Letters, postal services and law in Early Modern Europe

Several scholarly projects have created online access, in repertories or digital versions, to Early Modern letters, in particular for a number of famous writers and scholars. Less attention seems to go to mail delivery in Early Modern Europe. Lately I encountered the research blog of Eric Vanzieleghem (Brussels) who charts French legislation on postal services from the fourteenth century onwards, focusing in particular on postal services during the Enlightenment. By chance I also spotted the website of a research project about Early Modern itineraries and travel guide books aiming at gaining more insight into networks connecting European towns and people. In my view it is fruitful to look at both projects together in a single contribution. A book with images and transcriptions of Dutch letters from many centuries gave me the final push to start this post.

You’ve got mail

Choosing correspondences as a subject goes clearly against the trend of the hyperquick social media and the continuous instant arrival of bits of information at our computers and mobile phones. Letters with their sheer length, the impatience of waiting for the postman to arrive, and the sense of expectation when opening a closed envelope have become rare. To be honest, I like to delve into Early Modern letters, but as a legal historian I hesitated to express this interest! Physical post might be less important now, but we all want to be kept posted on developments, and bloggers keep posting their contributions.

A look at the blog directory of the Hypotheses blog network earlier this year brought me to the blog Histoire du courrier dans l’Europe des Lumières created by Eric Vanzieleghem. Research concerning the letters of Condorcet led him in 2022 to start investigating legislation about postal services in Early Modern France. Vanzieleghem rightly started with defining the main concepts concerning post and postal services, and before I knew it he had me hooked in. The French word courrier was first used to refer to the actual carrier of letters, while nowadays it means the entirety of packages, written and printed matters send by post. The word poste literally stems from the stations where one could change horses. It referred to the distance between them and the network of these posts. Only since the nineteenth century its meaning changed into the desigination of state or private postal services. Vanzieleghem promises us an arricle about the eighteenth-century ferme générale des postes, and this office brings us close to the French government and administration during the Ancien Régime.

Until now Eric Vanzieleghem has published only six posts. One of them gives you the text of a royal ordinance from 1673 which adjusted postal regulations after the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668) and the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1673). I found in particular the tariff for postal service in force between 1703 and 1759 very interesting. It deals both with French regions and with a number of European postal routes. The payments due for a trajectory changed markedly when passing through particular towns. Part of the reasons behind these differences stem clearly form the very itinerary you letter had to go. In the second section of this post itineraries and travel guides will come into view.

Vanzieleghem gives us a list of the eighteenth-century correspondences used for his research. Both online versions of well-known corresponces fiugure here, buyt alo some very recently edited letters of more unfamiliar persons. He alerts to the recent discovery at the National Archives, Kew, of 75 letters written in 1757 and 1758 captured from the French navy.

His page on legislation is of course a key element for my posts. Van Zieleghem righly looks far and wide to find royal ordinances from 1315 onwards and revolutionary legislation upto 1801. The famous Receuil général des anciennes lois françaises (…) edited by François-André Isambert and others (29 vol., Paris, 1821-1833) does not contain every relevant ordinance until 1789. The Receuil d’Isambert is available online among the digitized legislative resources in the section Essentiels du droit of Gallica. The chronological list does not (yet) contain references for every ordinance in it, let alone links to digitized editions, but there is a brief overview of the main resources used sofar. It seems Vanzieleghem has found a lot of revolutionary decrees and laws, but he does not refer to the online Décrets et Lois 1789-1795: Collection Baudouin and La loi de la Révolution Française 1789-1799 on which you find information here in a post I wrote in 2022.

At the page Références of his blog Vanzieleghem offers a bibliography with several sections. Apart from scholarly literature for France he mentions a few titles for Italy and Switzerland. He also includes a list with a number of Early Modern books about letters and postal services, some of them with links to digitized versions. Vanzieleghem has either made a very strict selection of works or he has not (yet) used the online Bibliographie d’histoire du droit en langue française (Université de Lorraine, Nacy-Metz), searchable in French and English. For the maritime postal services he has found more titles than currently present in this online bibliography.

