A Distant Reading of Legal Dissertations from German Universities in the Seventeenth Century

Bibliographic Data

ID8958475
AuthorsLaslo Scholz (0000-0001-5089-0089, University of Manchester, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume65
Issue2
Pages297-327
Publication date2021-06-14
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Historical Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-246X • E-ISSN: 1469-5103
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0018246x2100011x
OpenAlexW3171980799
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited10

Scholars and students at early modern European universities wrote hundreds of thousands of dissertations. One reason why these sources have long been neglected is that they defy any individual's capacity for close reading. This article adopts a digital distant reading approach to uncover long-term trends in the titles of over 20,000 legal dissertations written at German universities during the seventeenth century. Providing a pathway into a forbidding archive, the article highlights the dissertations’ interest for the history of jurisprudence and its receptiveness to social change, the history of universities and academic publishing, baroque rhetoric, and cultural, political, and economic history. The titles reveal a markedly declining interest in civil law, with topical issues like debt and marriage eluding this trend. Initially, dissertations were often written in dialogic form, but these were gradually supplanted by more single-voiced and monographic texts. Jurists increasingly preferred sharply delineated, diverse, and often original subjects, writing about anything from somnambulism to pearl fishing. The way in which seventeenth-century jurists expanded the scope of their writing reflects broader revaluations of scholarly curiosity and baroque polyhistorism as well as the heightened stature of an epistemic community that interpreted ever more spheres of life through its own categories

Art · Dialogic · German · Jurisprudence · Literature · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Rhetoric · Social science · Sociology · Classics · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · Historical Legal Studies and Society · Historical Studies in Science · History · Law · Philosophy

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