Projects
Here you will find information about projects concerning natural law which are carried out by the members.
Balázs, Péter
Gángó, Gábor
Ziel des Projektes ist es, den Beitrag von Johann Christian von Boineburg (1622–1672) zu den Naturrechtsdebatten zwischen Grotius und Pufendorf in Deutschland und in der internationalen Gelehrtenrepublik zu rekonstruieren.
Der zumeist nur noch als Förderer von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz bekannte Mainzer Oberhofmarschall Johann Christian von Boineburg hat als Anreger und Auftraggeber von zahlreichen sehr namhaften Gelehrten des 17. Jahrhunderts die intellektuelle Orientierung und Leistung einer ganzen Generation in Deutschland nach dem Westfälischen Frieden sowohl direkt als auch indirekt maßgeblich beeinflusst.
Boineburg verfolgte im Ausgang einer bereits früh erworbenen Bewunderung für den niederländischen Juristen, Historiker und Theologen Hugo Grotius ein groß angelegtes enzyklopädisches Projekt, das, aus religiösen Motiven gespeist, auf die Bewahrung und Vermehrung von politisch wie theologisch relevantem wahren Wissen zielte. Ein sich erst entwickelndes integrales Moment dieses an Grotius anknüpfenden und dessen Leistung fortsetzenden Projekts war die theoretische Formierung eines dezidiert christlichen Naturrechts, das Boineburg in der kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit Pufendorfs Elementa jurisprudentiae universalis (1660) voranzutreiben versuchte, allerdings nicht bzw. nicht nur mit eigenen intellektuellen Mitteln. Als einflussreicher Politiker, der zeitweilig als Oberhofmarschall in den Diensten des Kurmainzer Erzbischofs stand, machte er sich – wie sein Nachlass zeigt – zum Zentrum eines Gelehrtenkreises, der von ihm zur Ausarbeitung eines christlichen Naturrechts nicht nur angeregt, sondern geradezu beauftragt wurde. Im engen Kontakt mit Hermann Conring, Johann Heinrich Boecler und Samuel Rachel partizipierte Boineburg als auch inhaltlich involvierter Organisator an der Formierung eines für notwendig erachteten dezidiert christlichen Naturrechts.
Unter der Verwendung eines sehr breiten Corpus von unterschiedlichem Quellenmaterial – insbesondere handschriftlichen Zeugnissen – soll die Genese des christlichen Naturrechts als ein Kommunikationsprozess innerhalb eines Netzwerkes rekonstruiert und beschrieben werden, dessen Zentrum ein bisher nicht hinreichend sichtbar gewordener Akteur ist. Indem das christliche Naturrecht nicht bzw. nicht in erster Linie von seinen im Druck erschienenen Resultaten, sondern von dem Wechselspiel kommunikativer Interventionen aus rekonstruiert werden soll, können die bisher unbekannten theoretischen Hintergründe der Genese des christlichen Naturrechts und seiner Inhalte sowie die damit verbundenen weitreichenden politischen Ambitionen zum ersten Mal sichtbar gemacht werden. Damit wird nicht nur ein Beitrag zu Geschichte des christlichen Naturrechts geliefert, sondern zur Geschichte des Naturrechts insgesamt, denn die etwa von Boecler und Rachel in den Diskurs eingebrachten Positionen bleiben trotz der tatsächlichen oder auch nur vermeintlichen Dominanz des säkularisierten (bzw. sich säkularisierenden) Naturrechts als theologisch inspirierter Kontrapunkt für eine lange und noch immer nicht hinreichend abgeschätzte Zeit einflussreich.
The subject matter of the present project is a complex reconstruction of the intellectual and political contacts between Johann Christian von Boineburg (1622–72), Chief Minister of the Elector of Mainz, and Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff (1626–92), Chancellor in the Gotha court of Ernest “the Pious,” Duke of Saxe-Gotha.