Early Modern itineraries and digital humanities

The research project Early Modern Digital Itineraries (EmDigit) is led by Rachel Midura (Virginia Tech). Her project team aims at mapping itineraries in Early Modern travel guide books on maps, using these data to build a project in the field of spatial history. Midura explains the aim of EmDigit using as an example a rare early Italian edition, Poste diverse d’Italia, Alemagna, Spagna, e Francia (Milan, [1550]). This edition is not recorded in EDIT16 and the Universal Short Title Catalogue; the union catalogue of the Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale does not mention any copy of it in Italy. The only known copy has been digitized in full color by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, however, with currently as inferred date of publication around 1620. This change of seventy years came possibly after comparison with a copy of the edition Milan 1647 held at the library of Munich University, but more probably in view of the activity in and around 1622 of the Milanese printer Nava as shown in the Heritage of the Printed Book Database. The HPB database currently repeats the date around 1550 for the book Midura presents at EmDigit. I will look here at other elements and arguments for datation of this rare book.

Title page of the Poste diverse d’Italia – copy Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Rar. 1075 – image source: BSB

The book gives the distances between cities, adverts you about the differences in length of the mile in countries, and contains detailed information about the dates of European year markets, a concise pilgrim’s guide for the Holy Land, and the dates of the weekly departure and delivery of mail for particular itineraries. Midura plotted the resulting data on a map of Europe. As for internal evidence for the date of production of this work, on pages 15 and 26 it is stated Vienna is the current residence of the imperial court, which suggests 1529 as a terminus post quem or the period after 1620. Maybe Midura has been misled by the black-and-white version available online in Google Books with the old datation 1550 given in 2014. It seems she simply did not check the bibliographical information at its ultimate source. Luckily Midura provides at GitHub a PDF with a very substantial list of printed itinerary books between 1545 and 1747. This list provides you with a basis to add further works, for example more translations of some of the works mentioned. Midura points to two editions of a Dutch translation of Georg Kranitz’ Delitiae Italiae. Works in Dutch can be traced using the Short-Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN), now online at the CERL platform.

Midura noted on January 1, 2024 in the ReadMe document and the GitHub startpage of EmDigit the problem with the datation of the Poste diverse edition; she opts for a datation around 1700. She does not mention the new date around 1620 proposed by the librarians in Munich, and she points to just a single other digitized itinerary held at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. An online search in the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog – with a search interface in German and English – will quickly bring you to more relevant digitized works held at this library and elsewhere.

The bibliography by Madura shows very clearly some titles took over advertising claims from other books, and perhaps even more for their contents. The GitHub page of Midura for EmDigit gives you access to the various digital components of the map with the postal routes. The spatial dimensions of the post routes in Early Modern Europe are certainly clear, but their presence in any particular short period needs further elaboration and some basic work, starting with using more printed itineraries and widening also the list of secondary scholarly literature. Midura tells you more about her project in the article ‘Itinerating Europe: Early Modern Spatial Networks in Printed Itineraries, 1545–1700’, Journal of Social History 54/4 (2021) 1023–1063. Midura was also involved in developing a transcribing model for Transkribus, Italian administrative hands 1550-1770. In a period of 150 years Europe changed drastically, if only becaure of long wars, and thus it is vital to locate information both in space and time. Midura uses some eighty itineraries for her project.

The EmDigit team organizes in 2024 several workshops. Midura announces on X (Twitter) she is going to publish her study The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe in open access. I was particular happy to see her announcement, because it can form a bridge to the third and last section of this post around a book on letters from the Netherlands.

Post Scriptum

Letter writing comes in various forms and genres. Recently I was delighted to pick up a copy of a book by Jet Steinz, P.S. Van liefdespost tot hatemail. De 150 opmerkelijkste Nederlandse brieven [P.S. From love letters to hate mail. The 150 most remarkable Dutch letters] (Amsterdam 2019). Steinz found a great way to organize her book and to give it more impact. She organized the letters by genre in chronological order, and she presents each letter with images of the original in full color and a transcription. For older letters she sometimes rephrased the wording for smooth reading in modern Dutch. Letters in foreign languages have been translated. Only the relatively small format (18 by 23 cm) prevents it from truly becoming a kind of palaeographical atlas for late medieval to modern scripts. Apart from letters from famous Dutch people, be they Erasmus, Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek, Rembrandt van Rijn, the brothers Vincent and Theo van Gogh, Anne Frank or Johan Cruyff, numerous letters stem from ordinary people. Letters by famous Dutch writers, often written when they were not yet famous, appear in many genres, even in the section for children’s letters.

