Knowledge of the Production of Normativity
Research Fields
If one conceives of the history of law as the history of translation processes in which normative knowledge is produced, specific historical regimes of this production of normative knowledge emerge as key subjects of research. If one also assumes that the production of normative knowledge can only be understood as social practice, then the practices, rules, principles and norms of how historical actors engaged with normative knowledge, as well as the material and media factors, gain special significance.
These common themes are the focus of the projects and cross-cutting activities in this Research Field. They explore the textuality and materiality of law in the Middle Ages, in modern canon law and in moral theology. They show how material practices, aesthetic perceptions, translations of normative knowledge from other regions, and historical narratives – thus including legal historiography itself – shape the production of legal knowledge. This Research Field is one of the areas in which the concepts of ‘translation’ and ‘multinormativity’, developed at the Institute in recent years, are further elaborated and explored.
