'Historia literaria iuris' Beispiele juristischer Literaturgeschichten im 18, Jahrhundert (Historia Literaria Iuris: Examples of Juridical Literary Histories in the 18th Century)

No. 2013-03

The article "Historia literaria iuris. Examples of juridical literary histories in the 18th century“ evolved in the context of a colloquium on the various disciplines in the "Historia literaria“ which was hosted by the Institute of German Philology at the University of Munich in October 2007. On the basis of the secondary literature in the individual disciplines, the history of their development and the separation of fields of study as a whole were investigated. The theme was the function of the "Historia literaria“ in presenting and ordering knowledge, its pedagogical functions, the construction of hierarchies and its usefulness for investigating the history of knowledge and scholarship.

At the centre of the present study lie the juridical encyclopedias of the 18th century and the scholarly practice of the "mos gottingensis“ of the University of Götttingen, which were fundamentally influenced by the "historia literaria iuris seu iurisprudentiae“. The purpose of this literary genre was to bring the expanding field of knowledge into a readable and instructive format. This led to legal science as a whole splintering into legal sub-disciplines. Thereby a process of differentiation was set in motion within the individual legal subjects which led to the creation of basic and subsidiary fields of scholarship. Bibliographies of individual legal subjects and dogmatic legal questions were the result. A perennial problem was created by the questions and criteria surrounding the selection of books and titles which documented the academic discussion and which led to typologies within the bibliographies themselves.

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