Today our attention is focused on how to analyse #conflictmanagement from an interdisciplinary approach, due to our broad variety of source material. In particular: law and its role in diplomatic/economic centered conflicts. As Alain Wijffels points out while discussing Anglo-Hanseatic commercial conflicts, law was not on the forefront of these relations. The main focus was on diplomacy & trade. But legal documents can add valuable insight, esp. when scholars look beyond conflict resolution and analyse the conflict process.

“Law may not have been seen as offering a way out of the conflict, in the sense of a form of dispute resolution but it did contribute by formalizing the controversial issues and subjecting them to legal arguments supported by legal authorities, to secure some form of conflict management.” (p.172) Wijffels chapter is this week's #RetroConflictsInspiration since legal institutions/actors involved in Hanse-related conflicts will be used to e.g. demonstrate law as a tactic or how Hanseatic legal authority was perceived. A. Wijffels, “Legal authorities as instruments of conflict management. The long endgame of Anglo-Hanseatic relations (1474-1603)”, Godfrey, M. (Ed.) Law and Authority in British Legal History, @CambridgeUP  (2016), pp.170-191. [....]

A key idea in our project is that managing conflict is about more than just resolution. Conflict managers can escalate, or drag out, or just let conflicts fade away. Our #RetroConflictsInspirations review today is all about cases of unresolved conflict and its consequences. The Emperor’s Old Clothes (2015) by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger analyses four moments of conflict in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. But these aren’t the Empire’s great wars, or even its intellectual debates. They are about symbolism.

Drawing on cultural sociology, the book argues that in the Empire’s constitutional politics you can never separate hard questions of policy from symbolic questions of presentation and representation. That, it argues, would be an anachronism. In that kind of world, conflicts over the symbolic were more than a question of courtesy. As #conflictmanagers on the political stage navigated the ‘expectations about expectations’ at the heart of the Empire’s politics, they were at every moment reshaping the Empire itself. The Emperor’s Old Clothes can, therefore, act as a great illustration of the historical contingency of conflict management practices and the high stakes that conflict management often had in the pre-modern world. AC

This week’s #RetroConflictsInspirations is provided by the collaborative work of Hilde de Weerdt, Catherine Holmes, and John Watts, ‘Politics, c.1000-1500: Mediation and Communication’, Past & Present 238 (2018), 261-296.

Combining case studies spanning from Song China to late and high medieval Byzantium and France, the three authors suggest a new way to write a global history of medieval politics. Akin to New Diplomatic History, they are less interested in comparing institutions and trajectories than in analyzing the practices of politics ‘the messier ways in which power is negotiated.’ Focusing on mediation and communication, they show how actors as different as Chinese students or French and Byzantine noblemen and town assemblies acted as mediators in interaction and conflicts between high powers, communities, and individuals. Apart from the common interest in actors, processes, and practices, it is the article’s methodology which influences our project as a whole. Its approach of combining regional studies to assimilate findings and establish common patterns is also highly valuable when analyzing case studies stretching from London to Tallinn. But it also inspires us to look further: How can our understanding of the #Hanseatic world add towards writing a bigger, global history of conflict management?[....]

This week’s #RetroConflictsInspirations is the work of Michael Jucker on medieval secrecy, e.g. in “Secrets and Politics: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects of Late Medieval Diplomatic Communication” Micrologus. Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies 14 (2006) 275–309.

Focussing in particular on Switzerland, he shows how written and oral, verbal and non-verbal secret communication in #premoderndiplomacy were intertwined. Secrecy is presented as a sophisticated tool, furthering change and – perhaps more surprisingly - stability. Drawing on Valentin Groebner, he fleshes out examples of secrets as gifts: secrets had (and have) a function in diplomacy. Secret diplomatic communication happened at various political levels in cities. This certainly echoes in our material on the #Hanse and northern Europe. Moreover, the understanding that most secrets are lost or inaccessible to us as primary sources, has actually brought our research further. How? Through the shift of focus to when, how and why communication ABOUT secrets was mentioned, even without content disclosure. Talking and writing about secrets had a specific function in the Hanse. It delineated #trust, both externally and internally, in a highly flexible manner. The languages of trust and secrecy shared roots and fruits.[....]

