We are publishing bi-weekly microreviews on Twitter: short discussions of monographs, edited volumes and articles which have inspired us (#RetroConflictsInspirations). Diplomatic, social, economic, legal history on the one hand, and conflict resolution & management theory on the other.

History meets the social sciences.

Search in microreviews and other website content: https://premodernconflictmanagement.org/search

Microreviews collected

Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

Overview of microreviews:

1) New Diplomatic History (Watkins)

2) Intergroup conflicts (Bar-Tal)

3) Consumption of Justice (Smail)

4) Astronomer and Witch (Rublack)

5) Comparative diplomacy (Thomson)

6) Secrets and Politics (Jucker)

7) Politics, Mediation and Communication (De Weerdt et al)

8) The Emperor’s Old Clothes (Stollberg-Rilinger)

9) Legal authorities as instruments of conflict management (Wijffels)

10) Language and conflict (Janicki)

11) Extra-Legal and Legal Conflict Management (Cordes and Höhn)

12) Lust for liberty (Cohn)

13) Conflict management (Miranda)

14) Diplomatic knowledge (Cornago)

15) Jenseits von Piraterie und Kaperfahrt (Rohmann)

16) Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819 (Whaley)

17) Urban networks and emerging states (Blockmans & Heerma van Voss)

18) The Material Letter (Daybell)

19) Trust in Long-Distance Relationships (Forrest & Haour)

20) Reichsstädtische Außenbeziehungen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Krischer)

21) Between sea and city: portable communities in late medieval London and Bruges (Spindler)

22) Trust: a Sociological Theory (Sztompka)

23) Tage (Courts, Councils and Diets) (Hardy)

24) Diplomacy from below (Morieux)

25) Contesting the City (Liddy)

26) Dark Side of Knowledge (Zwierlein)

27) The Culture of Reconciliation (Muldrew)

28) Punctuated Negotiations (Druckman & Olekalns)

29) The Logic of Political Conflict (Lantschner)

30) The Merchant Republics (Lindemann)

31) From Usages of Merchants to Default Rules (De ruysscher)

32) Trading Conflict (Christ)

33) Urban Politics (Friedrich)

34) Spielregeln der Politik im Mittelalter (Althoff)

35) Order within Law, Variety within Custom (Kadens)

36) Konfliktaustragung im norddeutschen Raum des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts (Dirks)

37) Negotiated Reformation (Close)

38) Politische Kommunikation in der Hanse (1550-1621) (Schipmann)

39) Economies of violence (Esmer)

40) The Trouble with Networks. Managing the Scots' Early-Modern Madeira Trade (Hancock)

41) Political Participation and Economic Development (Wahl)

42) Anger's Past (Rosenwein)

43) Cultures of Conflict Resolution in Early Modern Europe (Cummins and Kounine)

44) Power politics and princely debts: why Germany's common currency failed, 1549–56 (Volckart)

45) Common good and private justice (Beck)

46) The darker angels of our nature (ed. Dwyer and Micale)

47) Luther, Conflict, and Christendom (Ocker)

48) Diplomatische Strategien der Reichsstadt Augsburg (Timpener)

Latest Blog Posts

Diplomatische Strategien der Reichsstadt Augsburg (Timpener)

Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

The majority of conflicts our different sub-projects are concerned with went beyond the formal boundaries of a single city. Often, such altercations required the town council to engage with other municipal governments, regional nobility, and even royal courts. Which is why this week’s #microreview turns towards the topic of #medieval urban diplomacy in the form of Evelien Timpener’s study of late medieval Augsburg’s foreign relations.

Focusing on the council’s conflicts with regional nobility and clergy in the 15th century, Timpener argues, that the main task of urban diplomacy lay in finding allies to support the city’s interests, not in negotiating quick conflict resolutions. While Augsburg’s council situationally cooperated with the nobility, it was the exchange with other cities and the kings of the Holy Roman Empire which constituted the main pillar of the city’s foreign relations. To this end, the council’s diplomats – magistrates, jurists, and messengers – utilized a broad and flexible combination of letters and oral communication. While Timpener focuses on the city’s interaction with regional nobility and clergy, her findings can also be applied to the ‘international’ scope of Hanseatic cities. Although the contact with foreign courts has been a central topic of Hanseatic historiography, only few historians have paid attention to the how and who of the cities’ diplomacy. [....]

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Luther, Conflict, and Christendom (Ocker)

Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

A new #microreview for you today, this time a monograph on pre-modern conflict management, which shares our project’s roots in Georg Simmel’s understanding of conflict as a process not to be resolved but managed and guided: Christopher Ocker’s Luther, Conflict and Christendom.

Ocker is centrally interested in how an individual affects history, calling the book an anti-biogrpahy, not looking at Luther’s personal life but instead at how others interacted with his ideas and actions. Luther being Luther, that usually means looking at conflicts. He analyses conflict at the political and intellectual levels, as well as at the level of everyday life for common people, characterizing the Reformation as “conflict with relative, not absolute, parameters, defined differently for different people at different times.” This offers new insights into familiar aspects of the Reformation. Considering reform in German cities, Ocker suggests the process was not only a new axis for conflict or extension of old conflicts, but a new set of strategies by which conflict could be explored and managed. Turning to a lesser studied area, he examines how conflicts Luther identified between Protestant morality and the challenges and temptations of life came to the New World with protestant travelers who reinterpreted these conflicts to suit new communities and environments. Here, he highlights the advantages of a conflict management approach to studying two key sixteenth-century developments: the Reformation and transatlantic exchange. By centering the process rather than the subject of conflict, he reveals continuities missed by other methods. The focus on conflict also allows for a perspective neither top-down nor bottom-up but which shows relationships at different scales interacting as conflict moves from one man's intellectual life, to relations in communities like towns or abbeys, to the geopolitcal theatre. [....]

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