Their communication extended to a three-year period between 1661 and 1663 that coincided with the intensification of the pressure of Electoral Mainz on Erfurt to regain its territorial sovereignty over the city. In the sphere of the republic of letters, it covered the years of the development of Boineburg’s (over)ambitious project concerning the (re-)appropriation of Hugo Grotius’s heritage in the form of a “Christian” natural law. While the political contacts between Boineburg and Seckendorff during the Erfurt crisis are thematised in the secondary literature (although the account needs revision and a better documentation), the present proposal opens a further research perspective of their relations by focussing also on their scholarly communication. Therefore, the project understands itself as a case study of particular importance concerning the intervowenness of influence in politics and in the republic of letters during the early Modernity. As a result, one will be in a better position to understand the causes of subsequent, career-changing events in the life of both protagonists in 1664: the political fall of Boineburg in Mainz and the end of Seckendorff’s office in Gotha. As the Erfurt issue exemplifies, the principal aim of both parties consisted in influencing their rulers – the power-holding decision makers – respectively, rather than making decisions themselves. As Boineburg’s fall and incarceration demonstrated clearly, even enormous influence could evaporate within a minute.
The present project portrays Boineburg at the peak of his influence. The reconstruction of his personal relations and co-operation with Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff in the sphere of Imperial politics as well as of the republic of letters invites for a further, comparative investigation of the affinities of their “Christian” natural law. Boineburg’s ideas were scattered in his correspondence and implemented as an unfinished project in Johann Heinrich Boecler’s In Hugonis Grotii Jus belli et pacis ad illustrissimum baronem Boineburgium commentatio (1663–4), while Seckendorff’s scheme materialized in his Christen-Staat (1685). Their communication provides a further proof that Boineburg inspired, to lesser or greater extent, a number of individual efforts to create a “Christian” opponent of Samuel Pufendorf’s “secular” natural law in late seventeenth-century Germany: Johann Heinrich Boecler, Samuel Rachel, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff.
The project is implemented on a Hiob-Ludolf-Fellowship at the Gotha Research Centre of Erfurt University in 2022.
The “Maecenas Germaniae,” the Baron Johann Christian von Boineburg (1622-1672) was a book collector, patron of the arts, Lord Marshal at the court of the Mainz Elector Johann Philipp von Schönborn, and not least friend and supporter of the young Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Boineburg’s private library as an encyclopaedic, with an abundant number of hand-written cross-references interconnected “database” and his extended scholarly correspondence provides the source basis for the mapping of the international network of politically, denominationally, and scholarly engaged intellectuals after the Peace of Westphalia.
My project aims at the reconstruction of Boineburg’s role in the knowledge transfer between Germany and Italy. This research would encompass details of the acquisition, circulation, and reviewing of Italian books within his network as well as the determination of the place which science and theology that were produced in Italy occupied in Boineburg’s ever-broadening system of knowledge.
Besides, the project will focus on the issue of confessionality in Boineburg, which crystallised in a special way in his conversion. Boineburg, who received a Lutheran education in Jena and Helmstedt, was converted at the Imperial Diet of Regensburg in 1653. In the literature, his better career prospects at the court of the Mainz Elector are given as possible reasons. Here I want to overcome the previous state of research and also reveal the intellectual motives for the conversion. To this end, he will also examine the collective thought processes in Boineburg’s correspondence with other scholars. This collective communication and thought process has a lot to do with Italy and cannot be understood without the Italian context. As it will be shown on the collected source materials, impulses of the Counter-Reformation in the 17th century in general and also particularly in Boineburg’s case came from Rome.
As a result, one would be in a better position to understand, through the case study of an important German Catholic convert, the mid-17th-century reconciliation attempts between the authority of the Catholic Church and the aspirations of modern science and philosophy for the possession of true knowledge.
The project also includes the development of the database of Johann Christian Boineburg’s correspondence at the platform Early Modern Letters Online (University of Oxford).
The project is implemented on a Research Grant within the collaborative research scheme “Books in Motion. Circulation and Construction of Knowledge between Italy and Europe in the Early Modern Period” (director: Prof. Dr. Paola Molino) at the University of Padua in 2021-2022.
Grunert, Frank
Zur Vorbereitung der Edition der Briefe von und an Christian Thomasius haben Dr. Martin Kühnel und Dr. Frank Grunert die an den bekannten bzw. inzwischen ermittelten Orten lagernden Schriftstücke erfasst und gesichert. Durch umfangreiche – national wie international unternommene – Recherchen und durch gezielte Nachfragen bei den entsprechenden Einrichtungen wurde eine unerwartet große Anzahl von Briefen ausfindig gemacht, so dass der gesamte Bestand auf derzeit insgesamt 615 Schreiben angewachsen ist. Es handelt sich um 138 Briefe aus der Feder von Christian Thomasius und um die Schreiben von nicht weniger als 171 Korrespondenten. Alle relevanten Daten des bisher ermittelten Bestandes sind in eine Datenbank überführt worden, die eine Abfrage etwa nach Absender, Empfänger, Ort oder Datum erlaubt. Außerdem wurden alle aufgefundenen Schreiben vollständig digitalisiert, so dass die Transkription und die sachliche Auswertung der Briefe ohne Verzögerung aufgenommen werden kann.
