Maps for legal history, a German example

When creating an article or even a blog post creating a mind map can be most helpful. Using maps to represent information about legal history or historic events and developments with a legal dimension can help you to see legal history in a wider perspective. This month Klaus Graf kindly alerted me at Archivalia to a German project with legal maps, Rechtskarten, the fruit of a cooperation between nine legal historians at a number of German universities. They aim at presenting an atlas touching on both legal and cultural history. Its current dimensions are still modest, but in my view thsi project can inspire other scholars to use or create maps for legal history, too. Somehow this project escaped my attention earlier on…

A variety of maps

The navigation of Rechtskarten is fairly simple. You can use the tabs for maps, authors, keywords (Stichwortregister) and timelines (Zeittafeln). Currently only sixteen subjects are presented, but their numbering shows at least one hundred subjects are in preparation. Thus it seems you should not worry too much about the fact four out of sixteen themes deal with the twentieth century. The earliest item concerns the Kaufunger Wald, a royal wood since the eight century until the late eleventh centuy. In this item created by Wilhelm A. Eckhardt the maps shown are both modern and old. The section Orte (locations) brings you to an interactive map guiding you to its exact location in the north of the modern Bundesland Hessen, to the north east of Kassel.

Wilhelm A. Eckhardt looks at legal iconography and legal ethnology in another contribution on village court locations in Hessen. Among the images is a photograph from the legal icongraphic collection of Karl Frölich held at and digitized by the Max-Planck-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtstheorie in Frankfurt am Main. I discussed the background and possible use of this collection in an earlier post (2015). In that post I mentioned already the LAGIS portal for the regional history of Hessen with a section on these Gerichtstätten. Eckhardt righly mentions this in the bibliography to his article, with the latest item in it dating from 2013. The original land registry maps for Hessen (Urkataster) can be searched online at the LAGIS portal, too.

Land registry map (Katasterkarte) of Reichensachsen in Hessen with a linden tree indicating the location of the village court, 1788 – image source Staatsarchiv Marburg, Karte B 234, photo by B. Krippner

Among the items for the twentieth century i was a bit disappointed when I saw the media for the German Democratic Republic (1949-1990). I had expected some maps of the former DDR, but Hans Hattenhauer only added three diagrams touching the organization of this state, in itself surely enlightening and useful, but not the kind of map you would expect. In his contribution Hattenhauer concisely shows the low position of law and lawyers with the DDR. This item is in a way rather close to using a mind map. The visualisation of in this case state organization can be very telling.

Mapping some subjects has progressed clearly since the start of this project, somewhere between 2000 and 2015; information about the background and start of Rechtskarten is lacking, but Jörn Eckert died in 2006. The articles on the foundation of universities in the Holy Roman Empire (Armin Wolf) and the coming of printing to Europe (Jörg Wolff) share the same map, and it is instructive to compare the presence of universities with the advance of printing presses. The Atlas of Early Printing (University of Iowa) does a better job in many respects. You can easily add a layer showing university towns to the interactive map. The question about universities and early printing remains certainly valuable.

It is rather strange that the interesting article on maps of the Holy Roman Empire and the perception of minor states by Armin Wolf lacks any image of the maps under discussion. Is German copyright here the problem or have the Rechtskarten simply been abandonded at some point? Anyway, updating articles is in some cases clearly needed. The bibliography for the article by Jörg Wolff concerning the Tractatus de fluminibus seu Tyberiadis of Bartolus de Saxoferrato (1313/1314-1357) mentions only literature in German until 1999. By the way, this is one of the three subjects within this project not exclusively connected with German legal history. Armin Wolf’s contribution on the partitions of Poland in the eighteenth century as to some extent dynastic partitions lacks any map, image or location. The word Theatrum in the title of the work he discussed helped me to remember the project Welt und Wiissen auf der Bühne. Theatrum-Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel presented here in 2015.

Some musings

Sometimes things go differently than originally planned. Not every project succeeds, and though we all preach that you should learn from your faults and failures more often we hide them or try to forget about them. The Rechtskarten are in my view clearly an unfinished project, and not a failure. It is easy to point at shortcomings and omissions in this interesting pilot for a project with maps for legal history. I think the Rechtskarten can be revitalized. In fact it is a good exercise to come up with proposals for additions, corrections and updates. Some maps are now even only handwork. Only the articles on early printing and the foundation of universities belong to the field of cultural history. Many items lack a timetable, but the use of diagrams is an asset. The inclusion of some interactive maps is a sign this project certainly aimed – when feasible – at using modern tools. It would be great to have similar websites concerning subjects for other countries or regions, and I am sure you know some examples.

I had planned to open this year with other posts, but these I not have yet completed. Looking at an unfinished project with the potential to inspire others to create similar maps for their own field of interest seemed a wise thing to do!

Remembering Michael Stolleis

It seems difficult these weeks at my blog to leave Frankfurt am Main for other locations. The news about the death of Michael Stolleis on March 18, 2021 cannot be passed over here in silence, and thus again Frankfurt comes into view. Some obituaries succeeded very well in showing Stolleis’ role and achievements, and therefore I will not try to repeat everything already said with eloquent words.

The history of public law

On March 19, 2021 the Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory announced with sadness the death of Michael Stolleis (1941-2021) on March 18, aged 79 years. Stolleis was a director of the institute from 1991 until 2006, and acted as its interim director from 2007 to 2009. In view of his work for the institute it is certainly necessary to stress he was from 1974 to 2006 also a professor for public law and legal history at the university of Frankfurt. Klaus Günther wrote an obituary for the law faculty. He points to Stolleis’ role for the Research Centre Normative Orders in Frankfurt. In the obituary at the main website of the Universität Frankfurt Enrico Schleiff stressed the fact Stolleis was a true intellectual and a scholar who set Frankfurt on the map worldwide.

Patrick Bahners looked in his contribution for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in particular at the background. Stolleis’ father was burgomaster of Ludwigshafen between 1937 and 1941. After finishing secondary school Michael Stolleis followed the footsteps of his father who was both a vinegrower and lawyer, and started with learning viniculture. From a visit to a wine museum in Aigle I remember in particular how the plants and fruits need attention in every month of the year. Knowing about steps set before you, having to live in the present and working at the same time for the future is an excellent preparation for life. Bahners mentions rightly the way Stolleis combined objectivity with personal kindness. From the few times I met him I remember the word locker, relaxed, a label I did not associate at first with German professors, but luckily Stolleis could indeed look most happy and friendly. Stolleis contributed regularly to the FAZ with articles that struck me as most readable, well-informed and resonating in your mind long afterwards.

Stolleis studied law, German language and literature, and art history at the universities of Heidelberg and Würzburg. He wrote his doctoral thesis under the aegis of Sten Gagnér in Munich [Staatsraison, Recht und Moral in philosophischen Texten des späten 18. Jahrhunderts, defended 1967, published Meisenheim 1972)]. Stolleis wrote a moving article in remembrance of his Doktorvater, a piece telling you much about Stolleis himself, too [‘Sten Gagnér (1921-2000), ein großer Lehrer der europäischen Rechtsgeschichte’, Quaderni Fiorentini 29 (2000) 560-569; PDF]. In 1973 he defended in Munich his Habilitationsschrift (second thesis) on Gemeinwohlformeln im nationalsozialistischen Recht (Berlin 1974). At that time it was one of the first forays by German legal historians into the history of the Third Reich. Its theme, terms for the common good in Nazi law, can only be tackled successfully by someone trained also in German language and literature. Just a small example of Stolleis’ gifted pen and his calm judgment is his concise summary of the history of the Deutsche Rechtshistorikertag, in particular the paragraph on the dark years of the Third Reich.

The striking thing for me about Michael Stolleis is the combination of public law and legal history at one side, and promoting both fields whenever possible, as much for the general public as for fellow scholars. Frankfurt had a reputation for critical thinking with the Frankfurter Schule. Among the second generation of this group of scholars who focused on philosophy and social theory Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann stand out. Stolleis is responsible for putting the history of public law in Germany’s history on the same level as political and social history. The four volumes of his Geschichte des öffentlichen Rechts in Deutschland (Munich 1988-2012) definitely widened for German legal historians their fields of interest, and opened a necessary perspective on German history long overlooked as a defining and decisive element. However interesting, the history of private law cannot be the sole focus of legal history. Public law belongs as much to it as criminal law, legal procedure and canon law.

Only in my last post I mentioned the Repertorium der Policeyordnungen der Frühen Neuzeit, a project started by Stolleis. Social law as a historical subject was the theme in his Geschichte des Sozialrechts im Deutschland. Ein Grundriss (Stuttgart 2003). If you think Stolleis focused only on Germany you might turn to his preface for the biographical dictionary Juristen. Ein biographisches Lexikon von der Antike bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (first edition Munich 1995). His book on the image and the metaphor of the eye of the law shows him at work also in in the field of legal iconography [Das Auge des Gesetzes: Geschichte einer Metapher (Munich 2004)].

The Max-Planck-Gesellschaft loses with Stolleis one of its most active and resourceful directors. Between 1991 and 2006 the institute in Frankfurt transformed already much by opening to wider fields and new approaches, and thus it prepared for the final touch, a change in its very name. Leading such transformations and normal scholarly business in sometimes difficult situations, and through losses as the untimely death of Marie Theres Fögen, is a great achievement. I will not try to list all awards, academy memberships and honorary doctorates Stolleis received. Let one prize suffice, the Hegel-Preis awarded by the city Stuttgart to Stolleis in 2018. Hegel was not just a very influential philosopher. His views became central to state building in nineteenth-century Germany and nineteenth-century science, in particular for historical research, with consequences for the twentieth century at large.

In a time when law faculties have turned into law schools or just Fachbereiche we should remember Stolleis as a truly outstanding thinker whose publications can help to free you from preconceived views and following trodden paths. My words can hardly do justice to Michael Stolleis whom I greatly admired. Sadness about his death should be mixed with gratitude for his life, achievements and example of a lawyer and historian firmly rooted in past and present.

A postscript

On March 23, 2021 Thomas Duve published on behalf of the Max-Planck-Institut a much more detailed obituary for Michael Stolleis, in German and English. A very insightful and moving tribute by Kjell Å Modéer was published in June 2021 at Sådant allt met rätta.

Retracing looted and lost art after 75 years

Amidst the current situation around the COVID-19 virus worldwide commemorations take place of the end of the Second World War, 75 years ago. After two generations work continues on retracing objects of arts and other objects belonging to a shared cultural heritage which were taken from Jewish people by the Nazi regime or stolen by others. The process of giving back such objects is often as difficult as retracing art objects at all, not in the least because legal matters impose themselves, too. In this post I will look at a number of relevant projects, in particular at a web portal with a central function. The International Research Portal for Records Related to Nazi-Era Cultural Property (shortened to IRP) is a branch of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), with a portal concerning archives and their holdings as another branch.

