Research projects

Emmy Noether Junior Research Group: Common Informing: Arbitrary Enforcement in Early Modern England

Head: Prof. Dr. Hannes Ziegler, staff members: Christine Gerwin, Nina Opgen-Rhein

The enforcement of penal statutes in early modern England was often achieved via the legal principle of qui tam and the practice of common informing: the private prosecution of economic, social, religious, and political deviance was financially rewarded. Persons otherwise unaffected by the statutory violation thus became advocates of the common good with executive capacities, for all legal decisions were binding even for the Crown. Well known among legal historians, this form of common law prosecution has rarely been viewed in its implications for early modern authority and remains little studied in its political and social dimension. Here, however, it promises new insights: Circumventing the necessity for expensive administrative institutions, governments were able to delegate the enforcement of authority to their subjects. The latter, however, were thereby enabled to encroach on government prerogatives. Accordingly, some subjects’ opportunities for participation increased. Because of its denunciatory character, however, informing also led to a rise in social tensions and new vertical dependencies. Relations between subjects and rulers formed and regulated by informing were thus highly ambiguous for both sides and highlight structural tensions still prevalent in modern politics.

The project aims, for the first time, to write a coherent history of common informing in early modern England via three case studies. An important aim is to locate informing in the context of early modern rule and authority in England. Methodologically, the project aims to take the notorious ambiguity of such arrangements seriously. To this end, the project chooses to describe informing on the part of informers as arbitrary acts: Informers had every right to act as they did, and yet they acted without specific office or mandate and routinely defied political and social norms. The effects of such actions in turn cannot be subsumed in a narrative of subjects’ emancipation or successful state-building either. Their structural ambiguity is captured, therefore, in the neutral formula of authority effects. On the whole, the project aims to study the emergence of authority as an interaction of rulers and subjects specific to the common law. The project thereby offers, on the one hand, a contribution to the ongoing debate around early modern state-building and offers, on the other hand, the possibility for an engagement with current debates about surveillance, private policing, and governance. Learn more

Invective asymmetrization. Diatribes in Italian and German humanism

Applicant: Prof. Dr. Uwe Israel †, project management: Prof. Dr. Gerd Schwerhoff, Prof. Dr. Christian Jaser (co-opted)

Collaborators: Dr. Marius Kraus, Pablo Maria Borgialli, M.A.

What does 'humanism' mean and who belongs to the group of 'humanists'? These questions were clarified by contemporaries, not least in actu, using invective, according to the initial thesis of the project.

Intellectuals who, from the mid-14th century onwards, regarded rhetoric as the most noble method of promoting virtue, searching for truth and knowledge of God, saw the use of personal disparagement as a suitable means of asserting and defending their values, views and positions. This has only recently been recognized by researchers and evaluated in its full implications for an appropriate understanding of humanism. For a long time, humanist invectives were ignored by researchers, even neglected. Controversial writings against individuals or groups that were perceived as pubescent or even obscene did not fit into the lofty image that people liked to have of the protagonists of an educational movement based on the classics - yet it is precisely the investigation of this apparent contradiction that promises new insights into humanism.

The project stems from a sub-project proposal for the second term of the Dresden Collaborative Research Center 1285 "Invectivity. Constellations and Dynamics of Disparagement". In the 2017-21 project "Agonal invectives. Diatribe Duels in Italian and German Humanism", the fundamental significance of agonality and the rituality of contentious disputes in invective events was of particular interest. The focus was on the group formation processes in humanism that were dynamized by invective, in continuation of studies that already clearly show the importance of competitive practices for social group formation. Learn more

Completed projects