With 34 genres Steinz created a wonderful array of moods and aims in letters, bringing emotions from love to hate, anger to happiness, obedience and protest into relief. Sea post, not unfamiliar here from the posts I wrote here about the letters among the Prize Papers in the collection of the High Court of Admiralty held at the National Archives, Kew, figures as the first genre. Letters by prisoneers and letters with threats, letters applying for a job and rejections by firms, letters from scholars and simple notes about household chores show many sides of human life. Steinz brings together letters from many Dutch cultural institutions. She dispensed with exact references to archival collections, thus making it into a nice exercise to trace these meta-data. Steinz redeems this omission with a substantial bibliography of relevant literature about Dutch letters.

Apart from letters captured by enemy navies Steinz used another curious collection of letters which never reached their destiny. Simon de Brienne, a seventeenth-century Dutch postmaster, retained some 2600 undeliverable letters in a chest. After nearly a century in the former Communication Museum, The Hague, these letters and the entire museum collection will move in September 2024 to the main location of Beeld en Geluid [Sound and Vision] in Hilversum, the Dutch national audiovisual museum. The chest and letters were the subject of the independent Brienne research project, now itself part of the international Letterlocking project for creating a typology of ways of sealing letters, and for tracing and reading unopened letters using new technologies. At Early Modern Letters Online (EMLO) you can find the catalogue of the letters within the Brienne collection and references to the research about them. It is touching to see in Steinz’ book letters of prisoners among these undelivered letters. Yet another lifeline had been locked for them.

In her foreword Steinz gave a place of honor to Francisco de Tassis (1459-1517), the founder of the first European postal service. I could not help remembering only the Thurn und Taxis family in Regensburg, but they are indeed connected with this man. I readily admit that when looking at Vanzieleghem’s blog I was surprised to read in an old French manual for legal history about the postal service of the university of Paris. Its monopoly ended in 1719. Vanzieleghem could not yet find the first royal ordinance issued in 1383 about the postal role of this university which from then on should serve each French diocese.

To me it seems definitely fitting the themes in this post are connected with each other in some way. It will do no harm to compare postal tariffs with printed itineraries. It is also clear spatial history needs a sure foundation on historical research. Letters and postal services vitally connected and connect people just as much as the internet does since a few decades. In Italian legge (laws) and leghe (miles) might look rather similar, and indeed they are not miles apart from each other. Legislation concerning letters and post deserves due attention from legal historians.

An addendum

A good starting point for researching Early Modern postal services is the chapter by Nikolaus Schobesberger et alii, ‘European postal networks’, in: News networks in early Modern Europe, Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds.) (Leiden-Boston, 2016; online in open access) 19-63. This chapter suggests for example the inclusion of key postal stations in the Holy Roman Empire at certain moments can help to date the moment of creation of the contents in printed itineraries. It is good to see both this article and Midura point to Ottavio Codogno’s Nuouo itinerario delle poste per tutto il mondo (Milan 1608) as a very important source.

In the PDF version of the Munich copy of the Poste diverse the date of publication is still indicated as 1550. At p.15 it is also stated the emperor lived sometimes in Prague, altre volte vi abitava la Maestà Cesarea, referring either to the period in the fourteenth century or to the period between 1583 and 1620.

French laws between 1795 and 1799

Interpreting the French Revolution is a kind of historical industry. New interpretations and fresh assessments sometimes seem to tumble over each other or follow in relatively quick succession. Some watersheds remain visible, at least for those not immersed in the latest relevant literature. The fall of Robespierre and the end of the Great Terror in 1795 mark a period, as does the coming to power of Napoleon in 1799. The period between 1795 and 1799 with the Directoire might seem a minor interruption of the chain of revolutionary developments.

In my series of posts on the French Revolution I have put legal developments at the centre. With the completion and launch of a database with legislation enacted between 1795 and 1799 it becomes possible to look again at sweeping views of the character of the French Revolution. Did it really only destroy the Ancien Régime or did it build lasting structures at a legal level? Did only Napoleon erect a final new legal order with his Code civil and Code penal? Let’s look here at the database La Loi de la Révolution française 1789-1799, available at the ARTFL platform of the University of Chicago. What are the qualities of this project long known for its acronym ANR LexDir?

Legislative activity under the Directoire

In 2015 I published here my post ‘Laws and the French Revolution’. Whatever the merits of this contribution with lots of information concerning digital projects featuring information related to French legal history in the late eighteenth century, it remains a surprisingly often visited post. Over the years I have made some adjustments and additions to it. The French research project ANR LexDir started some ten years ago, but only now I spotted news about its completion and the launch of the database at the end of the international scholarly meeting La Directoire fait sa loi! held by the Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne on September 9-11, 2021. You can download the program (PDF) of this event.