Die bisherigen Vorbereitungsarbeiten ergeben folgendes Bild: Abgesehen von nur vereinzelten Schreiben aus den Jahren vor 1682 liegen bis zum Todesjahr 1728 durchgängig Briefe vor. Freilich ist die Überlieferungsdichte nicht immer gleich. Relativ hoch Ende der 1680er Jahre und während der 1690er Jahre, nimmt die Frequenz danach zunächst ab; gut dokumentiert erscheint dann wieder die Zeit zwischen 1706 und 1710 und die letzte Lebensphase in den 1720er Jahren. Geografisch findet der Briefwechsel in Mittel- und Norddeutschland und im Wesentlichen unter Protestanten statt. Mit Ausländern hat Thomasius – abgesehen von wenigen Ausnahmen, z. B. Pierre Poiret – nur vereinzelt Kontakt gehabt. Sofern er mit Partnern in den Niederlanden korrespondierte, handelte es sich durchweg um Deutsche (z. B. Friedrich Breckling), die entweder in den Niederlanden auf Reisen waren oder sich dort niedergelassen hatten. Die bevorzugte Sprache ist in der Regel Deutsch, Latein wurde – vermutlich je nach Gegenstand des Briefes – erst in zweiter Linie verwendet. Der französischen Sprache hat sich Thomasius – nach dem gegenwärtigen Stand der Erhebungen – nicht bedient, umgekehrt existiert durchaus eine nicht unbeträchtliche Anzahl von an ihn adressierten französischsprachigen Schreiben; englischsprachige Briefe liegen nicht vor. Angesichts des unbestrittenen Rangs, der Christian Thomasius auf den unterschiedlichen Feldern seines Wirkens zukommt, darf man von der Briefausgabe – abgesehen von wichtigen Einsichten in die Genese des Werkes – aufschlussreiche Erkenntnisse über die Formierungsphase der Aufklärung in Deutschland und die Gelehrtenkultur an der Universität Halle in den ersten zwei Jahrzehnten ihres Bestehens erwarten.
Gefördert durch die DFG ab 01.04.2010 für zunächst drei Jahre (2½ wiss. Mitarbeiter).
Collaborators
Matthias Hambrock
Martin Kühnel
Andrea Thiele
The topic of the project is the teaching of natural law at the Universities of Halle and Leipzig from 1625 to 1850.
Halle University was established in 1694 and has functioned continuously with only a very short break in 1807. The archives contain almost all lecture announcements of the University from the start. There were lectures on natural law at the juridical and philosophical faculties in every semester between 1694 and 1850, except the winter semester 1842 and the summer semester 1843. The number of courses was constant at around 5 per semester from 1694 until 1750, when it generally dropped a little only to pick up from 1790, reaching a peak in the summer semester 1797 with 14 courses. After 1800 the number decreased again, but lectures continued until 1850 with one to three courses per semester, and there were some also after 1850.
All in all there were 1.151 lecture courses on natural law given by 84 different professors in the period 1694-1850. The professor with most courses was Johann Christoph Hoffbauer with 90 between 1790 and 1827. From the announcements of lectures we can learn some details of their content. In many though not all cases we can find the theories and authors discussed and the texts used, often the lecturer’s own publications. There is mention of 51 different authors. Between 1694 and 1741,175 courses were devoted to the theory of natural law by Samuel Pufendorf, mostly his De officio hominis et civis. The lecturers included Johann Samuel Stryk, Johann Peter Ludwig, Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling, Johann Gottlieb Heineccius, Justus Henning Böhmer, Carl Gottlieb Knorr and Johann Tobias Carrach, a who-is-who of the natural law tradition at Halle University in the first half of the eighteenth century.
Leipzig University was founded in 1409 and has worked without interruption since then. There are gaps in the sources for lecture announcements, and within the period of the present project full records are only available from 1773 to 1850. There were courses on natural law in every semester that we have analysed, except for several years around 1700. In all for our period, the incomplete records show a total of 965 courses on natural law, given by 106 professors. The professor with most courses was Ernst Carl Wieland with 68 between 1777 and 1827. The natural law theories of 77 different authors are mentioned, the most noted of them Ludwig Julius Friedrich Höpfner in 130 lectures between 1781 and 1813.
