Georg Jostkleigrewe

Georg Jostkleigrewe studied History, Romance Philology (French), and Latin within an integrated programme at the Universities of Tübingen and Aix-Marseille I. After defending a doctoral thesis on perceptions of “Franco-German” relations in the Middle Ages, he worked as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Münster. Since 2019, he has held the Chair of Medieval History at the University of Halle.

The project

Title: Research on French Factions in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries

"French political society at the end of the Middle Ages was marked by deep partisan and factional divisions that have so far received little scholarly attention. Research has generally focused on conflicts that erupted into open violence, such as the well-known rivalry between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians in the early fifteenth century. Earlier factional conflicts, although no less significant, were expressed in different ways and have therefore attracted less attention.

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, factional opposition was often concealed and articulated through shifting rhetorical strategies, employed both by contemporary observers and by the actors themselves. From the fourteenth century onwards, for instance, political discourse frequently invoked the preservation of the royal domain, while the underlying objective was often the exclusion of rival groups from royal favour. To date, such discourses have been studied primarily from the perspectives of legal history and political thought, with little consideration of their factional contexts.

This project instead focuses on the interdependencies between political discourse and micropolitical conflict. It aims to provide a detailed reconstruction of factional constellations in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries–an area that remains largely unexplored."

Hosting Institution: Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Selective Bibliography

• Monarchischer Staat und ‚Société politique’. Politische Interaktion und staatliche Verdichtung im spätmittelalterlichen Frankreich, Ostfildern 2018
• Das Bild des Anderen. Entstehung und Wirkung deutsch-französischer Fremdbilder in der volkssprachlichen Literatu²r und Historiographie des 12. bis 14. Jahrhunderts (Orbis Mediaevalis 9), Berlin 2008
• (De)Centralising Governance in Late Medieval France: Actors and Mechanisms, in: Frederik Buylaert/Erika Graham-Goering/Jim van der Meulen (Hgg.), Lordship and the Rise of States in Western Europe, Londres 2025, p. 75-89
• La difficile construction du champ diplomatique. La mission permanente de Gênes en France (1337–?) et la professionnalisation de la diplomatie médiévale, in: Francia 48 
• Alterity and Genre: Reflections on the Construction of ‘National’ Otherness in Franco-German Contexts, in: Andrzej Pleszczyński/Grischa Vercamer (Hgg.), Germans and Poles in the Middle Ages: The Perception of the 'Other' and the Presence of Mutual Ethnic Stereotypes in Medieval Narrative Sources (10th-15thc.), Leiden 2021, S. 41-56 (2021), p. 23-42