The sheer number of laws and decrees enacted between 1789 and 1799 is much larger than you would guess at first. Modern national parliaments and the European Union do have a substantial legal production nowadays, but the members of the revolutionary assemblées succeeded in creating a massive quantity of legal enactments. How did they have any spare time for steering the French Revolution through all perils?! At the ARTFL platform the project team with Yann Arzel Durelle-Marc, Anne Simonin and Pierre Serna underlines in their concise introduction the fact the French Revolution was a highly legal phenomenon, something already noted by Jules Michelet with his vignette “le triomphe du droit”. The new resource should enable you to put such statements in due perspective.

The new platform at ARTFL offers not only the legislation published between 1795 and 1799, but also the laws published since 1789 in the Collection Baudouin which remains separately available. The Collection du Louvre – with eighteen volumes covering the years 1791 to 1794 – is the source for a part of the legislation covered also by the Collection Baudouin, with 85 volumes for the period 1789-1799. Its volumes 68 to 85 cover the Directoire from October 1795 to December 1799. In fact if you like to focus on either one of these collections you can directly go for them at the search interface.

With the database at the ARTFL platform comes the rich search functionality of Philologic4. Not only you can browse for a particular year and use a general free search option, but also a recherche avancée enabling you to look at contexts, collocation and chronology of laws. The advanced search mode allows you to filter out headings, to skip indexes, to use either normal (Gregorian) or revolutionary dates, and to filter for subjects and titles of laws, to mention only the most important features. These filters are also at hand in a filter panel to the right of search results. You can present results with only the exact text or show them in their context. My first impression is that of a veil lifted from an amorphous mass of information. The feeling you can search here in full depth is most attractive and promising.

How should one appreciate the value of this new online resource? It is one thing to be able to use digitized works, for example in the splendid selection Essentiels du droit of the Gallica digital library showing you many sources for French legal history, but searching in these sources is another thing. A database gives you new search opportunities. Having at your disposal all revolutionary legislation coming from the capital and being able to use it as a textual corpus helps you to put materials from outside Paris from the various départements into more and deeper relief, to mention just one possible approach. In the next paragraph we will see how French revolutionary legislation does not have to be studied as a single or isolated subject.

The wonders of ARTFL

Some recent additions at the ARTFL platform merit particular mention, too. The section What’s new at ARTFL has much to offer! The ten volumes of the Oeuvres complètes de Maximilien Robespierre have become available online. You can use the Philologic Federated Bibliography for bibliographic research across all ARTFL resources.

Most interesting for legal historians and everyone else is the first version of the Intertextual Hub, a portal for searching with one search action in a number of resources, among them nearly 26,000 French revolutionary pamphlets digitized by The Newberry Library in Chicago, the Archives parlementaires and also revolutionary laws, the latter with an English search interface. Add to them the Journaux de Marat and eighteenth-century works on political thought and economy for the Goldsmith-Kress collection, and you will agree with me this new hub is indeed most valuable. Among similarly searchable resources elsewhere I should mention the newspaper Le Moniteur Universel (1789-1830). Florida State University has created a searchable version of this gazette nationale.

In view of the riches awaiting you both in this alluring Intertextual Hub and in the database with French revolutionary legislation from 1789 until the end of 1799 you will probably not want to read here much longer than absolutely necessary! I will end with warm thanks to the research team in Paris and the ARTFL staff at Chicago for bringing this project to a successful conclusion. I had best offer you here below the links to the complete series of my posts concerning legal history and the French Revolution.

The first article in this series, ‘Laws and the French Revolution’, appeared in February 2015. The second article came in June 2015, ‘Some notes on the history of tolerance’. A third post was published in March 2016, ‘Images and the road to the French Revolution’. The fourth post from August 2016 focused on legal briefs before, during and after the French Revolution, ‘Legal rhetorics and reality in Early Modern France: The factums’. Among earlier posts you might still like to look at ‘Rousseau at 300 years: nature and law’ (2012).

Encircled by knowledge: New life for old encyclopedias

In happy and carefree moments you can be tempted to think that only the internet made it possible to have all possible kinds of knowledge within you reach. However, for centuries having a compact or massive encyclopedia on the shelves of your personal library seemed already to warrant this vision. Lawyers were no strangers to this opinion as I showed in a post about Early Modern legal encyclopedias. Interestingly there is a movement to recreate the world of old encyclopedias. In this post I want to look at some projects which bring you to online versions of older encyclopedic works. Some of them are still familiar among historians, others will come as a surprise.

