Visualizing Generational Change in Early Modern Law Dissertations

Abstract

In the seventeenth century, German jurisprudence saw important thematic and methodological shifts. This article employs a distinctive visualization approach to examine whether these changes can be attributed to specific age cohorts or whether they were adopted across generations. Interrogating the metadata of over 20,000 legal dissertations defended at German universities, it visualizes relative frequencies of title keywords and decomposes them by the dissertation supervisors' age at the time of publication. The increasing use of bilingual titles that combined Latin and the German vernacular can be attributed to younger age cohorts who entered the profession after the end of the Thirty Years' War, nuancing explanations of shifts in early modern academic language as primarily driven by the intention and initiative of eminent individuals. In contrast, the sudden drop in mentions of controversia in the 1610s was a much broader and swifter cross-generational shift, possibly indicating a shared desire to avoid association with the increasingly established genre of confessional polemics. Finally, the late emergence of dissertation titles mentioning territory suggests that one of the most consequential legal-political concepts of the century faced more academic inertia than assumed and adds to our knowledge of the connection between career motives and subject choice.