Dr. Daniel Jaquet

Assoziierter Forscher

Abteilung für Mittelalterliche Geschichte

E-Mail
daniel.jaquet@faculty.unibe.ch
Postadresse
Universität Bern
Historisches Institut
Länggassstrasse 49
3012 Bern
Seit September 2018 Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (postdoc) an der Abteilung für Mittelalterliche Geschichte (SNF-Projekt «Martial Culture in Medieval Town»)
Seit Oktober 2017 Leiter kulturelle Vermittlung und Forschung Château de Morges et ses musées, Morges
Februar - August 2017 Lehrbeauftragter an der Universität Genf (Abteilung für Mittelalterliche Geschichte)
September 2016 - Februar 2017 Chercheur associé au Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, Université de Tours (SNF Postdoc Mobility)
September 2015 - August 2016 Visiting scholar am Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin (SNF Postdoc Mobility)
Januar 2014 - August 2015 Oberassistent (postdoc) an der Universität Genf (Abteilung für Mittelalterliche Geschichte)
Januar - Juli 2014 Lehrbeauftragter an der Universität Lausanne (Abteilung für Mittelalterliche Geschichte)
December 2013 Promotion an der Universität Genf
2007 - 2013 Assistent an der Universität Genf (Abteilung für Mittelalterliche Geschichte)
2001 - 2006 Phil. hist. Studium Universität Genf (Geschichte, Literatur, Rumantsch)
  • Medialitätsgeschichte des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit
  • Wissensformationen und Vermittlung der europaïschen Kampfkünste
  • Sozialgeschichte von Heer und Krieg
  • Interdisziplinäre Geschichte des Körpers und des Körperwissens

Writing, performing and learning martial skills: Martial arts culture in words and images in the Swiss Lands (1400-1600).

Habilitationsprojekt (Teil des Forschungsprojekts Martial Culture in Medieval Town

This project will investigate the evolution and use of urban public martial festivals encompassing shooting competitions and other public displays of martial skills useful to the citizen-soldier. These festivals were stages for representation and promotion of urban honour and military prowess, and functioned as hubs of communication on martial knowledge. A comprehensive investigation of these events in the late middle ages, and of the people promoting, organising, participating in, and profiting from them, will shed light on the each of these elements and show how they interrelated, and will enable a tracking of the ways individual expressions of martial urban cultures merged to form regional patterns.

As Schaufelberger (1972) showed, martial competition played a central role in the military training of citizens in the 16th century. Further evidence suggests that such competitions took place as early as the beginning of the 15th century, across a broad network of towns. Martial associations (societies, guilds and brotherhoods) were, from the late 14th century onwards, composed of citizens and inhabitants. Both groups were responsible for the urban internal security on the basis of their rights of citizenship or of habitation, and weapon ownership was regulated according to legal status. Studies of early modern French, Swiss, and Dutch towns point to ‘games’ played within these associations and connect them to military training. Swiss historiography, however, still tends to assume that citizen-soldiers did not need any training because the simple weapons they used allowed them to ‘learn on the spot’. Material evidence, and information on the organization of the urban armies of the period, however, suggest that there was at least occasional active training of town-dwelling soldiers even for the period before the Burgundian wars.

Analysing these martial festivals and other related network of competitive activities will allow to (a) draw parallels and distinctions between the Swiss lands compared to later periods and other areas better investigated, and (b) investigate connections between urban martial activities and warfare, and (c) lastly, connect this document-based research to analyses on material culture (weapons, banners, clothing) and to technical literature on how to shoot or to fence.