Combining resources

The situation in the occupied European countries during the Second World War had similarities and major differences. After the war national institutions were founded for doing research on a dark and deeply troubling period, first of all by bringing together relevant documents and archival records. Tracing the fate of Jews and other persecuted people was a most important research motive, but other themes, too, called for attention. Survivors of the concentration camps often found little help from authorities and judges in regaining possession of their belongings. In the years of reconstruction their appalling situation was often simply ignored. Research along national lines has inevitably limits.

In 2014 the movie The Monuments Men, based on the book by Robert Edsel (London-New York 2009) brought the work of curators, archivists, art historians and others near the end of the Second World War and its aftermath to rescue works of art in Europe to the attention of the general public. The website of The Monuments Men Foundation informs you about its activities. However, in this project the focus is on works of art taken from galleries and museums, not so much on private collections. Nowadays The Art Loss Register helps both individuals and institutions to recover stolen works of art.

The IRP is a special portal supporting the recovery of cultural heritage stolen, confiscated or in whatever way taken away during the Second World War. Things get complicated in the face of museums and even nations acquiring items from the collections of Jewish art dealers and collectors. In fact I have to state my explicit wish not to comment on the outcome of legal cases such as the Goudstikker case and the case of the Koenigs collection. Perhaps it better to admit we now see things from a distance, and we should be aware we can see only some parts of a chaotic period which does not allow for easy extrapolation of conclusions, apart from fearing things were grim, grey or indeed beyond imagination.

At the IRP portal you can search in the databases of eleven institutions. Some of these databases cover several countries, but you got to be aware you cannot search every database of these institutions with one search interface. For this reason the IRP portal rightly states it is a demo. The Deutsches Historisches Museum, the Getty Research Institute, the Mémorial de la Shoah, the British National Archives, the Nationalfonds der Republik Österreichs für Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, the Belgian State Archives, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American National Archives and Record Administration are included in the central search function of this portal.

It is remarkable the resources of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (Amsterdam), home to the IRP portal, are not yet included in the central search interface. Thus the list of resources – under the heading Institutions – with ample information about accessing databases elsewhere is most important. The tab Collections brings you either to the central search interface or to the resource notices. Sometimes you do not land directly at the right section for a particular collection. In my view you can currently skip the Collections tab. The search interface has an advanced mode where you can enter terms for artist, location and techniques, but a notice alerts you this works only with some of the databases. Mentioning exactly for which it works or not would be a welcome addition, and a clear order of the institutions, be it by alphabet or by country, would be helpful, too. However confusing this may seem, it has the major benefit of shaking you clear of the idea to find something with just one search action at a single central resource, and it helps you to confront the fact things have been entered into databases in different ways. The IRP does help you to go in the right direction when you use its information carefully.

One of the obstacles in approaching these databases is the need for the use of standards, and not just at the interface level. The NIOD has helped creating with other Dutch archives a thesaurus for terms around the Second World War and the Netherlands. This thesaurus is a key element of the portal Oorlogsbronnen [War resources]. At the IRP portal the NIOD mentions only its archival collection concerning the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the unit of the Nazi regime looting Europe for works of art and other objects of European cultural heritage.

On its website the NIOD has created a section Expert Centre Restitution (interface in Dutch and English). This centre hosts the database Herkomst gezocht / Origins unknown. Its core is information about works of art either taken form Jewish people or acquired in dubious other ways and at some time – or still – present in the governmental Netherlands Art Collection (Nederlands Kunstbezit). Here, too, there are warnings about the completeness of the information. The NIOD point also to the website Museale verwervingen vanaf 1933 with information about works acquired by Dutch museums between 1933 and 1945 in suspicious ways such as theft, sale under pressure and confiscation. At the IRP portal is currently no indication whether such resources will be included in the future or not. The database of Museale verwervingen, accessible in Dutch and English, has not been updated since December 2018. Its overview of links and the succinct bibliography with mainly Dutch studies are worth mentioning. While preparing this post I noticed the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History has very recently digitized seven archives of art dealers between 1850 and 1950. In its holdings the RKD has archival collection of nine art dealers, among them the art firm Goudstikker. Although I am not unfamiliar with art history I have not conducted special research concerning the Dutch part of the history of stolen, looted and lost art around and during the Second World War, but these digitized archives are valuable new resources, accessible with an English and Dutch interface.

The Dutch websites figure here for a clear reason, not just to honour my regular Dutch view as a recurring element of my posts. It is perhaps wise to mention briefly some of the databases not yet included in the central search layer of the IRP Portal. In some cases the IRP’s overview makes clear an institution has not just one relevant database. Several institutions have archival collections concerning the Einsatzgruppe Reichsleiter Rosenberg. Only the database Cultural Plunder of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is directly included in the IRP one-step search. On the website of this project you can also find archival guides for a number of countries, and a section on looted libraries. Lost Art is a database of the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste, with an interface in German, English and Russian. The WGA-Datenbank of the Landesarchiv Berlin can be consulted in German and English, and there is a useful introduction on the website of this institution concerning the Wiedergutmachungämter (restitution offices). The University of Heidelberg is mentioned at the IRP portal for its project German Sales 1901-1945 with nearly 10,000 auction catalogues. The website with the database at ArtHistoricum contains much information besides the database. The portion of this project with German Sales 1930-1945 is included in the provenance databases of the Getty Research Institute.

The resources overview at the IRP portal is precious, and exactly for this reason you would expect explanations about the way more databases will be integrated into its search function. The differences between databases are a challenge to scholars and the IRP team dealing with them. It is sensible to view the portal as a tool supporting the use of these databases, and not, or not yet, as a complete replacement of searches to be conducted in individual databases. On purpose I indicated the languages used at other project websites. It would be helpful to have at least some elements of the IRP portal in various languages. In fact not only English is used in the IRP resources overview.

An unfinished history

Among websites and projects that deserve at least mentioning here, but perhaps also inclusion at the IRP portal, are other projects concerning looted and lost art. The most often mentioned projects are the Claims Conference and Looted Art of the Commission for Looted Art in Europe. The art library of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin-Preußischer Kulturbesitz has a succinct commented list – available in German and English – with the main relevant projects and databases. The Swiss Federal Office for Culture has a section on its multilingual website for looted art from the Nazi period, with a list of links. I would like to mention here two websites not included in these overviews. Auction Catalog Segmentation is a French resource created by the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art with a focus on the auction catalogues of the Parisian firm Drouot between 1939 and 1945. The Landesarchiv Berlin and the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin have created a website Bergungsstelle für wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken focusing on books taken from research libraries. This library participates with five other institutions at Looted Cultural Assets, with currently some 31,000 provenance records and information about 8,000 persons. Not just libraries work here together, but also the Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin-Centrum Judaicum and the Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden in Hamburg.

How can the memory of the twelve years of the Nazi period and its history of violence, genocide and other atrocities be kept alive? The EHRI project is one of the efforts of scholars to help studying the darkest part of this period. In Berlin one of the memorials is named Topographie des Terrors. Many German memorials and other websites can be found in the extensive links list of the Gedenkstättenforum. The portal Gedenkorte Europa 1939-1945 helps you to find more places of memory in Europe. However, I will not try to answer this question with only information about initiatives for remembrance. The actions to retrace, recover and restitute objects to their owners or successors, and the efforts to entangle legal questions about the rightful ownership of such objects are part of the aftermath of the Second World War and form in a way part of its remembrance. Sometimes the stories about looted art form a painful part of the aftermath when they brought further appalling humiliation to survivors and their families. Acts and places of remembrance should not hide the ways the stories of the Second World War have also been ignored, kept silent or made invisible. Sorting things out legally about objects is one thing, bringing some kind of justice to people in the face or irreparable human and material loss and injustice done to them is another challenge. Behind these objects is the history of persons with for each her or his individual history and the history of persecuted groups during a terrible period of human history.

A postscript

It is perhap useful to note here the Deutsches Historisches Museum offers not only the Datenbank zum Central Collecting Point München, integrated in the central search at the IRP portal, but also two additional databases concerning art during the Nazi regime, a database for the Kunstsammlung Hermann Göring and the Datenbank Linzer Sammlung for the art collections destined for the projected museum in Linz. The German Archivportal recently added a Themenportal Wiedergutmachung nationalsozialistischen Unrechts.

Learning to read German legal responsa

Modern technology has taken up the challenge of reading old scripts, the domain of palaeography. One of the best known tools, Transkribus, is currently used in a project on legal resources held at the university archives in Greifswald. The project Rechtsprechung im Ostseeraum. Digitization & Handwritten Text Recognition focuses on sources dealing with Germany’s legal history in the region on the borders of the Baltic Sea. The project aims at making accessible 102,000 pages of legal instructions of the Faculty of Law of the Universität Greifswald (Spruchakten der Greifswalder Juristenfakultät, 1580-1800), 130,000 pages of opinions of the judges at the Wismar Tribunal (Relationen der Assessoren am Wismarer Tribunal, 1746-1845) as well as 25,000 pages of opinions of the judges of the Wismar Council Court (Relationen des Wismarer Ratsgericht) (1701-1879). Users will get access to images of these sources and they will be able to perform text searches in this corpus. The Transkribus tool is being trained to recognize Early Modern handwriting of very different scribes. Does it succeed indeed in creating reliable transcriptions? What efforts are necessary to make such sources ready for computerized approaches?

Scribal varieties and the use of computers

At various European universities and archives teams use the Transkribus tool of the READ (Recognition and Enrichment of Archival Documents) project and even a special portable scanning tent for projects with many thousand pages in Early Modern or medieval scripts. Combined with a very active presence on Twitter it can sometimes almost seem Transkribus is virtually the only proven tool in this field. Until now the number of projects with the Transkribus tool for documents specifically dealing with legal history is small. The recent announcement of the project at Greifswald at the Transkribus blog offers an opportunity to see the tool at last at work for legal historians.

A “Spruchakte” from 1586, Universitätsarchiv Greifswald – image: Digitale Bibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern

At the bilingual project website in Greifswald it becomes quickly clear in the sources overview that you can find currently only images of four registers of Spruchakten from Greifswald shown at the Digitale Bibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The initial choice for only four registers was made as a “training set” with a view to the Transkribus tool which has to digest letter forms and writing patterns in order to become a functional reading tool. The registers contain documents from 1586, 1603, 1607 and 1643. The Universitätsarchiv Greifswald has digitized several series, among them matriculation registers and charters, but the Spruchakten are not mentioned in this overview. On the other hand the university archive and library are currently present with the largest collections in the Digitale Bibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. The other institutional partners in this project are the Universitätsbibliothek Greifswald, the Stadtarchiv Wismar and the Landesarchiv Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in Schwerin. The Stadtarchiv Wismar has a web page about the creation of finding aids for the records of the Wismarer Tribunal in its holdings and also those in other archives, with some references to relevant literature.

