Tarren Andrews (Yale University), Medieval Treaties and Modern Nations. This event will take place in a hybrid format; to attend virtually, please register here. Co-sponsored with the Mahindra Humanities Center Native Cultures of the Americas Seminar.

“Medieval Treaties and Modern Nations” takes up the question of how modern notions of nationhood are informed by treaty systems. Through a close analysis of an early medieval treaty from the late ninth-century in the North Atlantic and a modern treaty from the American Intermountain West, this paper establishes the structural formula of treaty writing has changed precious little in the last one thousand years. The transnational and transhistorical similarities invite questions about just how much medieval treaties have shaped and influenced modern conceptions of international relations and, indeed, nationhood itself. Subsequently, a corpus analysis of the treaties’ operative word, “peace,” which has three Old English antecedents—sibb, frið, and grið—shows that in Anglophone legal contexts peace has an intentionally limited temporal dimension. Thus, the paper concludes that such limited understandings of peace not only doomed U.S. – Indigenous treaty making from the start, but furthermore play a crucial role in the shaping modern conceptions of nationhood in settler colonial spaces.