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All are welcome. Refreshments will be served.

Dr Harald Braun will present work-in-progress on an aspect of his current research.

This paper feeds on a Spanish research project exploring connections between the histories of emotion, violence and scholastic legal-political thought. I am looking at how specific legal and moral norms, forms of violence, and emotional states operated in relation to one another. I am interested in how they weighed on one another, complemented, sustained, modified or obstructed one another. The case study is the debate on the legitimacy of the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Mexico. Traditionally, historians have focused on scholastic 'just war theory', especially ius ad bellum and the question of the natural rights of the Amerindian population. I would like to shift attention to a neglected, but, I believe, nonetheless crucial aspect of this complex debate: the relationship between pre-emptive strike (part of ius ad bellum), just conduct in war (ius in bello), notions of violence, and early modern languages of emotion, for instance the perception and conceptualization of fear. A controversial instance of collective violence on the American main serves as the initial focal point: the Massacre of Cholula (1519), the mass killing of members of an indigenous community by Spanish conquistadors and their indigenous allies. My starting point is that early modern political debate mingles juridical, deceptively rational conceptualizations of legitimate and illegitimate violence with emotional responses to massacre. The participants in this debate are conscious of these connections. Emotions emerge as conceptual hinges which in some ways guide a many-layered moral and legal discourse about the - ‘just’ or ‘unjust’ - perpetration of collective violence and the legitimacy of early modern empire.