Analyses of our conflict case studies are often tied to diplomacy and, due to the leading role of our Hanseatic actors, economic history. This, combined to the broad focus of our project (from London to Stockholm to Tallinn) leads to today’s #RetroConflictsInspirations. E. Thomson in ‘For a comparative history of early modern diplomacy’ effectively argues against the idea of homogeneous European diplomatic practices, one that can be applied to our medieval/early modern research & the inherent complexity of cross-border mercantile diplomacy.

As stated: “for it captures neither the variety of diplomatic institutions and practices nor the complexity and creativity involved in their imitation and adaptation.” (p.151) Indeed, the interregional & comparative aspects of our research (e.g. the London & Bruges Kontore) showcases how Hanseatic #conflictmanagers required knowledge of how their conflicts could be approached beyond their own cities of origin/in general terms, due to an European landscape characterised by legal and political fragmentation.  How did those actors handling conflicts react to economic/political/legal/etc. change & how did they share their #conflictmanagement knowledge - research q's tying into our ‘agents making institutions’ approach (https://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03468750600604390)
EZ

This week's microreview: Ulinka Rublack, The Astronomer and the Witch: Johannes Kepler’s Fight for His Mother, (Oxford, 2015). Conflicts happen at all scales, from the local to the global. And, of course, there’s always interplay between scales of conflict. One of our #RetroConflictsInspirations for questions of scale is Rublack’s The Astronomer and the Witch. The book follows the trial of Johannes Kepler’s mother, Katharina, to illuminate how the conflicts of one Württemberg town emerged from continent-wide debates about religion, gender history, knowledge and law, as well as climatic factors.

But it also shows “it is possible…to ask how Katherina herself made choices”. Despite their relationship to many macro-conflicts, the Keplers’ conflicts were contingent on decisions taken and strategies deployed by local participants. One last inspiration comes from its handling of porous borders between areas of skill and knowledge. Like our Hansards, the Keplers repurposed tactics from their social, intellectual, and religious lives to negotiate legal conflicts.
AC

Courts of law were central to premodern urban conflict management, Yet, why and when did people choose courts over other means of self-help and decided to invest in legal processes? By putting the ‘consumers of justice’ in the centre of his study of 14th century Marseille, Daniel Lord Smail addresses these questions and provides a counter-narrative to the concept that courts of law were established in a strict top-down process of state-formation and rationalization.

Among many other thought-provoking ideas, he reminds historians to not overstress pure economic rationality in legal processes and courts. Emotions and grudges as well as the desire to publicly defend or attack status and honor often overlapped with economic conflicts and provided as much an incentive to drag an opponent before court as an actual desire for justice. An important consideration when wondering why Hanseatic merchants at times invested substantially more into a conflict than what they could possibly gain from it. #RetroConflictsInspirations #twitterstorians[....]

One of the early #RetroConflictsInspirations has been Bar-Tal, D. (Ed.). (2011). Intergroup conflicts and their resolution. The reason is its holistic definition of conflicts with focus on connections, perceptions and actions, which works also for the past. ‘Conflicts are defined as situations in which two or more parties perceive that their goals and/or interests are in direct contradiction with one another and decide to act on the basis of this perception’.

This applies to (connected) micro, meso and macro interactions. Conflicts can be tractable (seen as solvable) or not. For historians, this holistic approach allows analyses of people’s strategies, tactics and motivations behind lawsuits, group clashes or wars, i.e. conflict management, without the sole focus on resolution or institutions. The premodern setting offers a broad repertoire of perceptions and decisions in conflicts. In particular, the volume triggers questions on which premodern conflicts were approached as tractable, and why. History’s benefit: knowledge of the outcome. Mostly. [....]

With diplomacy as a substantial part of medieval & early modern conflict management, our project often comes back to new diplomatic history & John Watkins’ call to use interdisciplinary approach:  #RetroConflictsInspirations.To quote: ‘The history of diplomacy is finally inseparable from parallel histories of education and literacy, technological innovation, economics, literature and rhetoric, gender, sexuality, and marriage. One story cannot be told fully without reference to others.’ (p.6)

This rings true for our project: our Hanseatic conflict managers are not a static group: we focus on the role individuals took on, in a bottom-up, agency-based approach. Hanseatic diplomacy is tangled with economic, cultural, social, institutional & political history. By broadening our research to the process of a conflict instead of official diplomatic resolutions, we'll be able to observe a group that did not practice diplomacy as a function but as a role influenced by e.g. trade, the Hanseatic urban politics & social networks.[....]

We are publishing 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.[....]