Reframing Treaties in the Late Medieval and Early Modern West

This volume deals with the many ways of reaching an agreement (peace, truce, alliance) through a wide geopolitical range of case studies between the 14th and the 18th centuries, and their afterlives up to the 21st century. With a multidisciplinary approach, it demonstrates the complex and multi-layered nature of the process of peacemaking. The history of peacemaking has traditionally been reduced to isolated case studies and seen as the prelude to the presumed 'universal' and 'modern' international order. Countering this one-dimensional and Eurocentric narrative, this multi-authored volume reconceptualizes peace treaties as a range of successful and failed agreements, settlements, truces, leagues, and other forms of conflict resolution, thus recovering their multilayered history throughout the medieval and early modern period. Rather than a series of 'great' treaties, peacemaking is reframed as a flexible phenomenon; a 'political grammar', whose complexity is reflected in its variety of forms and sources. Drawing on both diplomatic history and international relations studies, this volume traces the central role that peacemaking has played in the political history of the Western World.