The German History Society is proud to announce the winner of the 2026 German History Article prize as Tristan W. Sharp for the article ‘Mortal Enmity and the Feud in the Late Medieval German Town: Nordhausen, Strasbourg and Augsburg‘, German History, 44/1 (2026), 1–31.

The article examines three late medieval urban feuds in Strasbourg, Nordhausen and Augsburg to challenge the traditional view that German burghers were reluctant participants in violent conflict. It argues that burghers actively embraced the feud’s vindicatory violence and introduces the concept of ‘mortal enmity’ to rethink how historians understand violence within the late medieval Fehde.

On his article, Dr Sharp commented on the inspiration for the piece:

This article grew out of a ‘discovery’ of a long-forgotten tale of vengeance, conspiracy, and judicial murder hidden away in the holdings of Nordhausen’s municipal archive (Stadtarchiv). What began as a fascination with a textile merchant family’s tale of grievous injustice and the seeming anomalous levels of violence of their feud turned into a complete reassessment of how historians have understood the feud and role of violence within it, approached through the relatively neglected subject of feuding townsfolk.

You can now read Dr Sharp’s award winning essay open access through OUP here. Congratulations to Dr Sharp on his award!

Tristan W. Sharp earned his PhD in medieval history in 2022 at the University of Chicago, where he held the Social Science Teaching Fellowship from 2022 to 2024. In 2025, he began an FWO Senior Fellowship at Ghent University to work on his monograph, Plunder and Protection: Violence, Lordship and the State, which explores how the decentralized state formation of the Holy Roman Empire contributed to the persistence of regimes of predatory lordship well into the early seventeenth century. In addition to his article, “Mortal Enmity and the Feud in the Late Medieval German Town: Nordhausen, Strasbourg and Augsburg,” in German History, he has also published in Past & Present and Austrian History Yearbook.