On digital and real shelves

Among the Early Modern works that you might still turn to is at least one German work. I confess I had not quite realized how voluminous the Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon aller Kunste und Wissenschaften by Johann Heinrich Zedler (1706-1751), published in 64 volumes between 1732 and 1750, followed by a supplement in four volumes. In 2006 two German libraries held an exhibition in his honour, Seine Welt Wissen. Enzyklopädien in der Frühen Neuzeit [Knowing your world. Encyclopedias in the Early Modern age]. This year I could use the Zedler in its online version provided by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich to expand scarce information about members of a family in Kleve who served the Brandenburg government of this duchy. The makers of the 2006 exhibition drily note the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences. des arts et métiers by Diderot and D’Alembert has only 17 volumes with 72,000 articles on 23,000 pages, whereas Zedler serves you 290,000 articles on 68,000 pages.

Before exploring other works it is fair to look quickly at the great Encyclopédie and its current digital availability. Foremost among its modern incarnations is the searchable version offered by the team of ARTFL in Chicago. Its editors, Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, immediately mention the 11 volumes with illustrations that set this encyclopedia apart from all its predecessors and contemporary competitors. These plates and the character and quality of the contributions still command respect and admiration. The editors at ARTFL count 74,000 articles on 18,000 text pages. The information about supplements published after 1772, links to forerunners of the Encyclopédie, a bibliography and other essays enhance the ARTFL version which stands out for the search possibilities of Philologic4.

More traditionally looking at first sight is the ENCCRE online version recently created by the French Académie des Sciences, with modern introductions and search facilities using a corrected Wikisource transcription. The acronym ENCCRE is a French pun on the word encre, ink. The Encyclopedia project for an English translation at the University of Michigan, too, offers more than a strict rendering from French into English. The plates can be quickly searched at Planches. Lexilogos does a great job in offering both the ARTFL and ENCCRE versions, and adding links to the text-only version in the French Wikisource, and last but not least to the digitized original volumes at Mazarinum, the digital library of the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. This copy is used at ENCCRE, too.

In the limelight

Zedler and the Encyclopédie deserve scholarly attention and quickly accessible modern versions, but other valuable works can readily be found. Let’s look at a few websites which bring you both to other general encyclopedias and to works focusing on specific scientific disciplines. Let’s go straightforward to the heart of this post, a tour of the wonderful German Enzyklothek. A few years ago I had briefly visited this portal, and I put it aside with the impression it does not contain much for legal history. However, this time I became intrigued by its sheer coverage, and I marvelled at its holdings.

Peter Ketsch launched the Enzyklothek Historische Nachslchlagwerke in 2014. He offers access to digital versions or information about printed works in five sections: bibliographies, secondary literature, general encyclopedias, encyclopedias for specific disciplines, and biographic dictionaries. The sixth section for dictionaries is empty, a reminder you cannot expect everything at one portal. First of all it was a surprise for me to find here bibliographies. You will find here a number of entries concerning national bibliographies, but also some items for individual authors. For legal history I found in this corner only Rolf Lieberwirth’s study Christian Thomasius. Sein wissenschaftliches Lebenswerk. Eine Bibliographie (Weimar 1955). Among the bibliographies for specific disciplines Rechts- und Staatswissenschaften (disciplines concerning law, jurisprudence and government) are only announced, but alas no items have yet appeared under this heading. The general section on bibliographies starts with just one work from the late sixteenth century, and to me the choice of works in this section seems rather at random but nevertheless interesting. The section Enzyklopädistik with historical overviews and bibliographies of encyclopedias and specialised dictionaries is much richer.