In the choice of doctrines and authors Halle dominated over Leipzig. While several Halle lecturers were taught at Leipzig, no Leipzig lecturers were used in Halle, with one exception. Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling (fifty courses), Johann Christoph Hoffbauer (six), Ludwig Heinrich Jakob (two), Ernst Ferdinand Klein (six), Daniel Nettelbladt (one), and Theodor Schmalz (two) were all taught in Leipzig. Only the Leipziger Adam Rechenberg's doctrine was taught in Halle, once in 1695, by Johann Franz Budde).
Haakonssen, Knud
Hüning, Dieter
Jensen, Mads Langballe
As a As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Lund University’s Department of history, I lead a project on the role the law of nature and nations, and related disciplines such as Statistik, played in the intellectual history of Denmark as a colonial state. Between the introduction of absolutism (1660) and its replacement by constitutional monarchy (1849), the Kingdom of Denmark established itself as a medium-sized colonial power with a global reach, from India to the West Indies, and from West Africa to the Arctic. This project investigates the adoptions and uses of natural law discourse in a series of reforms of Danish colonial policies in the decades following the palace coup of 1784 in all its global locations: India, Africa, the Caribbean, and Greenland.
Jensen, Mikkel Munthe
The natural law database is first and foremost a detailed open reservoir of knowledge that contains not only structured biographical and bibliographical data but also links to digitalised source material as well as commentaries made by individual specialists. Building upon this reservoir, a long-term goal is to develop and implement analytical visualisation tools in the database, so users easily can conduct both general and specialised data explorations. The creation of such a database is in essence a transnationally collaborative and open-ended digital enterprise, which also means that populating and expanding the database rely on contributions from the already established research networks within the Natural Law 1625-1850 project and on widening the circle of contributors in the field. The basic aim of the database is thus to provide an essential tool for the Natural Law project to compile and structure data and conduct research on early modern natural law scholars, their works and their institutions.
For more information see project webpage
Makhotina, Katja
Malaspina, Elisabetta Fiocchi
The research project focuses on the publication, translation and circulation of the works of Jean Barbeyrac, Jean Jacques Burlamaqui and Emer de Vattel in the Italian peninsula during the eighteenth century. At the beginning of the century, the so-called Ecole romande du droit naturel was established in the French-speaking part of Switzerland and achieved great success in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The project proposes to retrace the ways in which the texts of this so-called school were used and adapted to the Italian context (which was extremely different from the one in which these works were written and published), in order to contribute to the constitutionalisation and transformation process of the Italian states during the eighteenth century.
Also the circulation and use of the law of nations played a central role in the geopolitical context of Italy within Europe during the eighteenth-century. For example Emer de Vattel’s Droit des gens (1758), was not classified as merely a text on the law of nations. On the contrary, it was a benchmark for domestic law and diplomacy that provided a political and juridical guide for the foreign office of the small Italian states. The references to Vattel’s work are numerous and continuous in the diplomacy of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Sardinia’s territory, Venice and Lombardy.
The aim is to trace the process of appropriation and reproduction of law of nations theories in the Italian peninsula during the eighteenth century and to investigate how texts on natural law and the law of nations, such as those by Barbeyrac, Burlamaqui and Vattel, circulated and were used. The focus of the investigation is on doctrinal positions and academic teaching.
Nilsén, Per
David Nehrman (1695–1769) was professor in Swedish and Roman law at the Lund University from 1721 to 1753. Having this position at the rather small, provincial university in southern Sweden – one out of totally four universities in the realm, including the German university in Greifswald – meant being responsible for teaching the whole field of legal disciplines. David Nehrman’s lectures were highly estimated by his contemporaries, they were written down in student’s manuscripts and circulated in the country and quite a few were also edited by David Nehrman himself and published as textbooks: in 1729 his Introduction to Swedish Private Law (Inledningtil then swenskajurisprudentiamcivilem) was published, followed in 1732 by a similar Introduction to Swedish Private Procedure (Inledningtil then swenskaprocessumcivilem). The Swedish Code of 1734 – which finally replaced the mediaeval rural and urban codes – came into force in 1736. This did not only necessitate updated versions of the already published works (a supplement to his introduction to private law was published in 1746 and a new edition of the introduction to private procedure came in 1751), but also stimulated to new publications: Lectures on the Book on Marriage (Föreläsningaröfwergiftermålsbalken [1747]), Lectures on the Book on Inheritance (Föreläsningaröfwerärfdabalken [1752]), and two new Introductions: one to Swedish Criminal Law (Inledningtil then swenskajurisprudentiamcriminalem [1756]) and one to Swedish Criminal Procedure (Inledningtil then swenskaprocessumcriminalem [1759]).
