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

This article asks whether a ritual model of conflict resolution built from European legal and historical materials, can also be recognized beyond the European setting. The thesis is that if the same underlying sequence recurs where institutions and symbolic vocabularies differ, the case for a cultural universal in the human management of conflict becomes stronger. Renaissance Friuli and other European materials are read alongside early descriptions of Indigenous American societies and colonial encounters. Vendetta appears here as a normative order rather than as lawlessness, an order in which ritual made injury, mediation, and peace socially binding. The article follows a breach as it is opened to negotiation, held within a protected interval, and turned into a durable social relation, or as it collapses back into vengeance. Exile stands at the hinge of this process. It was a liminal device that could keep mediation and the possibility of return alive, and one that could harden under expanding penal authority into punitive outlawry and legal exposure. The transition to state justice then looks not like a passage from violence to law but like the displacement of one legal and ritual order by another. The study draws on a multilingual corpus of 119 works. Passages were located through structured semantic retrieval with a large language model, and the results were verified and read closely by hand. Research data and supplementary materials: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22110031 Status: Preprint.