In the margins, or, Unexpected testimonies of everyday encounters

It was on 13 September 1781, a Thursday to be precise, that a certain Pierre François, municipal sergeant in service of the city magistrate of Luxembourg, on behalf of the Provincial Council in Luxembourg – an organism charged with the governance of the then Duchy of Luxembourg under Habsburg rule – an ordinance decreed only three days before.

Ordained as a matter of urgency on 10 September 1781, it was a response to outbreaks of dysentery, a severe intestinal infection, often accompanied by putrid fever. Affecting in particular the poverty-stricken areas in the rural Duchy, the ordinance testifies to an early form of public health intervention, instructing local authorities to cover the costs of medical care for the impoverished and destitute. The fear of the disease continuing to spread certainly dictated the short interval between the initial decision-making process as well as the typesetting and printing process on the one hand, and the actual publication of the ordinance on the other.

François, who had acted in his capacity as municipal sergeant ever since his official commission in April 1780, reported back to the Council by means of a handwritten note, elaborating on where – and, more importantly, how – he made the ordinance public:

Messieurs, Cejourd’hui 13 ^e 7 ^bre 1781 je sergent soussigné de ce Magistrat ai duement publié la présente ord[onnan]ce sur les Coins et Lieux accoutumés tant dans la haute que les basses villes aux fins y reprises et j’ai affiché une pareille copie à la breteque à cet hotel de ville. (sic!)

Strange as it is, François’ handwritten testimony, although undeniably an invaluable repository of historical information, prompts us to pause for a moment and come to a necessary halt. For to a contemporary audience like us, a handwritten note such as this may evoke a certain unease, raising more questions than it actually seems to answer.

Particularly pertinent in the exacting circumstances of a worsening public health situation, the question of what mechanisms were available to local authorities to render regulatory measures public not only points to the stark discrepancy in terms of the public communication of law when measured against our contemporary standards, but also exposes the structural insufficiencies with which the administrative apparatus of the period was confronted in daily practice.

Indeed, in this third accompanying post to the temporary exhibition in the reading room on early modern legal texts, we direct our attention to what recent scholarship has termed ‘object biographies.’ More specifically, we focus on the often spontaneous and informal interaction that, in various ways, made their way into – or onto the margins of – early modern ordinances and decrees. Here, the term biographies refers above all to the overlapping, sometimes conflicting, and historically accumulated webs of relationships that manifest in, on, and through these legal texts—understood and interpreted as material objects. And this discrepancy already starts with the experience of law itself.

We in the 21^st century tend to associate law almost instinctively with the written word. Law, for us, exists in the quiet endurance of paper – or more precisely, in towering tomes, densely annotated codes, and cascading paragraphs of highly specialized language. Nowhere is this more visible than in the context of the European Union, whose legal machinery is often perceived as labyrinthine, abstract, and difficult to grasp – a bureaucratic apparatus both omnipresent and impenetrable. And here in Luxembourg, this perception takes on particular resonance. On the Kirchberg plateau, not far from where this exhibition is standing, the institutions of European law are established: the European Court of Justice, legal think tanks, translation units, and the University of Luxembourg’s Faculty of law. A whole topography of legal production, interpretation, and negotiation surrounds us.

In early modern Europe, however, law was primarily an acoustic experience. Ordinances and decrees were proclaimed aloud, read after Sunday mass or announced in public squares. The majority of the population – spread across the Duchy’s rural areas in small villages and humble towns, encountered legal norms not by reading them, but by hearing them. And the voice through which law was projected, repeated, and performed was that of local office holders such as Pierre François.

The historical documents on display both here online and in the reading room offer a compelling counterpoint: they remind us that the textuality of law should not be considered self-evident. On the contrary, it invites us to reflect upon the different material forms which law has taken over time and how this process has shaped its perception and internalisation. Authority, much more than being encoded in the written word, needed to be embodied by local proxies. Power, as scholars have taught us, was heavily reliant on performance. One such performative practice, which has been preserved in the margins of a great many early modern legal texts, was their official publication across the Duchy of Luxembourg. Thus, Pierre François is one of more than 30 local office holders that have left their traces in the corpus of early modern edicts and ordinances presently inventoried and digitised at the National Library of Luxembourg.

Announced by drumbeat (“Au son du tambour”), as many of these official accounts do not fail to specify, bailiffs, local officials and other such magistrates often rode from village to village, proclaiming the new law usually after Sunday service as parishioners exited the church. Thus, the effectiveness of any ordinance ultimately rested on these local officers and their willingness to proclaim it. When they failed to do so, as many surviving complaints and reports suggest they often did, entire communities could remain unaware of new regulations, levies, or punishments that technically governed their lives. It seems evident that many a social grievance stems from the transient nature of law which quite literally was often but passing through.