One of the reasons to use digital tools for studying these legal materials is their nature. The series of legal instructions and verdicts are organized in chronological order and only indexed for the names of claimants and defendants. The sheer working power in dealing with a massive set of (textual) data can make a huge difference for starting at all with a project concerning documents linked with a particular legal court in some or all of its dimensions.

Using the Transkribus tool

For using the Transkribus tool you need to create a free account. You need to download the tool. There is a succinct user guide (PDF) and an extensive online guide in the Wiki format. The tool is the core of a set of accompanying websites and cloud services. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) are both possible. You will need to contact the team at the Universität Innsbruck for starting the “training” of the tool, the process of recognizing and correctly deciphering various forms of writing. Among the most interesting results with this tool is the high percentage of correctly resolved texts in Early Modern Dutch archival records. The “model” succeeded not only in reading just one kind of script, but dealt equally successful with several kinds of handwriting. Depending on the number of words fed into the machine the character error rate (CER) can reach very low levels. A recent post at Rechtsprechung im Ostseeraum discusses the difference between word error rate and CER.

On Tuesday October 29, 2019 Annemiek Romein (Universiteit Gent) and Jeroen Vandommele gave a webinar at the Dutch Royal Library about using Transkribus. Provided you can follow Dutch, viewing this webinar gives you a very useful introduction to the practical use of this transcription tool, albeit with a focus on optical character recognition for dealing with printed texts, in particular collections of ordinances and the resolutions of the Staten-Generaal. I was in particular impressed by the way you can zoom in on and select text blocks. Aspects such as the costs of using Transkribus and surely the most asked question, its final reading speed, currently one page within a minute, come also into view.

As for now the project in Greifswald brings only a set of legal instructions by the law faculty of Greifswald. These gain in importance when sets from the other two resources, the opinions of the Wismar Ratsgericht and the Tribunal are added. It will be most interesting to see whether the opinions of the law professors deal with cases heard at one of the two legal courts. Combining them with the verdicts themselves is a logical sequel. I had hoped to report here more about the ins and outs of this project, but on the other hand it is a realistic example of work in progress, not a finalized and fully dressed product.

Despite carefully looking at the project website I could not readily detect the entrance to transcribed records, but I did reach a password protected page. You must forgive me my predilection for websites with site maps and clear navigation! However, the project team gives a very good description of the various stages of preparations needed for the workflow of their project. The team is right in approaching these stages as separate but intertwined projects which all need due attention. In the blog posts at the project website a lot of subjects have been touched upon, and this steadily stream will hopefully continue in coming years. It is certainly useful to get acquainted with this and other tools, to look at its procedures and terminology in order to carefully consider the chances and risks of using such tools.

It seems wise to look in more detail at the Transkribus website and its subdomains. On the main website the overview of pages for the Transkribus tool is essential. The transcription tool itself is hosted at a subdomain. Perhaps surprisingly there is also a page about the palaeography module offered by Transkribus at another subdomain, Transkribus LEARN. Here you can find hundreds of script examples. It is understandable Transkribus focuses at its transcription tool, but this palaeographical resource deserves to be known by anyone wanting to learn reading old scripts. This way of learning by doing it yourself has to be distinguished from the “learning” of the “model”, the process by which the transcription tool digests information about scripts from a set of documents for automatic deciphering. As an extra you might want to visit Famous Hands, a site with documents showing the handwriting of famous European persons. It is a bit amusing to see how Transkribus LEARN and Famous Hands can seem almost hidden from direct view, but Transkribus LEARN is duly listed at the services page. Here, too, a sitemap would be helpful.

The datasets of Transkribus have been put at the Zenodo platform with the title ScriptNet – READ. The fleet of deliverables, the newspeak term for finished products from a project, are listed at a separate page of the main website. Components such as the transcription tool, the portable ScanTent which works with Transkribus’ own DocScan app, the link to Famous hands, the GitHub repository of Transkribus and also the several components of the tools developed by various European teams can be found at this page. The so-called Transkribus KWS interface for keyword spotting brings you to a project for Finnish court records from 1810 to 1870 held at the Kansallisarkisto, the National Archives of Finland (interface Finnish and English), yet another subject touching upon legal history.

At the end of this brief presentation of the Transkribus tool and its current uses for legal history it is fair to mention at least concisely some other available tools, following no particular order. Transcripto is a tool with a German and English interface created at the Universität Trier. Looking at Scripto I thought for some time it might also be a transciption tool like Transkribus, but it is a transcription interface created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media for crowdsourcing projects which can be integrated with several CMS systems. The Università Roma Tre works on the project In Codice Ratio with the aim of automatic text recognition and transcription, in particular for the holdings of the Vatican archives. The French Himanis project has at its core a tool for text recognition used for indexing the text of 68,000 charters and documents in the Trésor des chartes of the Archives nationales in Paris.

TranScriptorium was the earlier incarnation of the READ project. Among the five datasets at the old project website are transcriptions of verdicts given by the German Reichsgericht between 1900 and 1914, a project led by Jan Thiessen (Universität Tübingen). This set of documents in the Kurrent script has been transferred to the document sets of Transkribus; you can access it after free registration. Christian Reul (Würzburg) has created OCR4ALL, a tool for dealing with OCR scanning of historical printed editions. It turns out it is fairly easy to find transcription platforms with various levels of image and transcription integration. In some cases there are even distinct layers for guiding and moderating crowdsourcing projects, but finding a tool for electronic recognition and transcription of historical handwriting and old printed works remains a challenge which certainly deserves a separate contribution.

A postscript

Within a few days Elisabeth Heigl of the project team at Greifswald kindly sent a comment with the good news of a very useful overview in English for searching and browsing the documents in the Digitale Bibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. With the search function you will see the result of the HTR done by Transkribus.

For all those curious about Transkribus and wanting to start using you might have a look for example at these blog posts elsewhere, ‘Digitize a Collection of Letters using Transkribus and XSLT‘ at the blog How to of the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities, ‘How to historical text recognition: A Transkribus Quickstart Guide‘ at LaTex Ninja’ing and the Digital Humanities, and Issue 13: OCR (July 2019) of Europeana Tech.

200 years Monumenta Germaniae Historica, a story of editions, projects and scholars

Every year some subjects and themes are brought to your attention just because there is some jubilee or centenary. In the face of their sheer number I wisely do not venture to trouble you with all centennial or even bicentennial celebrations. For me the Monumenta Germaniae Historica are exceptional in many ways. In view of the scholarly impact on the field of medieval history, German and European history, and in particular many fields of legal history. A meeting in Frankfurt am Main on January 20, 1819 has had a very important influence on the shaping of history as a scholarly discipline taught at universities. The flow of editions produced in two centuries is one thing to marvel at, but the story of this institution is much richer. Some celebrations have already been held in January, but the last week of June 2019 has been chosen as the week with more events around this bicentenary. I will try to be as concise as possible, but the story of the MGH deserves space!

History, nationalism, Romanticism

The start of the project we now know as the Monumenta Germaniae Historica happened in a particular time and place. Horst Fuhrmann analyzed concisely in his splendid book on the scholars of the MGH the start of this enterprise and much more, and I follow here his lead [Sind eben alles menschen gewesen. Gelehrtenleben im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Dargestellt am Beispiel der Monumenta Germaniae Historica und ihrer Mitarbeiter (Munich 1998; online, MGH (PDF))]. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1803, according to the late Peter Landau more important in Germany’s history than the reforms created by Napoleon, after the Napoleonic wars and the establishment of a new political order in Europe at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815) there was time in Germany to look backwards. You would assume that a number of people influenced by Romanticism founded the Gesellschaft für ältere deuttsche Geschichtskunde. the society for the study of older German history, but Lorenz vom Stein (1757-1831) and his visitors were not the archetypical romantics. This lawyer and former Prussian minister met at Frankfurt am Main with four delegates of the Bundestag, the central organ of the Deutsche Bund (1815). Vom Stein was known for his proposals for reforming public law and administration. Instead of looking back at the past he wanted to work to rebuild and strengthen Germany as a nation. The project originally set out to publish a number of sources in a relatively short time span, maybe ten years. Vom Stein had been in contact with leading German romantics to ask for their opinion and support.

In the first years the project met with some approval but also with indifference, criticism and even derision. Metternich subjected the first volumes to censorship. One of the ironies was the fact a team of students was sent to Paris to copy medieval manuscripts, because they were more bountiful and better accessible in the French capital than in other major libraries. The German states did not want to put money into the MGH. An offer for funding the project came not from German politicians, but from the Russian tsar. Vom Stein politely declined and spend a lot of his own money. In 1820 an accompanying journal was started, the Archiv für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, the ancestor of the current Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters. From 1823 onwards an archivist from Hannover, Georg Heinrich Pertz (1795-1876), led the small team around Vom Stein. He designed the division of the editions into five major series, the Scriptores for editions of works dealing with history, the Leges with legal resources, the Epistolae for letters, the Diplomata for charters, and the Antiquitates for other sources. Pertz stayed with the Monumenta for fifty years.

Fuhrmann, himself a former president of the MGH, was quite right in writing a story about scholars as people, ordinary mortals with great gifts and sometimes wilful personal characteristics. The strife between Pertz and Georg Waitz (1813-1886) was not only a matter of different visions of history and scholarly practices, an archivist developing on his own the historical-critical method to edit sources against a scholar trained by Ranke, but also a clash of two humans. Some projects stemming from the MGH belong to the Vorarbeiten, preliminary works such as the Regesta Imperii started by Johann Friedrich Böhmer who later on after quarrels with the MGH decided to edit a series Fontes rerum Germanicarum (4 vol., Stuttgart 1843-1868). Others, too, had their trouble with the MGH and started their own series. Philipp Jaffé edited after his break with Pertz the series Bibliotheca rerum Germanicarum (6 vol., Berlin 1864-1873). Thus the MGH delivered not only its editions, but set path-breaking examples of using the historical-critical method. It became a model for projects abroad by the very fact they initially stuck to just publishing sources, not scholarly monographs. Controversies about its role and aims led to other important scholarly projects in the field of medieval history.

A human history

With Philipp Jaffé (1819-1870) we encounter perhaps the most tragic of all Monumentisten. Jaffé had studied in Berlin, and without getting a Ph.D. he started his own projects. The first edition of his Regesta pontificum Romanorum, a work listing 11,000 papal acts and charters up to 1198, appeared in 1851. In these years he studied medicine in Berlin and Vienna, believing he had no chance to make a career as an historian being a Jew. However, Ranke considered Jaffé his very best student and made him the first ausserplanmässiger professor in all Germany. Between 1854 and 1862 he worked for the MGH. On the title pages of the six volumes of the Scriptores series Jaffé helped editing his name was not mentioned. In 1863 a feud developed between him and Pertz, who eventually wanted to deny him access to the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. Jaffé started his own series with major source editions. He got estranged from his family, converted to Lutheranism, and in growing isolation he took his life in 1870, a fact that shocked the scholarly world.

