Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West

Abstract Opening a fresh chapter in the burgeoning field of premodern diplomatic history, Reframing Treaties focuses on peacemaking through a wide geopolitical and constitutional range of case studies not limited to Europe, but including also the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds, and along a chronological time frame which centres on the period between the 14th and the 18th centuries but explores crossings, continuities, and afterlives up to the 21st century. The volume has two main general objectives. First, to rethink the peacemaking process and uncover the flow of negotiations that shaped late medieval and early modern political interactions. Secondly, to add an important contribution to the ongoing debate about Eurocentrism and its consequences by breaking down one of the most spectacular mechanisms (the system of the European great treaties) that helped make Western late medieval ius commune and early modern ius gentium become a purported ‘universal international order’ in the 19th century and beyond. With a multidisciplinary approach, the volume puts at the heart of the investigation not the single peace treaty, but the peacemaking process in its many forms and outcomes and demonstrates that peacemaking was a complex and multilayered phenomenon. Used as a political grammar, its binding nature transformed it into a powerful instrument to settle conflicts and regulate interactions both within and outside polities and communities. The volume is organised into four parts (Sources, Peacekeeping, Peacemaking, and Intersections), and 21 chapters and an Epilogue (chapter 22), and brings together an international team of specialists from European and American universities and from different fields.