The Historical Journal (2021), 1–31 doi:10.1017/S0018246X2100011X ARTICLE A Distant Reading of Legal Dissertations from German Universities in the Seventeenth Century Luca Scholz University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Email:
[email protected] Abstract Scholars and students at early modern European universities wrote hundreds of thou- sands 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 disserta- tions written at German universities during the seventeenth century. Providing a path- way into a forbidding archive, the article highlights the dissertations’ interest for the history of jurisprudence and its receptiveness to social change, the history of univer- sities 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 mono- graphic texts. Jurists increasingly preferred sharply delineated, diverse, and often ori- ginal 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