It is impossible to follow here the MGH and its contributors through all its history, if only for the sheer number of scholars for which you can find photographs at the MGH website. Jews had indeed a great role for the published editions. In particular Harry Bresslau, the author of the Geschichte der Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Hannover 1921; reprint 1976; online, MGH) felt hurt under antisemitic attacks. During the period of the Third Reich Ernst Perels and Wilhelm Levison were among the targets of the Nazi regime. The MGH became a Reichsinstitut für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde, but Nazi control was not total. In 1939 Levison could find a refuge in Durham. In 1944 the MGH had to leave Berlin for Pommersfelden near Bamberg. In 1949 the institute came to Munich where the MGH found in 1967 its current location in the main building of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. You can find the titles of the MGH’s own publications about its history on this web page.

The library collection of the MGH is now famous for its riches, but it was only after getting in 1907 the books of Ludwig Traube and in 1911 those of Oswald Holder-Egger a substantial library came into existence [see Norbert Martin, ‘Die Bibliothek der Monumenta Germaniae’, Bibliotheksforum Bayern 19/3 (1991) 287-294]. One of the special qualities of the online catalogue is the presence of links to reviews of works in the Deutsches Archiv. Nowadays we may take dMGH, the digital MGH, for granted, but such projects are solely possible with financial means and other support by institutions as for example the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). The MGH have a legal status under public law as an institution for the Freistaat Bayern with subventions by other Bundesländer. I have been fortunate to work in 1997 and 1998 with the library staff of the MGH, and my fond memories of these days prompt me to write here, too. Apart from the vast collection with printed books on the history of medieval Europe the Virtueller Lesesaal offers a lot of books in several sections. Here I would like to single out the digital version of Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Latin manuscript books before 1600. A list of the printed catalogues and unpublished inventories of extant collections (4th edition, 1993; supplement, 2006; revised digital edition 2016). This indispensable guide has been revised and updated by Sigrid Krämer and Birgit Christine Arensmann.

A mighty enterprise

The time with just five massive series of editions is long ago, a mighty fleet of series has sailed into our century. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica in its printed form take many shelves in a library and make a mighty impression. In the early eighties the very stacks with the folio volumes of the MGH collapsed in the rather new library of the history department in Utrecht, luckily before opening hours. Apart from a library catalogue you might better use the yearly leaflet with an overview of the editions which duly was posted near these stacks. The Gesamtverzeichnis 2019 is also available online (PDF). In 1997 even the library of the MGH decided to catalog again all editions since 1826.

Legal historians will within the old series and the current program of edition projects first of all turn to the Leges and Diplomata series. In the Leges series there are currently projects for sources such as the Collectio Gaudenziana (Wolfgang Kaiser), the Collectio Walcausina (Charles Radding), a part of the Leges Langobardorum, capitularies, formulae, and even for the most intriguing and difficult corpus of Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, just one example of a project which cannot be seen properly without looking to other forged collections around it. More soberly it is also an example of a project running over many decades. If you remember Antonio Agustín’s reluctance in the late sixteenth century to pronounce a clear verdict, a forgery or genuine material, even though he was in the best position to do this, you will understand the courage of scholars such as Horst Fuhrmann, Schafer Williams, Klaus Zechiel-Eckes and now Eric Knibbs to proceed in their wake with finally producing a critical text edition. Among other projects in this series are editions of medieval councils, a new edition of Regino of Prüm, royal constitutions, the glosses to the Sachsenspiegel, and the Latin version of an other treatise on German law, the Schwabenspiegel. It is good to see here attention for several kinds of legal systems

The publications within the Diplomata series may seem more straightforward. The sheer mass of charters issued from the Carolingian period onwards is indeed much greater than one could calculate in the first half of the nineteenth century. Nowadays not only charters of kings and emperors are being edited, volumes for some princes have appeared, too, and also for the Latin kings of Jerusalem. For the charters of the emperors Henry V and Henry VI there is even a digital pre-edition online, for the latter only for German recipients. Dieter Hägemann and Jaap Kruisheer, assisted by Alfred Gawlik, edited the two volumes of Die Urkunden Heinrich Raspes und Wilhelms von Holland (2 vol., Wiesbaden 1989-2006) with the charters of the only Roman king from the Low Countries. It is also the only case in which a Dutch scholar worked on a volume published for the MGH.

As for the newer series it is sensible to look here at just three series. In the series MGH Hilfsmittel we find works such as Uwe Horst, Die Kanonessammlung Polycarpus des Gregor von S. Grisogono. Quellen und Tendenzen (Wiesbaden 1980), the Wortkonkordanz zum Decretum Gratiani, Timothy Reuter and Gabriel Silagi (eds.) (5 vol., Wiesbaden 1990), the monograph of Rudolf Pokorny and Hartmut Hoffmann, Das Dekret des Bischofs Burchard von Worms. Textstufen – Frühe Verbreitung – Vorlagen (Wiesbaden 1991), and the printed edition of Linda Fowler-Magerl, Clavis Canonum. Selected canon law collections before 1140 (2005). Her work is now available online in a database with a German and English interface. Danica Summerlin and Christoph Rolker have added new canonical collections to the database.

The series Schriften der Monumenta Germaniae Historica is one of the oldest series to supplement the original program. You can choose at will in this series for classic studies. I mention here for legal history Arno Borst, Die Katharer (Stuttgart 1953), Horst Fuhrmann, Einfluß und Verbreitung der pseudoisidorischen Fälschungen von ihrem Auftauchen bis in die neuere Zeit (3 vol., Stuttgart 1972-1974), the six volumes of the congress Fälschungen im Mittelalter (6 vol., Stuttgart 1988-1990), Harald Siems, Handel und Wucher im Spiegel frühmittelalterlicher Rechtsquellen (Stuttgart 1992), and Maike Huneke, Iurisprudentia romano-saxonica. Die Glosse zum Sachsenspiegel-Lehnrecht und die Anfänge deutscher Rechtswissenschaft (Wiesbaden 2014).

Within Studien und Texte, the third series which I like to mention, you will find indeed both source editions and monographs, such as Stephan Beulertz, Das Verbot der Laieninvestitur im Investiturstreit (Wiesbaden 1991), and Sascha Ragg, Ketzer und Recht. Die weltliche Ketzergesetzgebung des Hochmittelalters unter dem Einfluß des römischen und kanonischen Rechts (Wiesbaden 2006), the first of a number of recent volumes in this series with studies and editions concerning medieval inquisitions. For your convenience I refer to the page on medieval legal procedure of my legal history website where I have included these works.

Time to celebrate

In its long and illustrious history the Monumenta Germaniae Historica had to deal with many crises and decisive moments. Think only of the 1880 fire in the house of Theodor Mommsen in Charlottenburg which destroyed working materials of the Monumenta, his personal library and some precious manuscripts in his custody! Remember the periods with a stifling political climate in the dark times of the Nazi regime. During the Second World War some materials were stored in a mine which was destroyed in 1945. Many projects suffered setbacks when editors failed to do their jobs properly, when death came too soon for experts dealing with most difficult matters, or clashes happened between scholars. The presidents and the Zentraldirektion have to steer between many rocks. Sometimes the presence of particular scholars is most helpful. From my own period I cherish the memory of Reinhard Elze, former director of the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, who walked each day from his home to the MGH in the Ludwigstrasse. I think his steady rhythm and kind presence helped everyone in a way to stay focused and open to people and ways to solve problems of any kind. The funny poster makes me remember the way Horst Fuhrmann could make jokes and show his happiness.

The program for the jubilee contained events in Berlin and Vienna in January, the festivities of last week in Munich, and a symposium to be held at the DHI in Rome on November 28-29, 2019 on “Das Reichsinstitut für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde 1935 bis 1945 – ein “Kriegsbeitrag der Geisteswissenschaften”? [The research institute of the Reich for the study of older German history, 1935-1945. A war contribution of the humanities?]. The DHI and the MGH were forced to merge in 1935. What impact did the control of the Reich have, and not only for substantially widening the budget? On June 28 a discussion panel rightly stressed the international character of the MGH has today. In 1947 the MGH for the first time elected corresponding fellows, then and ever since from abroad. The flyer for this event shows a list with more than fifty scholars from Europe, the USA and Japan. The main scholarly meeting on June 28 and 29 dealt with the theme Quellenforschung im 21. Jahrhundert [Research on sources in the 21st century].

What laurels does the MGH need? The founders put a crown of oak leafs around the motto in Latin which defies translation, but inspiration and labor of love is the very heart, not only the forests of medieval Germany. Using the older volumes with the introductions in Latin, slowing down your reading speed to digest the wealth of information in the double apparatus of the annotation, checking the Deutsches Archiv for thorough articles, concise information about new works, and the yearly messages of the Zentraldirektion on the progress of editions in preparation, looking at the website for new books in the holdings of the MGH which you might want to use yourself, too, you realize the contributors to the MGH put all their talents into helping to create sure foundations for research, Grundlagenforschung. They challenge you to do your own tasks in a similar dedicated way. Let’s hope the staff and fellows of the MGH can continue to work for the community of scholars in the fields of medieval law and history!

 

At the passing away of Peter Landau

Every year the death of scholars in the field of legal history makes you reflect about the very different paths scholars pursue in their research. Over the years I try here not to look only at their scholarly achievements, but also at the way they lived, their human qualities and attitude. Sometimes it is challenging to give a complete picture of someone in view of his many activities. With Peter Landau not only a scholar of medieval canon law has passed away. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica and the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte announced his passing on Thursday May 23, 2019. Here I will look briefly at his scholarly career and publications, and I will tell about my personal experience with him in Munich.

From Berlin to Munich

Berlin was the place of birth of Peter Landau (February 26, 1935), but you must mention a lot of other towns in Germany and abroad when you want to do him justice. You will find the main dates of his life in the curriculum vitae on the website of the Stephan-Kuttner-Institute for Medieval Canon Law. Landau studied from 1953 onwards law, philosophy and history in Berlin, Freiburg im Breisgau and Bonn. In 1956 he got support from the Studienstifitung des deutschen Volkes. He stood his first federal juridical examination (Erstes Juristisches Staatsexam) in Cologne in 1958. In 1960 he became an assistant at the university of Bonn. Guided by Hermann Conrad he defended in 1964 his dissertation on the canonical concept of infamy, published as Die Entstehung des kanonischen Infamiebegriffs von Gratian bis zur Glossa ordinaria (Cologne-Vienna 1966). His PhD thesis brought him in 1965 to Yale University where he worked with Stephan Kuttner, not only for the preparation of his second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift), but also as a lecturer on canon law. In 1968 he defended his study on the role of church patrons in medieval canon law, published seven years later [Ius Patronatus. Studien zur Entwicklung des Patronats im Dekretalenrecht und der Kanonistik des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Cologne-Vienna 1975)].

