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

Abstract Scholars and students at early modern European universities wrote hundreds of thousands 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 over 20,000 legal dissertations written German during seventeenth century. Providing pathway into forbidding archive, highlights dissertations’ interest history jurisprudence its receptiveness social change, academic publishing, baroque rhetoric, cultural, political, economic history. The reveal markedly declining civil law, with topical issues like debt marriage eluding this trend. Initially, were often dialogic form, but gradually supplanted by more single-voiced monographic texts. Jurists increasingly preferred sharply delineated, diverse, original subjects, writing about anything from somnambulism pearl fishing. way which seventeenth-century jurists expanded scope their reflects broader revaluations scholarly curiosity polyhistorism as well heightened stature an epistemic community interpreted ever spheres life through own categories.