The section Sekundärliteratur contains a more personal mix of things. In the corner with websites it is good to note the projects at Wolfenbüttel and Braunschweig for a virtual recreation of the Thesaurus eruditionis and similar works, and also Welt und Wissen auf der Bühne, a project about Early Modern works which used the metaphore of the theatre, a project I discussed here, too. For the legal disciplines Ketsch mentions just three titles in this part of his portal, on various subjects, from Zeremonialliteratur, texts written by lawyers about official ceremonies, to economical treatises and their forerunners, the Hausväterliteratur. By the way, here Ketsch indicates titles can appear in more rubrics. At this point the question about using either rubrics or a form of classification using a thesaurus or another form of tagging entries, and a second question is the choice for a database versus single pages. The search function clearly suggests the presence of a database, but the tagging of entries could be more generous. However, you can apply multiple filters for author, title, year, location, publisher and language. For the genre Hausväterliteratur there are now 784 entries. A section such as the one concerning publications about single medieval encyclopedic works contains nearly 4,000 items. As for now there is a total of 21,000 titles in this database. Whatever the quality of the coverage, the quantity of entries commands respect. For many entries Ketsch has added links to translations in other languages, reference works and bibliographies. In some cases you will see a series of incunabula editions of works, this seems too much of a good thing, even for Diogenes Laertius’ Vitae phlosophorum.

We must proceed now to the heart of Ketsch’s website, the general and specialized encyclopedias. For the general encyclopedias there is a division in periods (Antiquity, Middle Ages and Early Modern) and in entries for several modern languages. The presence of works in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian is a most welcome addition. In the section with Dutch encyclopedic works I encountered several books which you do not encounter often. In this respect it is good to see more popular and educational works. For the legal disciplines Ketsch mentions three German Konversationlexikons, in particular Herman Wagener’s Neues Conversations-Lexikon. Staats- und Gesellschafts-Lexikon (23 vol., Berlin, 1859-1867) was a massive project followed by modern successors. Ketsch scores by guiding you also to studies about the genre of the Konversationslexikon. If you want to know more about the Zedler Ketsch gives you some thirty publications.

The biographical section of the Enzyklothek shows national biographies for twenty countries, showing their rich history from printed works to online databases. The subsection with women’ biographies contains some eighty titles, almost exclusively translations of and studies about Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus. I had hoped for a very different content… At this point I must alert to Ketsch’s invitation for anyone interested to help him with his project.

How show one judge the merits of the Enzyklothek? The Swiss project on Enzyklopädien, Allgemeinwissen und Gesellschaft [Encyclopedias, general knowledge and society] stopped adding entries after the launch of Ketsch’s website. The overview of works of the Swiss project, launched in 2001, offers an alphabetical list of authors, a chronological overview and a drop down menu for particular genres. Its strength lies in the descriptions of works and the attention to the context and variety of encyclopedic works.

The project N-Zyklop (Universität Trier) which started in 2005 is another attempt at a full-scale database for finding encyclopedias. I checked here for works concerning Law (Recht). At first I was bewildered by the wide choice of works concerning trade and the presence of some biographical dictionaries, but you will find also the Vocabularium jurisprudentiae romanum by Otto Gradenwitz and other German scholars (Berlin 1903-1939). In particular the first edition of Jacob Bes’ Scheepvaarttermen. Handboek voor handel en scheepvaart (Amsterdam 1949) seemed gone astray, but in its multilingual version it became a classic work for maritime law, Chartering and shipping terms (1951). With some 5,000 entries and the possibillity to search for Dewey Decimal Classification codes in the advanced search mode N-Zyklop is certainly worth a visit, even if you have to translate the German terms used for every DDC code.

Lists versus databases

While preparing this post I thought I had spotted in the Enzyklothek an entry for the digitized version of the Lexikon für Kirchen- und Staatskirchenrecht, Axel von Campenhausen et alii (eds.) (3 vol., Paderborn, etc., 2000) in the section Digi20 of the Digitale Sammlungen of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, but I looked at the wrong place, and thus I was at first unable to retrace it. Finally I realized I had seen it in the German Wikisource list of online encyclopedias and lexicons. This work brings me to the final section of this contribution for a quick comparison of the specialized encyclopedia websites with the lists of encyclopedias offered at Wikisource. Some of my readers might well ask why I choose not to start with them. The main reason for my choice is the fact the lists at Wikisource and Wikipedia are not always the fruit of systematic and methodic search, but there is a clear degree of control, and thus the information can be most useful. In fact I had expected the name of a very conscious and active contributor to the German Wikisource as the main author or coordinating editor of this splendid list.