Peter Landau hold his first tenure as a law professor from 1968 to 1987 at the very new university of Regensburg, founded in 1962 and really starting in 1967. In these years he was twice a guest lecturer in the United States, at Berkeley in 1977 and in Chicago in 1984. He declined the call in 1983 to succeed Helmut Coing at the university of Frankfurt am Main. It will not do mentioning here all academic honors bestowed on Peter Landau. His membership of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences led him in 1986 as their representative to the board of directors of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), a role he had until 2014. In 1987 he became a professor of law at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in the surroundings of the Leopold-Wenger-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte. His major role in the field of research concerning medieval canon law is clear from his presidency of the Society for Medieval Canon Law (1988-2000) and his presidency of the Stephan-Kuttner-Institute of Medieval Canon Law since 1991.

In Munich

When you look at the list of Peter Landau’s publications, even when only updated until December 2014, the years in Munich gave him the space and time for many publications despite a growing number of other tasks and duties. In July 1992 Landau hosted the quadriennial International Congress of Medieval Canon Law. By chance I had planned to work in Munich for my own thesis in June 1992. Even during the weeks of preparation for this congress other things continued as well. I attended the seminar Landau held on Anglo-American legal philosophy. I remember helping the staff with sending out by post the final congress mailing. The congress was a great event, not just a chance to meet people, but also a gathering of scholars from different disciplines all bringing their light on medieval canon law.

Rather unexpectedly the Institute of Medieval Canon Law had to move from Berkeley, and in 1995 Munich was chosen as its new home. At a meeting in May 1995 with Peter Landau he asked me whether I would like to help with the new start of this research institute, and in particular with creating again a functioning library with the scholarly collection of Stephan Kuttner. Early 1997 I came to Munich to start with this task. Imagine yourself surrounded by hundreds of large boxes, many of them containing books, others offprints, letters and microfilms! Peter Landau set the direction of the things to do and just as important, he showed his confidence in me. His connection to the MGH helped to get quickly support from its library staff in creating an electronic catalogue. He urged me to attend also a seminar of his colleagues in the Abteilung A of the Wenger Institute, by any account Germany’s focus of research into Roman law. One of the most amazing things about Peter Landau was his absolutely marvellous ability to change focus and to go straight to the matters at hand, be they the very heart or important details. He smiled when his secretary Hille Sachtler gave him his daily map with letters to sign. Details about conciliar canons and papal decretals were literally within his reach in his large office lined with walls of files concerning legal collections and about ongoing research projects he was involved in.

Creating critical editions of important texts in the field of medieval canon law is one of the most urgent needs in this field, but also an often daunting task, even for the experts of the Kuttner-Institute. Peter Landau edited with the late Rudolf Weigand and Waltraud Kozur a late twelfth-century summa, Magistri Honorii Summa ‘De iure canonico tractaturus’ (3 vol., Città del Vaticano 2004-2010). He saw the completion of another summa edition, again with Weigand, Kozur, Martin Petzolt and Karin Miethaner-Vent and others, of the Summa ‘Omnis qui iuste iudicat’ sive Lipsiensis (5 vol., Città del Vaticano 2007-2018). The presence of these editions is among the most important developments in the field of ongoing research into medieval canon law.

You will soon be aware of the sheer width of Landau’s scholarly interest when you look at the different subjects and periods he addressed in his publications. The number of journals he contributed to is impressive in itself. It is a surpise to note his article on ‘Karl Marx und die Rechtsgeschichte’, Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 41 (1973) 361-371. A number of his articles concerning canon law have been reprinted with updates in the volume Kanones und Dekretalen. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Quellen des kanonischen Rechts (Goldbach 1997). You can find his contributions on many more themes in the volume Europäische Rechtsgeschichte und kanonisches Recht im Mittelalter. Ausgewählte Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1967 bis 2006 (Badenweiler 2013). Last year a volume appeared with 40 articles showing also his interest in German law of the two last centuries [Deutsche Rechtsgeschichte im Kontext Europas (Badenweiler 2018)]. He was the editor and co-editor of a number of volumes with articles on a variety of themes. His book on the foundations and history of Protestant church law shows another theme of his publications, Grundlagen und Geschichte des evangelischen Kirchenrechts und des Staatskirchenrechts (Tübingen 2010). Catholic Bavaria proved to be a most welcome and respectful home for the Protestant Landau.

Peter Landau showed his interests in many ways. His time was precious indeed. Very often he succeeded in asking immediately the right questions. It is reassuring to know he readily made time free for a beer in a nearby Biergarten when guests left Munich after a research visit. While reading my musings I noticed that I left out some very personal memories of Peter Landau which I really like to keep private, but I can assure you they show him at his most helpful. Let’s remember Peter Landau for his energy, his vision for the study of medieval canon law, his legacy as a teacher and a prolific author. In him we have lost a man of many qualities.

 

A German gateway to applied Early Modern sciences

There is a great difference between articles and monographs presenting the latest thought and results of new experiments on one end of the scientific world, and at the other end popularised science in cheap books and leaflets. A blog offers both the possibility to publish early results of new research or to bring synthesized contributions aiming at a wide public. Legal historians can feel the seduction to look only at the developments which in our eyes brought decisive changes, but discontinuity and continuities are all parts of one world. Faithful readers will no doubt know about my interest in digitized pamphlets. Legal pocket books have appeared here, too. In this post I will look at a genre which in my view stands nicely between both poles of attraction. The German portal Fachtexte offers scientific text books from the Early Modern period which aimed at presenting practical knowledge for several disciplines. The project is an offspring of the Kallimachos portal for digital humanities of the department for German linguistics at the university of Würzburg. Legal works are included in this project. The very word Fachtexte cries out for an English equivalent, yet another reason besides the linguistic approach to look at this initiative from Würzburg.

For anyone wondering how I encountered this project I must give you a very simple answer. It is not the first time that I found a notice about an interesting project at the Archivalia blog of Klaus Graf (RWTH, Aachen). On many occasions Graf adds some remarks about a project, often concerning open access, easy or cumbersome navigation and durability of links. Sometimes guest posts appear, too, but the majority of posts stems from this most active archivist.

The attraction of variety

There is a third factor making a tour of the Fachtexte project interesting. On the start screen of the German website you will find at the right a wordle with the disciplines represented in the digital collection. The dimensions of a discipline are equal to its numeric presence. Law and jurisprudence loom large here, but they are accompanied by other disciplines. A second thing to note immediately is that this project does not primarily or only touch technical matters, dictionaries and handbooks.

In order to establish a correct English translation of the concept Fachtexte we might as well look at some of the other disciplines. Rhetorik und Formularbücher remind us of the role of rhetorics and formularies in law. With Bergbau und Metallurgie you will encounter mining law. Wirtschaft und Handel, economy and trade are not far away from legal theory and legal business. In the title of this blog I opt for applied sciences as a valid way to render faithfully the scientific discipline behind the texts under discussion. In German and Dutch you have the words Fachliteratur and vakliteratuur, literature for a particular discipline. Only the Dutch German and Lithuanian version of Wikipedia have an entry about this genre.

Legal books for daily business 

Let’s not wait any longer before proceeding to legal books! You can click on Jurisprudenz in the wordle or choose this subject in a more regular list of the Sachbereiche. In this list of subject fields law and jurisprudence are the fifth discipline with 363 digitized items. Medicine scores almost one thousand items, nearly a quarter of the 4,200 digitized items. Apart from the general search field on top of the screen there is also a search page Werke (works) where you can browse alphabetically or in chronological order for works. On a similar page for authors you can search for them, and search also author biographies. The page Datenbankabfrage (database search) gives you a number of search fields and clickable preset filters. You can perform here quickly searches for digitized items from a particular century, printing location or providing institution. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich and the Staats- und Landesbibliothek Dresden provide respectively 883 and 824 items, a third part of all items. The project in Würzburg offers no items from its own university library. Using this search mask you get not only particular results, but also a nice visual representation of related information.

For the sixteenth century you will find nearly 1,100 items and for the seventeenth century 2,900 items. I wondered a bit about the presence of medieval items, but the Fachtexte project does indeed also include some digitized manuscripts. In two cases you will be directed to a text-only version of a text in the colorful and multilingual Bibliotheca Augustana of Ulrich Harsch in Augsburg. In other cases the German Wikisource provides online versions of texts.

The earliest legal text in the Fachtexte project is perhaps surprisingly the Sachsenspiegel (“Mirror of Saxony”), the thirteenth-century treatise about Saxon law by Eike von Repgow. My surprise is the fact this text certainly contains more a description of law than legislation or doctrine, yet it received the honor of several (!) series of glosses. The Monumenta Germaniae Historica in Munich published in recent years editions by Frank-Michael Kaufmann of the “Buch’se Glosse”, the gloss created by Johann von Buch, for the Landrecht (2002) and the Lehnrecht (2006), and also the Kürzere Glosse (2009) and the Längere Glosse (2013). There is even an accompanying glossary [Glossar zum Buch’sen Glosse (3 vol., 2015)]. In 2014 appeared Maike Huneke’s book on Iurisprudentia romana-saxonica. Die Glosse zum Sachsenspiegel-Lehnrecht und die Anfänge deutscher Rechtswissenschaft (Wiesbaden 2014; MGH Schriften, 68). Huneke argued this gloss is the first scientific product of lawyers of Saxony concerning the law of their own region. Earlier Bernd Kannowski had already underlined in his study Die Umgestaltung des Sachsenspiegelrechts durch die Buch‘sche Glosse (Wiesbaden 2007; MGH Schriften, 56) the way the glosses change the nature of this work radically. It seems the team at Würzburg finds the closeness to regional law of the Sachsenspiegel – and also of the Schwabenspiegel for Swabia – a sign of closeness to legal practice. The Schwabenspiegel has been fitted into several categories.

For the Fachtexte portal other late medieval Landrechte, regional law books, and Stadtrechte, municipal law books, have also been included in the legal section. For the fifteenth century there is for example a German version of the infamous Malleus maleficarum, the seminal work about supposed witches, Von den Unholden oder hexen (1489), and an imperial ordinance on the quality of wines (Ordnung unnd satzung über weynne, 1498). When you click on the link for the latter text you will see indeed two categories in the meta-data for this incunabula edition. The last incunabula edition of a legal text is most interesting, a book by Johannes Sleidanus about Plato’s view of (city) government, Eine kurtze summa oder Jnhalt der Platonischen Lere (1500).