David Nehrman was born in Malmö in 1695 – 37 years after the annexation of the former Danish province of Scania to Sweden in 1658. In order to make good Swedish subjects of the inhabitants of the province, a university was opened in the neighbouring cathedral city of Lund in 1668. But the actual peace was short-lived: in 1676–1682 and in 1709 the academic activities were discontinued as a consequence of war and in 1712, the plague raged in both cities. There were no possibilities to study law at the province’s university and the young David Nehrman had to seek other ways – following the Swedish tradition of peregrination, he studied at several foreign (mainly protestant German) universities, such as Rostock, Jena and Halle. In Halle, Nehrman was profoundly influenced by the natural law thinking of the period. Being tired of teaching after 32 years in Lund, Nehrman – in 1746 raised to nobility as Ehrenstråle – retired in 1753 to his estate in the province of Småland. Here his library was kept for many years after his death. Today, the library is a part of the collection of the City Library in Linköping.
The works of David Nehrman Ehrenstråle have had a long lasting value for Swedish law: not only as manifested in the mentioned textbooks, but also in the numerous student manuscripts. There are also manuscripts, written by Nehrman himself, which have not been published, e.g. his lectures on Swedish constitutional law (written between 1731 and 1739). In this manuscript of 623 pages, the author gives rather precise references to the literature he used in composing his lectures: approximately 35 titles are of Swedish origin, 35 of German, two of Dutch. Danish titles have been used four times, English six and French two times. In studying Nehrman’s work in this way, it is possible to not only to get a first-hand picture of the Swedish constitutional law of the period but also to get a good overview of the scientific (cross-border) world of one of the most important scholars in Swedish legal history. The publication of this manuscript with commentaries regarding Nehrman’s sources and literature has been discussed several times and is now well under way. An application concerning (part-) funding was approved by Institutet för rättshistorisk forskning – Olin Foundation – Grundatav Gustav och Carin Olin in 2011.
Olden-Jørgensen, Sebastian
Piirimäe, Pärtel
The project is going to focus on the replacement of the universalist, natural-law based aspirations of seventeenth-century international law scholars with a Euro-centric conception of 'international law of civilized nations', and on the reception and development of these views in Northern Europe.
Schmidt, Alexander
The project explores the teaching of natural law during a crucial period of intellectual transformation from the theories of Christian Wolff, Christian Thomasius and their respective followers to the reformulation of natural law in the wake of Kant’s epistemology and moral philosophy. While many scholars claim that natural law was demolished by the rise of positivism, utilitarianism and the German historical school of law around 1800, the project advances the claim that the reformulation of natural law which it went through in the last decades of the eighteenth century preserved it as a critical legal, moral, and political idiom of liberal reform in the nineteenth century. By focusing on the “engine room” of academic teaching we want to gain a clearer and more detailed understanding of the processes of reformulation of given theories and vocabularies of natural law as well as the inclusion of new themes by members of the different faculties of law and philosophy, which were competing in the teaching of natural law at Jena. An obvious point of departure for the project is the work and teaching of the philosopher, lawyer and economist Joachim Georg Darjes (1714-1791) who taught at Jena from 1735 to 1763. Darjes is central because he both set up a continuous stream of lecture courses on natural law and further developed Wolffianism in his teaching, transferring it into the new science of political economy. One aspect of the project here will be how his lectures, textbooks and the works of his students did reflect this transformation to questions of political economy. Another aspect will deal with his critical engagement with the Thomasius-school, especially in his theory of action. From Darjes distinction between inner and outer freedom the project moves on to the debates of the 1790s. It is often ignored that some of the most crucial German texts on natural law in the later eighteenth-century, such as Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Law according to the Principles of the ‘Wissenschaftslehre’ of 1796 and 1797 were basically course-books. The university of Jena in the 1790s here is of particular interest because some of Germany’s most aspiring young legal thinkers and philosophers competed simultaneously for academic fame and (paying) students. Here the aim of the project is to bring these competing lecture courses, and their printed offshoots, in a closer dialogue by studying lecture notes, correspondence and reviews by students who often were to become influential scholars and philosophers themselves.