Normativitätserzeugungswissen am kaiserlichen Reichshofrat. Theoretische Grundlagen und empirische Perspektiven

The presentation will be held in German with an accompanying PowerPoint presentation in English.

Global and knowledge-historical perspectives represent a productive challenge to the statist positions that still characterise much of legal history – the deficiencies of which have become increasingly clear in recent times. This also applies to research on the Holy Roman Empire, which dominated Central Europe until 1806. This empire had two central courts, the Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskammergericht) and the Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat), which have been the subject of intensive study in German legal history since the 1960s.

In order to utilise the rich fruits of this research in terms of global history, German historians will have to stop reconstructing the history of the Imperial Chamber Court and Imperial Aulic Council teleologically in terms of developmental steps leading towards the rule of law in the modern state. The process categories frequently used in the literature on the Holy Roman Empire, such as juridification, rationalisation and professionalisation, are inadequate when describing knowledge of the production of normativity. What is needed is a sociology of a judicial production of norms that sees the practices of the judges in constant interaction with social normativity regimes.

Using the example of the Imperial Aulic Council, I want to demonstrate how organisational and social analysis can be successfully linked together. At the same time, I would like to illustrate the demands that such a link makes on legal-historical archival work. To this end, I will present a Digital Humanities project currently being planned that will focus on the minutes of the Council’s meetings and offer numerous starting points for comparative studies of knowledge of the production of normativity in the Holy Roman Empire and the Ibero-American region.

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