International workshop on legal pluralism in late medieval Northern Europe

How is predictability ensured in situations of legal pluralism? What communicative practices are used to ensure that actors behave as they would like each other to behave? What if expectations are not fulfilled? How, for example, did late medieval long-distance merchants negotiate the normative patterns according to which they wanted to conduct their business? How did they deal with conflicts?

These questions will be addressed on 5 and 6 October 2022 at the workshop "How to Ensure Predictability. Northern Europe in the Later Middle Ages". The late medieval Hanseatic area is an excellent example, as traders with the most diverse cultural and legal backgrounds met here.

Trust and violence two sides of the same coin

Organiser PD Dr. Gregor Rohmann (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main), fellow at the Kolleg from July 2021 to April 2022, points to the variety of social modes that could be used in these situations, such as honour, trust or even the use of force: "Violence, however, was not disruptive to economic processes, but functional, as long as a relative equality of military means and the overarching consensus of economic exchange enclosed it. Trust and violence are thus two sides of the same coin."

For detailed information and to register for the workshop, click here.