Among the legal books from the sixteenth century is a great diversity of ordinances, books on feudal law and other treatises. it might be worthwhile to look here at some books that fit into more than one category. There is a Rhetorik vnd Teutsch Formular In allen Gerichts Händlen by Ludwig Fruck from 1530 dealing with rhetorical devices and legal formulas for all kind of actions in courts. An earlier edition of this book with the title Teütsch Formular, wie mann in Gerichts-Sachen Brieffe unnd Instrument stellen mag (1529) definitively should have been listed also under jurisprudence. Having easy access at Fachtexte to a list with works on rhetoric makes it possible to check for such matters. With Johann Haselberg’s Der Vrspruncg gemeynner Berckrecht (1535) we encounter a very early treatise on mining law.

Comparing categories of Fachtexte is a fruitful exercise. It leads also to some results which need further investigation or seem open to criticism. The group of legal books shows for 1552 a Kirchenordnung (ecclesiastical ordinance) by duke Johann Albrecht I of Mecklenburg tagged for both law and theology. A quick check in the theological corner shows a 1543 edition of a work by Andreas Osiander, Kirchenordnung. Wie es mit der Christlichen Lehre, heyligen Sakramenten und allerley andern Ceremonien (…). I will refrain from delving here into major publications by leading theologians in the German Reformation, but I am sure that Osiander’s work, first published in 1533, was adopted by the princes of several German regions. In a number of cases official publications such as city law books are listed at Fachtexte as works without an author, but an indication they were issued by on behalf of a particular authority is no luxury.

Legal practice in Early Modern Germany

With a book by Heinrich Knaust with a very particular title, Fewrzeugk gerichtlicher Hendel und Ordnung (Erfurt 1558) we finally see the kind of book I would expect here, a treatise aiming to distill information from medieval works by authors such as Henricus de Segusio (Hostiensis) (around 1200-1271), Johannes Andreae (around 1270-1348) and Nicolaus de Tudeschis (Panormitanus) (1386-1445) which he mentions in the long title of his work. The very first word of the title, Fewrzeugk or Fewerzeugk is intriguing. At the German dictionary portal Wörterbuchnetz it is explained under Feuerzeug, meaning a flintstone. In a recent study by Piotr Witmann, «Der da sein Practic auß Teutschen Tractaten will lernen». Rechtspraktiker in deutschsprachiger Praktikerliteratur des 16. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main, etc., 2015; Rechtshistorische Reihe, 458) Knaust and other sixteenth-century authors of practical legal works are discussed. Knaust appears in this section with more works aimed at legal practicioners. I could not help spotting that the digitized copy at Munich is part of the collection with the abbreviated siglum J. pract., “Jus practicum”.

A different combination of categories is found in a work by Leonhard Fronsberger, his Kriegßbuch, present at Fachtexte with editions from 1571, 1573 and 1578. Only the last edition is apart from the label Militär und Kampfkunst [Military and martial arts] labeled as a legal work. If you browse the edition 1571 you will see for yourself that the title starts emphatically with Vom kayserlichem Kriegsrechten. The first part of his work is concerned with legal matters, the organization of fighting units, military law and the authority of officers. I will not trouble you here with the question of correct labelling, but it is a matter of some concern indeed. Among the best known books for legal practitioners are the manuals for inquisitors and witch hunters. You will find here a number of them here, and also a translation of Jean Bodin’s De la demonomanie des sorciers (first edition, Paris 1580) into German by Johann Fischart, published in 1581 as De Daemonomania magorum : Vom Außgelassnen Wütigen Teuffelsheer der Besessenen. Here it has been overlooked that this 1581 edition already mentions Fischart as translator, and not only in the 1591 edition. It seems that some basic matters have not always been correctly recorded. However, the inclusion of multiple editions helps to correct such infelicities.

It is tempting to show your more interesting books, but I would like you to find them yourself. I could not resist mentioning the Newe Bauordnung des Fürstenthumbs Würtemberg, a building ordinance issued in 1587 by the duke of Württemberg. It contains a number of articles you would expect in late nineteenth-century legislation to control building companies. The famous Reinheitsgebot, a Bavarian ordinance from 1516 on beer brewing, is not included in the section Weinbau und Bierbrauerei. However, you will encounter ordinances for apothecaries, for architects, forest ordinances, a treatise discussing the legal or illegal nature of alchemy, ordinances for millers and much more. I leave it to you to discover here works from the seventeenth century, where you will surely find results as interesting as those selected here from the sixteenth century.

Some conclusions

It is brave to attempt selecting works for more than thirty different disciplines, be they close to the medieval artes mechanicae or to modern occupational manuals, or closer to popular versions of standard works for fields such as law, medicine, theology and mathematics. One of the strengths of the Fachtexte portal is the combination of categories which helps you to look beyond the normal borders of a particular discipline. Widening your horizons is not a bad quality for any project!

Fachtexte is part of a far more encompassing project in Würzburg, Kallimachos, which takes its name from one of the librarians of the ancient library of Alexandria. It brings together a number of linguistic projects, but also for example a project to study school plates, Schulwandbilder. It will be interesting to look into that project for legal iconography. However, I am happy to present here this project concerning applied sciences, because mirabile dictu you cannot find the Fachtexte project with the search function at the Kallimachos platform. One of the lessons in this post is the need to accept – once again, with relief or more neutral! – the fact you cannot find everything yourself. We should be thankful to those people who surf the oceans of online knowledge and share their discoveries as regularly as Klaus Graf!

A true professor: Knut Wolfgang Nörr, legal historian and lawyer

In the midst of all kind of things, not only preparing new posts for this blog, I read news which made me pause for thought, and more than that. It is truly sad to hear that Knut Wolfgang Nörr passed away on January 15, 2018. Last week Thomas Duve, one of the directors of the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main, wrote a brief message about Nörr’s death on the institute’s website. At the university of Tübingen his colleague Jan Schröder wrote a somewhat longer but still very concise in memoriam with however a very full treatment. In fact it is hard to believe you can tell anything about him with so few words. When you look at the enlarged version of the portrait photo it is even more striking how he looked almost unchanged over the years. Here I would like to share a few of my memories of meeting Professor Nörr many years ago, and I will briefly look at his work in the field of medieval canon law. I am sure they show sides of him which are equally telling about his person, his life and achievements as a scholar as more profound obituaries which he truly deserves.

A true professor

Jan Schröder succeeds wonderfully in creating a most lively image of Knut Wolfgang Nörr (1935-2018), a man of many gifts. Legal historians tend to see him as a major specialist in the field of medieval canon law, but he made also important contributions to the study of contemporary German law. It was Stephan Kuttner who guided his first research in the field of medieval ecclesiastical law, resulting in his first book around a theme connected with the Council of Basel, Kirche und Konzil bei Nicolaus de Tudeschis (Panormitanus) (diss. Munich 1960; Cologne 1964). Nörr used here the person of the Sicilian canonist Niccolò de Tedeschi (1386-1445) as a focus for a study of views on the balance between church and councils. His versatility became soon visible in his Habilitationsschrift on the position of judges within Early Modern legal procedure, Zur Stellung des Richters im gelehrten Prozess der Frühzeit: Judex secundum allegata non secundum conscientiam judicat (Munich 1967). Nörr became in 1966 a professor at Bonn, and went in 1971 to Tübingen where he would stay despite several alluring calls from other universities.

Combining the history of legal procedure and medieval canon law became a hallmark of his work, but he was equally equipped to study the history of German law, for example with a pioneering study of private law during the Weimar Republic, Zwischen den Mühlsteinen : eine Privatrechtsgeschichte der Weimarer Republik (Tübingen 1988), and crowned with a study on the history of economic law in post-war Germany, Die Republik der Wirtschaft : Recht, Wirtschaft und Staat in der Geschichte Westdeutschlands (2 vol., Tübingen 1990-2007). The results of his research were published also in a steadily flow of articles, a number of those concerning civil procedure were republished in the volume Judicium est actus trium personarum : Beiträge zur Geschichte des Zivilprozessrechts in Europa (Goldbach 1993).

In the field of medieval canon law he looked in particular at the way the papacy used law, not only in papal decretals, letters with decisions by papal delegates, usual bishops or abbots, but also at the courts of the papal curia in Rome. Looking at the titles of his articles and their sequence it shines through how he delved new roads to look at the relevant sources. The importance of his work on medieval procedure is perhaps most visible in the creation of the series Der Einfluss der Kanonistik auf die europäische Rechtskultur, Orazio Condorelli et alii (edd.) (4 vol., Cologne-Weimar-Vienna 2009-2014) in which three volumes deal with legal procedure. Thanks to Knut Wolfgang Nörr the very substantial role of canon law in legal procedure is taken into account in any study of the history of legal procedure, an achievement very much also following his teacher Stephan Kuttner who stressed the role of medieval canon law for criminal law.

Some personal notes

I had promised you not to look only at the publications of Knut Wolfgang Nörr, but seeing this overview helps you to understand what a towering figure he was, certainly in the eyes of a young graduate student. In summer 1991 I came to Tübingen for a period of research for my Ph.D. thesis. My second supervisor, Alain Wijffels (Leiden and Louvain-la-Neuve) had helped me to get support from the university of Tübingen. I had made an appointment at the law faculty, but I was not quite prepared for what happened next. Nörr welcomed me friendly, assuming I would defend my thesis at Leiden University, quod non, but after telling him about my purpose and study plan he did something else, too. He gave me the name of a student assistant whom I could contact for practical matters, and he walked me to the university library. In a seemingly old-fashioned but very effective way he introduced me to the staff of the department for rare books and manuscripts. Twenty-five years ago the electronic library catalogue at Tübingen was still in an early phase, and not all old works had yet been entered. Therefore he handed me the old hand written catalogue of legal books, and urged me to look it through completely before starting with reading specific medieval and Early Modern works.

To illustrate the riches of Tübingen’s university library for legal history Nörr told me a story about another visitor. On a certain occasion he had taken Domenico Maffei, a connaisseur of old legal books, to the library stacks, and left him with the old legal books. After half an hour Nörr looked for Maffei, and found him still between the stacks, murmuring again and again: “Scandalo, scandalo!”. “What is the scandal?”, Nörr asked him, and Maffei answered the scandal was not the stunning presence of many rare books, surprisingly often with more than one copy, but the fact this collection had survived the ages and now was only seldom used.

I spent part of the following summer again in Tübingen to benefit from the rich holdings of the university library. For at least one particular genre of Early Modern legal books it would be impossible to write its history without taking the collections at Tübingen into consideration, but it is closer to the truth to say that only the Universitätsbibliothek Tübingen made me thinking about this genre. I hope to follow and complete my investigations. Most of all, I cherish the foundations I could lay for such research thanks to the gentle support of Professor Nörr and the efforts of the library staff.