Beyond these official traces, however, we also encounter more spontaneous forms of engagement. Shaped by habit, necessity, or chance, they were the results of improvised, personal responses which often went beyond the actual content of the legal text. These annotations – some more pertinent than others – give testimony to the manifold ways in which contemporaries absorbed these legal texts, subsequently embedding them in their own socio-political cosmos. One of the more stunning examples of such a meaningful interaction that both testifies to the reading process itself as much as it gives expression to deeply personal stances which individuals adopted during the act of reading, materialised exemplarily on the reverse of a copy of an imperial edict on the independence of the religious orders in the Austrian Netherlands from all foreign authority, mandated in Brussels on 28 November 1781. On the back of the last leaf of an otherwise clean copy showing no further traces of interaction, someone – perhaps himself a member of the clergy – left us with what can certainly be considered an enthusiastic approval of its content. Itself on the more artistic end of the spectre of traceable interaction present on these legal texts, this personal endorsement of the edict of 28 November 1781 comes in the form of a Latin chronogrammatic wordplay (fig. 3). Early modern chronograms often (but not exclusively) come in the form of Latin distichs – i.e. couplets of verse lines where one hexameter is followed by one pentameter – in which selected letters are capitalised to signal their numerical value as Roman numerals.

In our case, the chronogram is composed of two lines which must, when differentiating between capitalised and non-capitalised letters, be transcribed as follows:

IosephVs seCVnDVs aVgVstVs
reforMator CLerI

If we count this sequence of numerals to indicate their sum, we arrive at 1782. As critical observers we do not fail to notice, however, that the sum of the capitalised letters does not match the publication year, i.e. 1781, which one could have expected. But as so often, expectations are a dangerous thing. The simplest and most straightforward explanation for this can be deduced from the fact that, decreed in late November 1781, the edict was only ratified in Luxembourg almost a month later on 21 December. The author of these lines probably didn’t get his hands on a copy of this edict before the end of that year. We can support this loose conjecture by including the German translation of that same chronogram. Since the author was obliging enough to provide the German equivalent just underneath its Latin counterpart, we will do the same exercise once again:

IosephVs eIn zWeIter MaIestätIsCher
kaŸser Ist eIn Verbesserer Der
geIstLIChkeIt

As with the Latin verses above, the capitalised letters in the German translation add up to the sum of 1782 (that is, if we count the capitalised letter “Y” as two times the capital letter “I”), thus corresponding with our previous findings. Chronograms were particularly popular in the early eighteenth century, although their legacy is a divided one. Some even went as far as to talk of an outright “craze for chronograms” (Audrey, p. 93). The English playwright and politician Joseph Addison (1672-1719), ever so sharp-tongued, somewhat condescendingly observed that “when therefore we meet with any of these inscriptions (i.e. chronograms), we are not so much to look in ‘em for the thought, as for the year of the Lord.” (Augarde 1984, 92). Indeed, during Addison’s time chronograms became particularly associated with what he refers to as “German wits”. (Augarde 1984, 92)

That marginalia do not necessarily align with the substance of a legal text – should one even accept the premise that such an alignment is to be expected – is illustrated with particular force in another example. On a copy of Joseph II’s Edict on idle institutions from 17 March 1783, which was decreed by the Emperor to suppress what were judged to be superfluous monasteries, that is, of no further use to the state, we find to our astonishment a sequence of invoices documenting the sale of mutton between July and October 1795. Over the course of four months, a certain C. Hochstras – who we have not been able to identify thus far – purchased no less than 174 pieces of mutton from Dominicus (also written as Domminicus or Domminick in the document) Notumb from Rippweiler, a small village some 25 km to the northwest of Luxembourg. On 19 September 1795, for instance, Hochstras acquired 114 pieces of mutton at a rate of 20 Schillings apiece in a single transaction. The consistent nature of the transactions underscores Hochstras’s role as an important client and simultaneously offers an unexpected glimpse into still obscure aspects of Luxembourg’s economic and dietary history at the end of the Ancien Régime.

So much be clear: many of those forms of interaction that have left traces on these ordinances owe their existence to chance; to the lucky fact of being at hand – a surface readily available for interaction. What makes these handwritten marginalia and annotations particularly intriguing is that they resist systematic discovery. They must simply be encountered serendipitously. The historian, therefore, must remain attentive to information that may extend far beyond the legal content of the text. This underscores the fact that the nature or function of a document does not necessarily determine the kinds of information, be they deliberate or accidental, that have ended up on the printed page.

▪ 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.