This dissertation, “Wars, Feuds, and Enmities— the Violent State of Late Medieval Germany: 1350-1550,” brings violence to the fore in order to challenge the long-standing assumptions of contemporary scholarship, which has conceived of the late medieval German feud (Fehde) almost exclusively within a legalistic framework. This notion, it argue, has limited our ability to fully grasp how the violence of the feud came to indelibly shape the structures of late medieval political, cultural, and socio-economic life. Drawing upon extensive archival research in Central German archives, this dissertations develops a more comprehensive understanding of the feud by first deconstructing the scholarly concept of the feud and then advancing a new analysis of conflict and violence in its late medieval German context. To this end, this dissertation takes a two-pronged approach. In the introduction and first chapter of my dissertation, the concept of the feud is subjected to a close historiographic and methodological critique. Here it is explained how the feud underwent what can be called a “constitutionalization” through the influence of the Austrian medievalist Otto Brunner. Brunner, developed a particular conception of the feud in order to positively reinterpret the role of aristocratic conflict in the late medieval Empire’s constitutional structures, which had hitherto been reduced to manifestations of lawless and arbitrary violence by earlier German and Austrian constitutional history. To ensure that the feud functioned as a constitutionally productive force, Brunner recast its violence as norm driven and strictly regulated. Instead of acting as the mere law of the fist, the feud could serve as the medium through which the building blocks of the late medieval imperial constitution, lordships, could resolve conflicts without slipping into unregulated violence. Underlying Brunner’s analysis of the feud was vision of medieval society “in which conflict is not a dysfunctional factor and peace not necessarily the foundation of human historical progress (Patschovsky, 2001, 147).” This vision of violence has proven incapable of being truly integrated into post-war German historiography, which has stressed the feud’s legal dimensions and functionality to the point of the “domestication” of its violence. By further emphasizing feuding violence as something fundamentally rule-bound, limited and calculatable has permitted post-war historians to make use of Brunner’s insights into the late medieval feud, without fulling accepting the Brunnerian vision of violence or doing so only in a highly attenuated and diluted form. This dissertation then demonstrates how this fraught reception of the Brunnerian interpretation of the feud has resulted in two serious consequences. The first directly concerns how this model of the feud defined in terms of function versus dysfunction excludes those elements that do not fit into the traditional register of feuding practices or motivations. These cannot be exhaustively explained by the dichotomous framework and may be divided into two sub-categories. The first consists in the cultural and concomitant affective elements underpinning the practice of late medieval violence, while the second comprises the overlooked economic factors and motivations integral to the endemic feuding and warfare of the late medieval Empire. that and. The second deals with how such a tightly delineated juridical conception of the feud has sealed it off from narratives about the broader pattern of endemic, organized violence that existed in the interstices between the “modern state” and the decentralized political structures of the Middle Ages.