Norms in print, or, The anatomy of early modern legal texts

Legal texts are rarely read for their form. I would even go as far as to assume that their format (i.e. the physical characteristics) and their layout (i.e. the visual lay-out of the text) are features which we simply take for granted. Both have always been there and that could be the end of it. However, reality is often more complex than we want to realise.

Hence, it should come as no surprise that seemingly inconspicuous details often assume an unexpected role, occasionally revealing hidden structures, unsuspected tendencies, and implicit biases that might otherwise remain beyond comprehension. There is a story – uneventful and dull as it might seem at first – to be written and its unfolding would be none other than the tale of the progressive emergence of those conventions which continue to determine the physical characteristics and the visual arrangement of books and other printed media. As is so often the case, the period which we commonly refer to as the early modern plays a key role.

The standardising impulses of early modernity found their way deep into the printed page and so, the roots of many a convention in printed media must be located exactly here. That these conventions are now undergoing a more systematic and thorough reexamination than has previously been accounted for is neither surprising nor accidental. As the digital transformation marches on with quickening pace, institutions such as the National Library of Luxembourg are investing a growing pool of resources to propel the transition of its services and collections. One outspoken goal of this transition, consisting of the digitization of heritage collections, is thus geared towards the dematerialization so to speak of physical entities – i.e. manuscripts but also books, maps and other printed media – and their transformation into a digital form, followed by a process of deconstruction and atomization so as to render them machine readable. This elaborate procedure encourages both cultural institutions and researchers to embrace new technologies and to see them as an opportunity to rediscover heritage collections through an altogether different lense.

That the resurgence of interest in the materiality of early modern printed books should surface at a time when this materiality is seemingly being rendered obsolete is no mere coincidence. There is, as the saying goes, method to the madness. Since the quality of digital files is dependent on an adequate understanding of the historical materiality of those documents in question, it appears inevitable that a more critically engaged reflection on the material conditions that curators, librarians, archivists, and researchers encounter is called for. Yes, there is a new exegesis on the rise and its need for vast quantities of data seems insatiable.

As we take a look at what can be considered a characteristic of a title page of an eighteenth-century printed legal text (fig. 1), we realise just how many of these aforementioned granular data elements can be extracted. Beginning with the paper itself, through decorative woodcuts and typographic elements, down to the letters, typefaces, and individual punctuation marks. Yet the after data does not stop at these printing specifics. The very words formed by individual letters, and indeed the entire linguistic usage, could berestructured into various datasets. And then there are the individuals named in the print: a whole network of printers, high officials, court clerks, as well as military and ecclesiastical dignitaries would rise from these pages – if only the right questions were asked of. Clearly, any form of segmentation, that is, the correct identification and labelling of the components that make up a page in an early modern printed book, doesn’t just hold the inherent promise of providing enough information to supply entire databases, it also threatens to hopelessly overwhelm institutions and individual researchers alike. In keeping with the old saying: missing the forest for the trees.

But before we plunge too eagerly into the bottomless depths of our deconstructionist madness, we must first see our printed page for what it really is: a formidable example of the premodern state’s drive to standardisation and the lasting imprint it left, which continues to shape the legibility of normative texts today. Yes, our printed page stands at the far end of the very same process whose outset was marked by the increasing textualization of governance in the late medieval period. The early modern legislator was in constant competition with prevalent, mostly unwritten, customary law, this “living, negotiated tissue of practices which [were] continually (…) adapted to new ecological and social circumstances”, as James C. Scott has it in his Seeing like a Sate (Scott 2020, 34).

As efforts not merely to administer but also to unify a landscape characterized by a bewildering array of often conflicting legal traditions and overlapping jurisdictional systems were continuously increased, central authorities such as the one in Brussels came to rely more and more on printed laws as a practical means of implementing their aims of simplification and centralization. If rendering this dense tangle of still dominating customary law more legible was one outspoken aspiration of the rising bureaucratic apparatus of the so-called early modern state, print technology advanced to become its most important, albeit double-edged, ally. The standardisation we observe in the layout, format, and even language of legal texts was shaped by long, often subtle and hard-to-pin-down processes of emulation and imitation. Others have already suggested similar dynamics at work, and some have explored more systematically how administrations learned from one another, borrowed formats, and adapted existing models to their own (local) needs. These practices, so their main contention, left visible traces in the material and textual conventions that we see emerging between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.

By the end of the eighteenth century, these attributes had clearly asserted themselves: an introductory formula, typically set in noticeably larger type and frequently topped by a headpiece or heraldic motif, establishes a clear visual entry point, followed by a distinctively laid-out main text (fig. 2). Surrounded by generous inner and outer margins which allow for intensive annotations – thus hinting at the target audience already consisting of notaries, lawyers, and other such legal experts, the actual body text could present itself to the reader in a variety of forms.

