Annual Bolton-King Lecture with Dr. Harald E. Braun (University of Liverpool)
War Crimes: Seventeenth-Century Perspectives from the Bolton Library
Date: Wednesday, 5 November
Time: 6-8pm
Location: Captains’ Room, Hunt Museum
Admission: FREE event. Booking Essential
About the lecture
How did seventeenth century theologians, jurisprudents, and political counsellors confront the reality of war, especially atrocities against non-combatants? What was their understanding of legitimate violence in war? What challenges did they face? What solutions did they offer?
This lecture will explore the thinking of seminal authors whose works are found among the riches of the Bolton-King Collection such as Francisco de Vitoria OP and Hugo Grotius, both often addressed as ‘fathers of international law’.
It will then contrast their positions with that of contemporaries including political counsellors like the Saxe-Weimarian political counsellor Johann Wilhelm Neumair von Ramsla, who found himself at the coalface of military atrocity during the Thirty Years’ War in Germany.
Looking at the pre-history of international law will unavoidably raise uncomfortable questions for the present: What degree of protection can the law realistically afford civilian populations in war? Is there anything we can learn from the seventeenth century?
Dr. Harald Braun Biography
Harald E. Braun is Reader in European History at the University of Liverpool, UK. He is a historian of early modern political thought and culture, with an emphasis on the Spanish Habsburg empire and the Catholic World more widely (c.1400-c.1700). His work entwines the histories of knowledge, politics, religion and violence. His current research project funded by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung compares normative frameworks of military violence through the prism of the contemporary response to military atrocities during the Thirty Years’ War. His most recent relevant publications include chapters in the Cambridge World History of Genocide (CUP) and the Cultural History of Genocide (Bloomsbury) as well as a Companion to the Spanish Scholastics (Brill).
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