forms and the variety of the sources that recorded it. In so doing, and across 21 multi-disciplinary chapters, contributors show pre-modern peace-making to have been a multi-layered and varied phenomenon, the understanding of which has important implications for all those working on medieval and early modern international relations, diplomacy, and the new diplomatic history.