Social Relations and the State in Renaissance Germany: Feud and the Law in the Prince-bishopric of Würzburg, 1500-1600

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.