A second loss

While musing about my fond memories I remembered another thing. Knut Wolfgang Nörr belonged to a family with three of Germany’s best lawyers, a Dreigestern (three-star). Last year Dieter Nörr (1931-2017), too, passed away. In my Munich years I worked at the Abteilung B for German and Bavarian legal history of the Leopold-Wenger-Institut für Rechtsgeschichte, but luckily I was also in touch with the department for the legal history of Classical Antiquity in its fullest extent. Dieter Nörr, his colleagues and the marvellous library for ancient law ensure that yearly many young scholars come to Munich. For me it was striking to see during the famous Roman law seminar the similarities between the two brothers, in particular his humility and humour in admitting something was too difficult for him to solve. The In Memoriam on the institute’s website says infinitely more about him.

A true professor inspires not only by his research, teaching and publications, but with his whole person, his behaviour and way of living. Knut Wolfgang Nörr set an example of questioning existent views, immersing himself in the matters at stake and charting new territories, and perhaps above all, taking interest in people and sharing his curiosity and wisdom. Even in the few times I met him these qualities were visible. The community of legal historians has lost again one of its giants. Let’s keep alive the sparkle that lived so strong in Knut Wolfgang and Dieter Nörr!

A postscript

On April 12, 2019 the Universität Tübingen held a memorial session. The three papers of this session with an introduction by Jan Schröder have been published online in the Fokus section of the journal Rechtsgeschichte – Legal History 28 (2020).

E.T.A. Hoffmann, writer, composer, draughtsman and lawyer

The huge influence of German science and culture on the development of history as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century is something taken for granted. The image of a German professor lost in abstract thought in a country yearning for its romantic past is almost a caricature. However, not only professors walked through German university towns. In this post I will look at a well-known German writer who was also an active lawyer, serving as a judge. In December 2016 the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz launched the beta version of the E.T.A. Hoffmann portal. On December 12, 2017 its final version was revealed. Not only in Berlin events are currently organized around Hoffmann. Let’s look what will fit into one post!

A man of many talents

At the portal you will find the following quote by Hoffmann: “Die Wochentage bin ich Jurist und höchstens etwas Musiker, sonntags, am Tage wird gezeichnet, und abends bin ich ein sehr witziger Autor bis in die späte Nacht”, on weekdays I am a lawyer and at the best a tiny bit musician, on Sundays I am drawing, and in the evening I am a very funny author until late night. I fear any attempt at a short biography of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) will inevitably be much longer than this one revealing description. Hoffman was born in Köningsberg (now Kaliningrad). In 1792 he started studying law, but soon he used also his musical talents as a teacher. His study went well, bringing him already early on to Berlin, but he worked also in Poznan, Plock and Warsaw, in that period part of Prussia. A rather successful period in Poznan, where some of his compositions were received well, ended with an affair around anonymous caricatures behind which one suspected rightly Hoffmann.

The arrival of the French to Warsaw in 1806 brought a temporary end to his career as a Prussian servant. Eventually he settled in Bamberg as a conductor, and later he worked in the city theater. In 1816 he became a Kammergerichtsrat, but he unsuccessfully kept trying to work as a conductor, too. Meanwhile Hoffmann had started writing literary works. Under the restoration regime after the Napoleonic period he had in Berlin from 1819 onwards rather surprisingly the task to investigate people suspected of subversive plans. Hoffman used his knowledge of a particular case in his story Meister Floh, but he was charged with unlawful behaviour because he had allegedly publicized matters he was not allowed to divulge as a state official. Just before his case went on trial Hoffmann died after a prolonged illness.

If anything this brief overview shows in a nutshell many aspects of life and culture in Germany from around 1790 to around 1820. It is characteristic of Hoffmann to be aware of the many sides of his short life. Hoffmann’s sketch from 1815 of the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin, the Kunz’scher Riss, is presented at the portal as an interactive map bringing you to a life with many facets. Hoffmann lived nearby this central square in Berlin with the Nationaltheater. In the following paragraphs I will look only at some sections of the Hoffmann portal, but in fact you can find interesting matters in every corner.

Earning his bread with law

During his short life Hoffmann earned most of his bread as a lawyer. The portal has a large section E.T.A. Hoffmann als Jurist by Hartmut Mangold. Hoffmann studied law only in Königsberg, and for just three years. We are used to German students visiting several universities during their student years, sometimes to hear the lectures of a particular professor, sometimes for other qualities of a city. Hoffmann made such rapid progress that he could start very quickly with the practical part of his legal education, first in 1795 as an Auskultator (hearer) at Glogau, and from 1798 onwards as a Referendar in Berlin. He earned enough praise to follow his career in 1800 as an assessor (judge) at the Obergericht of Poznan (Posen). However, within a month he had to move to the small town Plock because of the affair with the caricatures. The two years at Plock were unhappy, but his efforts were recognized by his superiors who sent him in 1804 as a Regierungsrat to Warsaw. The French occupation of Warsaw in 1806 ended a lucky period of hard work as a judge combined with eager cultural activities.

In 1814 Theodor von Hippel, a former friend from Königsberg, helped him to work again as a judge, first at a kind of minimum wage as a voluntary at the Berlin Kammergericht. Only after two years he got the full normal salary. His hard work brought him in 1819 a call to become a member of the special investigation committee, and in 1821 he moved to a rank at the coveted appeal court, the Oberappelationssenat. Mangold looks at Hoffmann’s views of the Schmolling case to assess his views as a judge in criminal cases. Hoffmann carefully analyzed a medical consultation which deemed Schmolling was not liable for his actions. In a following section you will see Hoffmann as a very conscientious member of the special committee which stood as one man against political influence and overruling by higher authorities. The committee had the task of a public attorney to bring legal actions against supposed offenders of the restrictions on political freedom. The committee saw in almost every case no criminal offense which could led to further persecution. He had to deal for example with Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, the man behind the popularity of gymnastics in Germany, often nicknamed Turnvater Jahn, who brough a case for defamation against Albert von Kamptz, a high Prussian official, who had slandered his name anonymously in two newspapers.

Hoffman dealt in a humourous way with Albert von Kamptz in his story Meister Floh [Master Flea]. The story ended with the dismissal of the mischievous official who had created a case out of a few words. However, Von Kamptz recognized himself quickly in Hoffmann’s publication, and started a disciplinary action against him with the argument that Hoffmann had broken his duty to reveal nothing from official procedures. Hoffmann defended himself by pleading for poetic freedom. He died before a trial against him could start. Mangold rightly stresses the way in which Hoffmann conformed to the ethos of Prussian law and lawyers.

A self-portrait drawing by Hoffmann instead of just signing a letter – collection E.T.A. Hofmann-Archiv, SBPK, Berlin

Writing about Hoffmann I noticed how my enthusiasm to know more about him and about his work as a Prussian lawyer steadily grew. You had better look yourself! A major part of the portal is a digital library for many of his works and papers. You will find letters, editions of his work, portraits, manuscripts, music scores, drawings and ex libris. In the corner Kurioses you will all kind of matters, from a massive wine bill by a Berlin firm to some funny drawings. Hoffman twice kept a diary, during 1803 and 1804 at Plock, and in the years spent between 1809 and 1815 in Bamberg, Dresden and other towns in Saxony.

It is great to find on this portal chapters accompanying the sections of the digital library. Thus you are enabled to look both at for example Hoffmann’s views on music as a discerning critic, gaining even approval and thanks from Beethoven, and at his compositions. His most successful opera Undine had a successful premiere in 1816 and gained high praise from Carl Maria von Weber, but unfortunately the Schauspielhaus burned down after the fourteenth performance. It marked the end of his career as a composer. Earlier on Hoffmann had changed his third name to Amadeus, a fair measure of the importance of music for him.

Large sections of the portal are devoted to research on Hoffmann. You can for example look at an attempt to reconstruct his personal library. His juridical books were restricted to almost exclusively works on contemporary Prussian law. He presumably used in Berlin other books from the library of the Kammergericht. I had expected to find legal materials also in the digital library of the Hoffmann portal, but these are simply absent, nor in printed form or in manuscript. Among all the qualities of the portal I missed references to the services of the Kalliope-Verbund, housed at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, the great database with a German and English interface for searching personal papers and manuscripts of famous persons in the German-speaking world held by archives, libraries and museums. The Kalliope database rightfully alerts you to materials concerning Hoffmann in a substantial number of collections, with of course the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin-Preussischer Kulturbesitz at the first place.

Hoffmann in Berlin, Bamberg and Düsseldorf

The Staatsbibliothek in Berlin is the home of the E.T.A. Hoffmann archive. The Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, too, has holdings concerning Hoffmann. At the website of this library is a selection of drawings, early editions and letters. A look at the German Wikipedia page for Hoffmann brings me to a link for more works by Hoffman digitized at Bamberg. The page on Hoffmann as a lawyer leads only to the edition of his juridical works by Friedrich Schnapp [Juristische Arbeiten (Munich 1973)] and one article by Stefan Weichbrodt, ‘E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776 bis 1822)’. Juristische Schulung 2008/1, 7-13. Luckily Mangold gives us more at the Berlin portal. The E.T.A. Hoffmann Gesellschaft has made Hoffmann’s house in Bamberg into a museum. You can see six virtual exhibitions at their website, including one about the story of Meister Floh and its impact. With interfaces in seven languages you are bound to read something on the website of the Hoffmann Society which you can understand sufficiently.

In the last section I will turn to another story by Hoffmann which is now the heart of an exhibition at the Heinrich-Heine-Institut in Düsseldorf, Nussknacker und Mausekönig (Nutcracker and Mouse King), with much attention for the modern drawings for this story by Sabine Friedrichson. Hoffmann was and is famous for his certainly for Germany pioneering grisly tales. Combined with elements from other stories by Hoffmann a script was created for Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet, surely one of the most enduring and beloved ballet scores. Les contes de Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach is an opera in which at least two stories by Hoffmann have been used to create its libretto.

Some contemporaries concluded Hoffman was a bewildering figure, not to be taken seriously, but Hoffmann gained also admiration for his stories and music. Contemporary lawyers took him most seriously. If you look for some moments at Hoffmann’s life in a country suffering from the Napoleonic wars and its conservative aftermath you will recognize how sharp he saw the very different elements of life, war and society. In a romantic era his figure might at first seem romantic, but there is good reason to agree with Rüdiger Safranski in his masterful study Romantik. Eine deutsche Affäre [Romanticism. A German affair] (Munich 2007) that Hoffmann was a sceptic phantasy writer (“ein skeptischer Phantast”). In 1984 Safranski published a biography of Hoffmann with the same subtitle.

