Medieval Treaties and Modern Nations

NATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

SPEAKER: Tarren Andrews, Yale University

“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.

Tarren Andrews is a postdoctoral associate and visiting presidential fellow at Yale University in the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration where she will join the faculty in 2023. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she specialized in the law, literature, and material culture of the Early Medieval North Atlantic, and in Critical Indigenous Studies. Her forthcoming book takes a transtemporal approach to law and literature, re-examining legal and literary artifacts from the early medieval North Atlantic alongside resonant documents and stories from Turtle Island to recover the origins of Anglophone settler colonial logics as they are manifested in U.S. and Canadian settler law. She has essays forthcoming in Exemplaria and The Yearbook of English Studies.

This event is co-sponsored by the Medieval Studies Seminar.