Peace as Strong as Oak: Ritual Law, Vendetta, and Mediation in Renaissance Europe and the Americas

Peace as Strong as Oak: Ritual Law, Vendetta, and Mediation in Renaissance Europe and the Americas examines customary conflict resolution as a recurrent ritual process rather than as a simple opposition between violence and law. Drawing on medieval and early modern European materials alongside early descriptions of Indigenous American societies and colonial encounters, the study develops a comparative three-phase model of peacemaking and advances the thesis that this ritual structure reflects a broader cultural universal in the human management of conflict. The article is based on a multilingual research corpus of 119 works. The associated methodology, corpus documentation, analytical prompt, structured data, and LLM-assisted research outputs are preserved separately on Zenodo and linked to this preprint through the related-record metadata. Research data and supplementary materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22110031 Status: Preprint.