Fully justified in most cases, meaning that the text would be aligned on both sides – considered both visually appealing and formally elegant – we nevertheless encounter different layouts as well. Especially in plurilingual contexts such as that which has always been characteristic of Luxembourg, it was not uncommon to publish bilingual texts set in two columns with one column showing the exact translation of the other (fig. 3). Since the majority of the laws decreed in Brussels and subsequently sent to Luxembourg so that they could be ratified by the Provincial Council there were published in French, we can assume that the translation process was ensured locally. That this opens up promising avenues for research – particularly into the process of translation, while also actively engaging with local language usage – seems obvious and is more than desirable. With the column, itself inherited from the Vulgate and other manuscript traditions, early modern legal texts kept carrying forward a long tradition that had begun in the world of handwritten books.

Yet alongside this continuity, print also opened the door to innovation as it gave way to new textual conventions. Among the most significant was the rise of the paragraph, which began to reshape how information was structured and, ultimately, made sense of. Depending on the nature and, more importantly, the complexity of a legal text, the paragraph came to assume an important role not only in increasing the legibility and navigatability of a text, but also in bestowing meaning upon it by regrouping sentences into logical sequences and organising them into a cohesive progression of distinct ideas (fig. 4).

An outright revolution of the then prevailing information technology, as Will Slauter has put it in his The Paragraph as Information Technology, the rise of the paragraph is inextricably associted with the advent of the printing press, by the help of which it “went from being a sign inscribed in the margins to a distinct textual unit marked off by white space or indented lines” (Slauter 2012, 258). Taken together, these individual paragraphs – or building blocks, if you like – which together made up the body text, thereby facilitating the navigation through at times abstract concepts. Alongside an unequivocal pagination, usually placed at the top of the document, clause headings provided essential tools to support structured access and generally improving navigational clarity for professionals; professionals who often had to scour through hundreds of pages of legal texts in short intervals of time.

Going beyond the main purpose of printed legal texts as repositories of expert knowledge, they also functioned as archives – albeit to a lesser degree. Owing to the material appearance and the accompanying life cycle of an ordinance – that is, its so-called object biography – these legal texts constantly oscillate between printed textuality and handwritten additions, which are at times arbitrarily appended to the print during its existence. For this reason, one could also say: printed legal texts blur the conventional boundaries between printed and handwritten documents. They are therefore printed matter and archival material at the same time. They recorded, both in print and through later handwritten additions, the names of key actors in the legal and administrative process: officials, magistrates, printers, lawyers, notaries. Printed names reflect premeditated inclusion by the authorities or printers, while handwritten names, often appended subsequently, testify to the ongoing object biography of the text. Distinguishing between these layers is crucial for identifying the individuals who operationalized governance on the ground.

The ratification clause (fig. 3), i.e. the concluding paragraph that mandates the publication of a norm in the Duchy of Luxembourg at the request of the Provincial Council and in accordance with directives from the central administration in Brussels, offers valuable insights. It reveals how the legal text was to be published, specifies locations for any republications, and, crucially, indicates where the President of the Council and the court clerk affixed their signatures. Identifying these signatories not only helps in verifying the document’s authenticity, but also allows us to examine more closely the officials who acted as intermediaries of central authority in Luxembourg. Clearly then, the ratification clause is an integral component of the strctural anatomy of an early modern legal text.

Continuing down to the bottom of the document, we arrive at the final element in the anatomy of the standardised early modern legal text: the printer’s mark. This imprint identifies the printer, often operating under royal or imperial privilege, who collaborated closely with the local administration and frequently produced large volumes of legal texts within short spans. As illustrated in figures 6 and 7, these printer’s marks are a surprisingly rich source of information.

They not only document the privileges held by the printer – as in the case of André Chevalier, who, as figure 6 shows, refers to himself as “ordinary printer to the king” (in this case Louis XIV) and to the Council – but sometimes also include the address of the printing house, thereby enabling us to map the locations of printers’ workshops in Luxembourg City. Similarly, figure 7 displays a typical title page, which, at the foot of the document, records the location of Élisabeth-Cathérine Kleber’s printing establishment, situated in the city’s Grand’ Rue, at house number 114. Together with their often incidental handwritten counterparts, added as the documents passed from hand to hand and owner to owner, these printed nominal traces transform these legal texts into more than mere sources of legal history: they become rich archival repositories of social, political, economic, and cultural life in the early modern duchy of Luxembourg.

▪ A selection of similar documents will be on display in the display cases outside the Rare Books Reading Room on the first floor from July to August 2025.