Multinormativity in Early Modern Academia? The Challenge of Establishing »Good Scholarly Practice« in the 17th and 18th Centuries

Abstract

During the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the practices of learning were regulated by an informal »moral economy of knowledge«. Practices like fraud, plagiarism and symbolic claims to a superior social status were difficult to control and could not be handled by the law alone. Setting the norms for scholarly practices can thus serve as a case study for the workings of multinormativity in early modern societies. The deviant practices of scholars were addressed by religious norms, the ideals of courtly society and the emerging bourgeois society, and they were articulated in different media like satires, academic dissertations and moralizing pamphlets. The multinormativity of the discourse of scholarly vices was not compensatory but operated on different layers of normativity concerning both the sources of articulation and the origins of different norms. The paper traces in three steps how the norms of conduct of the learned were implemented. First, it discusses norms beyond the law, then it focuses on the jurist as an object of that normative order, and third it takes a look at the challenges of regulating practices of social distinction in juridical terms. Practices of self-fashioning beyond the limits of what was deemed acceptable were counted as misdemeanours but nevertheless were hard to sanctify. Grappling with that challenge became a multinormative project that offers new insights into the historicity of normative orders as well as orders of knowledge.