• Vita

    Claudia Garnier has been a professor of Pre-modern History at the University of Vechta since 2011. She completed a Master's degree in Medieval and Modern History and Slavonic Studies at the universities of Gießen and Kazan/Tatarstan. She then worked at the Chair of International Law at the University of Gießen and was part of a project team working on international law in the Middle Ages (1994/95). From 1995 to 1997, she was employed as a research assistant at the Chair of Medieval History at the University of Bonn. This position was subsequently held by her from 1997 to 2008 at the University of Münster. During the summer semester of 2008, she taught at the University of Heidelberg. She also worked at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ at the University of Münster from 2008 to 2011.

    Her PhD (2000) focused on political friendship and princely networks in the 13th century. She wrote her habilitation thesis (2008) on petitioning as a form of communication within the medieval political order. Her fields of research are:

    • Forms of communication in the medieval political order
    • Intercultural communication between East and West
    • Political and religious exclusion in the Middle Ages
    • Political networks in the late Middle Ages
    • Conflict and peacemaking
    • Arbitration in the late Middle Ages

  • Research Project

    Exclusion and Deviance in the Context of Legal Diversity in the High Middle Ages

    High Middle Age communities practised legal, political, social and religious exclusion in a variety of contexts. The project, which is to be published as a book, examines forms of secular and religious exclusion that were a response to deviant behaviour: whether individuals or groups were accused of breaching relevant norms; whether they had actually been guilty of breaking the rules; or whether corresponding sanctions were formulated prospectively in order to prevent deviant behaviour before it occurred. Exclusion was not intended to destroy those affected. Rather, it was intended to compel them to recognise the legal order and, in this way, to preserve peace. The project views the practice of exclusion in cases of breaches of the law and its social embeddedness as a fundamental form of High Medieval law. It begins by analysing the various secular and ecclesiastical manifestations of this practice. In a further step, the question of how typological commonalities in High Medieval exclusion developed from these pluralistic approaches will be discussed. This will be examined with a focus on the following areas: procedures and practices; language and performance; space and memory.

  • Selected Publications

    Claudia Garnier, Amicus amicis – inimicus inimicis. Politische Freundschaft und fürstliche Netzwerke im 13. Jahrhundert (Monographien zur Geschichte des Mittelalters 46), Stuttgart 2000.

    Claudia Garnier, Die Kultur der Bitte. Herrschaft und Kommunikation im mittelalterlichen Reich (Symbolische Kommunikation in der Vormoderne), Darmstadt 2008.

    Claudia Garnier/Johannes Schnocks (eds), Sterben über den Tod hinaus. Politische, soziale und religiöse Ausgrenzung in vormodernen Gesellschaften, Würzburg 2012.

    Claudia Garnier/Gerd Althoff (eds), Die Sprache der Gaben. Die Regeln der symbolischen Kommunikation in Europa 1000-1700 (= Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 63 [2015]). 

    Claudia Garnier/Christine Vogel (eds), Interkulturelle Ritualpraxis in der Vormoderne. Diplomatische Interaktion an den östlichen Rändern der Fürstengesellschaft (Beihefte der ZHF 52), Berlin 2016.

    Claudia Garnier/Hendrik Baumbach (eds), Konzepte und Praktiken der Schiedsgerichtsbarkeit im römisch-deutschen Reich vom 12. bis zum 15. Jahrhundert (= Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte 155 [2019], S. 233-416).

    Claudia Garnier (ed), Konzepte und Funktionen der Gewalt im Mittelalter. Münster 2021.