The German Wikisource page for encyclopedias has a section on Politik und Recht, politics and law. When you look at the works mentioned on it the Enzyklothek clearly is deficient. Among the notable works is the Deutsches Staats-Wörterbuch by Johann Kaspar Bluntschli and Karl Brater (11 vol., Stuttgart-Leipzig, 1857-1870). Bluntschli’s draft for a civil law code of the Swiss canton Zürich influenced the Schweizerisches Zivilgesetzbuch designed by Eugen Huber (1907). Bluntschli is better known as one of the founders of the Institute for International Law-Institut de Droit International. You will find als the first three editions of the Staatslexikon published by the Görres-Gesellschaft since 1887, with the eight edition now being published. Even today one can benefit from Emil Seckel’s continuation of the Heumanns Handlexikon zu den Quellen des römischen Rechts; the sixth edition (Jena 1929) has been digitized in Sevilla (PDF, 80 MB).

I would have been most happy to report here on the wealth of information in the English and French Wikisource for legal encyclopedias, but alas this is not possible. The English Wikisource bring you to the first edition of a single multivolume work, The laws of Engeland, being a complete statement of the whole law of Engeland (31 vol., London, 1907-1917) by the Earl of Halsbury, an encyclopedia from beginning to the end and nevertheless avoiding this word in its title. The English Wikipedia lists five online legal encyclopedias. For completeness’ sake I note that the similar French and Ukrainian Wikisource pages do not give you any legal encyclopedias, but the Russian Wikisource mentions three legal encyclopedias. It is only logical the German Wikisource has also an interesting page Rechtswissenschaft for digitized old laws and older legal works. Both the various Wikisources and Wikipedias as resources in open access gain everything from the input and efforts of contributors. In my view it is wrong not to take them as serious as other encyclopedias in print or online.

Some conclusions

This rapid tour of legal encyclopedias taught me a few things. Apart from my preference to delve into old books it is simply important to realize the great encyclopedias in print and online of our century have many forerunners, a number of them taking much space on your shelves. The famous ones had their competitors, but there was also a market for abridged versions. It is good to see you can often hardly distinguish between legal encyclopedias and legal dictionaries. Another thing is almost a returning refrain here: do not stay content using just one major resource for any subject. The question of languages is a second thread on my blog. The use of the translation tool in a particular web browser from an omnipresent IT firm helps you to get at least a rough idea of contents, and it teaches you knowing a language inside out does help you in many ways. The books on early economic thought and their focus on running a household is a welcome reminder economics only started in the nineteenth century to claim an existence as a science. Private law has captured more attention from legal historian than public law, and this bias, too, becomes more clear thanks to these projects.

Last but not least the predominance of German resources in this post is indeed due to my familiarity with German research. For German legal historians having the second edition of the Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte in front of you on your computer screen as HRG Digital has been a major qualitative step, although you have to subscribe to it or find a university library with a license for this online resource. It is one of the dictionaries containing much more than you would expect. There is also a printed version of the second edition. It is fitting to end here with the efforts of Gerhard Köbler in Innsbruck, who has not only published a number of historical legal dictionaries, but also maintains a massive portal on German and Austrian law and legal history, including for examples concise biographies of many lawyers. Köbler prefers web pages above a database. As for libraries with collections of Early Modern legal works, and increasingly also digital collections, you will not stop me pointing here regularly to the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main.

An update

In November 2023 Peter Ketsch, the founder of the Enzyklothek, kindly informed about some major updates at his portal for historical encyclopaedias and dictionaries. The choice of legal works, and for example also for works in Dutch, is often interesting, and Ketsch heklps you by often providing links to digitized versions of works. He even includes some pages of late medieval manuscripts. It is pleasant to revisit the Enzyklothek and to marvek at its wide coverage of subjects.

250 years freedom of the press

The freedom of bloggers is not something you should take for granted. In some countries of the world blogging is really dangerous because governments are not at all at ease about the freedom to express oneself. 250 years ago Sweden saw the first legislation for freedom of print. In Sweden and Finland special websites gave been launched to celebrate this commemoration. Anders Chydenius, the Swedish minister responsible for the epoch-making law, came from Finland. In this post I would like to look at the celebrations and at eighteenth-century Sweden and the impact of this act of legislation.

A long history

The commemoration website Frittord 250 [The Free Word 250] created by the Swedish Academy of Sciences is the first point of access to find out about the law of 1766. The corner with source materials (Källmaterial & resurser) is the only point where you will find information about the historical legislation. You can download a PDF with a digital version of the original law (24 MB) or read it online at the website of the university library in Lund. With fifteen articles in a few pages it is a remarkable concise law. However, this evidentially led rather quickly to changes. Before 1800 there were already five new laws dealing with the freedom of print. The section offers the texts of seventeen ordinances and laws up to 2001. When you press the button In English you will find only a brief summary of the matter at the center of the commemoration. The calendar of activities and blog posts form the major part of the project website. One of the activities is a travelling exhibition Ordets akt [The act of the word], now at the Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm.