In this post with in the last paragraph a reference to a ballet which nowadays belongs to a particular period of the year, I bring you indeed to the end of this year. When you are weary of legal history, listening to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker or reading some of Hoffmann’s tales will hopefully bring you some moments of delight and wonder.

New ways to medieval city registers

How do you get the larger picture? Almost with a sigh we often long to see wide vistas, yet at the same time we want to zoom in while looking at a panorama of particular things. In this post I will look both at a repertory of particular sources, medieval and Early Modern city registers, for one country, Germany, and at an attempt to create a similar overview for medieval Europe. Last week I was alerted to the project for Germany, but this week I noticed also the project for a wider overview, and comparing the two projects is the most natural thing to do.

Efforts in Germany

The German project for Deutsche Stadtbücher has a subtitle in Latin, Index Librorum Civitatum. On closer inspection this portal can indeed be viewed in German, English and Latin. As for now the Latin is restricted to the headings of fields and filters. The project is the fruit of cooperation between the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the history department at the Universität Halle-Wittenberg and the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCEH). The portal offers four main entrances to search: cities, city registers, literature and archives. The word Archives stands here for holding institutions, not only archives, but also libraries. You can also use a free text field search. It is possible to search only for digitized registers, too. An extra is offered in the expert search mode, and you can also use an interactive map. This map can be used with some filters, but it seems a number of them is not yet active. However, you can go to a second interactive map, the DARIAH-Geobrowser which enables you to filter for periods and series of Stadtbücher. The loading of the results takes some time… On the main map you can select other countries as well. The database has for example currently entries for two Dutch cities, Kampen and Groningen. It is great to have bibliographies for many cities.

City registers or municipal registers is a very broad term. The strength of this project is certainly the creation of eleven categories, ten categories with in four of them attention for those registers most dear to legal historians, court registers, statutes and bylaws, council registers, and the classic registers for acts and charters (cartularies). In the eleventh category you will find everything which does not clearly fit into one of the other categories.

In such a vast project, spanning five centuries, you will find inevitably aspects which are either exhaustively or rather sparingly covered. Project leader Christoph Speer explains at his staff web page that for some Bundesländer he could build on the work of Reinhard Kluge in the former DDR for 450 cities with 70,000 registers, and he refers to a number of publications about the project and German city registers.

Getting a larger view

In 2014 I wrote here about a number of projects for the digitization of Dutch and Flemish city registers, in particular court registers and council deliberations. I discussed projects for Leuven, Liège, and ‘s-Hertogenbosch (Bois-le-Duc). I briefly mentioned some maritime registers at Amsterdam and a project for medieval charters in Tilburg. The Leuven project Itinera Nova is supported by the municipal archive and the Universität Köln. Especially when I looked at the map of the Stadtbücher project in which a center of this university is one of the main partners I wondered for a few moments why Leuven is not mentioned, but it is better to look first of all within the limits set for the Stadtbücher project.

Having within your reach a good and consistent repertory for one country is a fine thing, but often we set out to search for a digital version of one particular source, instead of going first to a relevant repertory. In this context it is perhaps a blessing in disguise that until recently I had not found many digitized medieval municipal registers. I had noticed a French project, Le Petit Thalamus de Montpellier, and a Scottish project, Law in the Aberdeen council registers, 1389-1511. In my 2015 post about portals for medieval history I mentioned briefly the section Paris médiéval at Ménestrel with much attention to legal documents. By the way, similar section at Ménestrel for Lissabon is promising, but has not yet reached this level.

However, very recently I encountered the project Registres des déliberations municipales au Moyen-Âge: La voix des assemblées [REGIDEL], a project concerning cities in Southern France led by the Telemme laboratory at Aix-en-Provence. On November 24, 2017 the symposium Enregistrer les conflits. Pratiques délibératives et scripturales des conseils urbains en temps de crise (XIIIe-XVe siècles, Europe méridionale) [To note conflicts. Practices of deliberation and scriptural practice in urban councils in times of crises, 13th-15th centuries, in Southern Europe] took place. The project blog contains articles about cities such as Turin, Toulouse, Digne and cities in the Emilia-Romagna, in particular for Bologna.

A companion to the REGIDEL project has got its own acronym, MUAR, for Medieval Urban Assembly Records, nothing less than a projected repertory for urban council records in medieval Europe. Like REGIDEL it is currently a blog at the Hypotheses platform. The website aims at becoming an archival and biographical repertory of municipal registers, with a focus on council registers, covering the period from the late twelfth to the early sixteenth century. The interface is in English, French and Italian. Currently there are sections reserved for France, Italy, the Iberian peninsula, the German empire, Britain and Ireland, the Low Countries and other countries. The striking feature here is the wish to classify cities in one region. For a moment I thought the team behind MUAR had fallen into the trap of placing cities in regions which successively were ruled by different rulers, but they mean current regions, for France even the départements.

When I checked the various headings I found partially the same cities as mentioned above for REGIDEL. For Italy you can find Perugia, San Gimignano, Bologna, Reggio Emilia and L’Aquila. Orvieto is the most recent addition, but it has not yet been included in the section for Italy. Most links in this post are internal references. So far Marseille is the only French town in MUAR. All other sections are under construction. For each town a timeline of important events is provided. I decided to check the page for Bologna, a town which figured here in a number of posts, for examples concerning Italian city statutes and municipal ordinances. In one post I portrayed Bologna also as a center of legal history when discussing two projects in Bologna for the digitization of medieval legal manuscripts. In this post I mentioned for the Archivio di Stato di Bologna the digital version of the Estimi di Bologna di 1296-97, records estimating the properties of Bolognese citizens, and the Liber Paradisus, a register about the liberation of nearly six thousand slaves at Bologna in 1257. The MUAR project does mention the critical edition of the Liber Paradisus by F.S. Gatta and G. Plessi, Liber paradisus. Con le riformagioni e gli statuti connessi (Bologna 1956), but not the digital version. The Estimi do not figure at all, nor the digitized Registro grosso (1116-1380) and the Registro nuovo. It is tempting to say the team at MUAR has not yet realized how daunting their objective is, but we can read the notice telling the team is looking for scholars willing to cooperate with them. In view of the German project it seems wise they change from a blog to an online database to enhance search possibilities.

For Italy one can benefit from the Scrineum project of the universities of Pavia and Verona, and more specifically from the Atlante della documentazione comunale italiana (secoli XII-XIV). This Atlante certainly does not cover all Italian towns, but you can find entries for cities such as Genua, Asti, Vercelli, and in particular for Florence. Scrineum provides you with background essays about notaries and libri iurium, and with essays on types of municipal legislation, with text examples from Genua and Florence. Is it safe to assume that there are various groups of historians dealing with legal documents in medieval Italian towns, and that every group has a particular focus? Instead of taking you with me through all kind of resources I had better translate words of Paolo Cammarosano: “As for municipal libri iurium for which there is now a prospect of the creation of a repertory and successively editions, the analysis to be done must reckon with great complexity, different articulations, mixing of matters and outright disorder (…)”, a quote from his article ‘I libri iurium e la memoria storica delle città comunali’, in: Le scritture del Comune. Amministrazione e memoria nelle città dei secoli XII e XIII (Turin 1998) 95-108, online at Rete Medievali Open Archive. The impression of a quick search for literature on libri iurium in the online bibliography of the Regesta Imperii is that of a wide variety of publications focusing on a fairly restricted number of Italian cities.

 In the wake of earlier projects

One of the questions to ask for both the German and the French-Italian project is the presence and use of earlier printed repertories and related projects. For the Stadtbücher the team could rely on a project for the Bundesländer in the former DDR as a substantial point of depart. On a European scale fifty years ago a team with a great role at the start for two Dutch scholars, J.F. Niermeyer and C. van de Kieft, edited the first volume of the Elenchus fontium historiae urbanae (Leiden 1967), a project for sources before 1250. The first volume deals with Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries. The other volumes cover France and Luxemburg (vol. II.1, 1996), Great Britain and Ireland (vol. II.2, 1988), Austria (vol. III.1, 1992) and Hungary (vol. III.2, 1997). On the website of the Commission Internationale pour l’Histoire des villes (CIHV) you can find PDF’s with the preface and overview of the contents of the volumes I and II.2. The Elenchus contains selected texts for the early history of medieval towns. The CHIV also stimulated the creation of country bibliographies.

For Germany it is easy to mention recent and earlier works. Ulrich-Dieter Oppitz published the massive repertory Deutsche Rechtsbücher des Mittelalters (3 vol. in 4 parts, Cologne 1990-1992), in itself a successor to the earlier work by Carl Gustav Homeyer, Die deutsche Rechtsbücher des Mittelalters und ihre handschriften (Berlin 1856; online, Hathi Trust Digital Library; text only, German Wikisource) and his earlier Verzeichnis from 1836 (online, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich). Both works deal with legal treatises such as the Sachsenspiegel and Schwabenspiegel, but they look also at the laws of individual cities. A number of Rechtsbücher, influential municipal laws, and Schoffensprüche (decisions of aldermen) figure in the online version of the Repertorium Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters under the heading Stadtrecht. I invite you to check also for example at Archivportal-D and the Archives Portal Europe for all kinds of city registers, for they can offer a quick way to relevant registers, too.

Many Dutch rechtsboeken have been edited by member of the Society for Old Dutch Law. Some of the nineteenth-century editions in the first series of editions will not quite stand the proof of modern textual criticism, but at least a large number of them has been digitized at Heidelberg for the Textarchiv accompanying the online version of the Deutsches Rechtswörterbuch. It would be a good thing to create an overview of these texts, the original sources and whenever possible their current digital presence.

To conclude this contribution, proposing the creation of either a national or an European overview of city registers in their various forms is one thing, creating them in a sensible and feasible way implies thorough reflection on many matters before even starting such a project. Overviews of one particular source genre can be most useful, but you cannot lift a source or a genre out of their context completely without impairing in the end historical understanding. This consideration works certainly as a factor which makes scholars rightfully hesitant to cooperate in such projects. The fact that you work with partners from other countries will surely help to widen your horizon and question your assumptions. Let´s wish all courageous scholars who nevertheless join these projects wisdom, good luck and stamina!

A postscript

My view of the German project Stadtbücher is rather positive, but it is right to add at least one comment from Klaus Graf at Archivalia who criticizes the working of the filters and the absence of information for some German regions, in particular Baden-Württemberg. In my opinion the north of Germany is covered massively, for other regions you can clearly wish for more. For Saxony you can benefit from the Gerichtsbücher database for some 22,000 registers concerning voluntary jurisdiction, for example property sales, mortgages, custody and wills.

I spotted in open access the most valuable article on Magdeburger Recht by Heiner Lück in the Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte III (2nd ed., Berlin 2013) col. 1127-1136.