Saying the focus of Frittord 250 is on the present is an understatement. I happened to find at The Constitution Unit website of University College London in the foreign corner of the section Freedom of Information an introduction about the Swedish freedom of press. Here, too, the story jumps from just one short paragraph about the original law to the current state of affairs. It is one thing to acknowledge the importance of current debates about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the way governments try to interfere with the public sphere, it is another thing to study developments and backgrounds which could be rather important in understanding and interpreting contemporary issues. For the United Kingdom the website of the Constitution Unit gives you at least a short history of developments since the sixties. The links section brings you for example to the international portal Right2Info where you can find much more. Its resources section is very impressive, even when you might wonder whether it is sufficient to mention for some countries only the national ombudsman.

The historical background of the 1766 law gets more space and attention at the Finnish website Freedom of Information: Anders Chydenius 250 years, a website accessible as often is the case in Finland in Finnish, Swedish and English. It is invigorating to read here about the historical, cultural and political background of Sweden’s pioneering law. Chydenius can be termed a very active exponent and propagator of Enlightenment ideas. His plea for freedom of press was part of his campaign in 1765 and 1766 for free trading rights. Maren Jonasson and Perti Hyttinen translated a number of Chydenius’ works in English [Anticipating The Wealth of Nations. The selected works of Anders Chydenius, 1723-1809 (London, etc., 2011)]. This book contains also a translation of the 1766 law. When preparing this post I also visited the website on copyright history of Karl-Erik Tallmo who looks not only at Sweden, but also at the history of copyright in England and Germany. Bournemouth University and University of Cambridge have created the well-known portal Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), and you can also learn something from the digitized texts in the Archivio Marini (Università degli Studi di Pisa).

Instead of only looking at the context of this law we might as well look at this piece of legislation in some detail to establish the width of its impact on information. The law’s full title Kongl. Maj:ts Nådige Förordning, Angående Skrif- och Tryck-friheten, “His Majesty’s Gracious Ordinance Relating to Freedom of Writing and of the Press”, promises much. In the preamble censorship is nominally abolished but technically transferred to the royal chancery. The stress on the benefit for the enlightenment of the people and the observance of laws is remarkable. In the first article a clear limit for the freedom of expression is posed by forbidding anything that goes against the Christian faith. Writings criticising the form of the state and the king himself are prohibited in the second and third article. Publications have to be printed with full names or with the printer’s responsibility to disclose the author’s name. The need for due process in cases in which this is disputed is made explicit. The fifth article stresses the fact only the limitations of the three first articles can set a limit to any expression in print. The following articles deal with matters we would describe today as freedom of information, in particular concerning actions of the government and the judiciary, including the verdicts of judges. The support in the fifth and twelfth article for those wanting to write honestly and correctly about history is not only pleasing for historians, but indeed important. Article 13 is a clause to ensure any subject not included or mentioned falls under the freedom of press, and article 14 expresses the wish to make this law irrevocable. In my view this law can stand scrutiny from modern perspectives in a number of aspects. The law was issued on December 2, 1766. For Chydenius freedom was a crucial element in all his plans for reform and renewal of contemporary Sweden.

The Finnish website shows how exactly this wish for perennial and unchanged force was soon thwarted. It makes abundantly clear that the Swedish road was not a linear road of and to freedom of speech, print and information. Alas for those wanting things to be entirely black or white, good or bad, a success or a failure, the Swedish story shows history does not fit into their dualistic world view. Thus history can be perceived as a possible nuisance, a luxury good of elites or something a nation cannot afford anymore. I feel ashamed to live in a country where we have to face the threat of the disappearance of history as a part of the secondary school curriculum . Baron Raoul van Caenegem, the famous Flemish legal historian, wrote already many years ago: “Who hinders, forbids or abolishes the study of history, condemns people to ignorance and gullibility”.

It is up to you to look at both the Swedish and the Finnish websites, and also to the website of the Anders Chydenius Foundation, yet another example of a trilingual site, to expand your knowledge, deepen your understanding, in short to use your critical faculties to see the values history can provide and the ways it can sharpen our understanding of contemporary society. However, history can be more than a handmaiden guiding you to act wisely in current affairs, it can teach you much about women and men in the past, the ways they faced the problems of their times and aspired to be as much human as we do.