The Mechanical Art of Rhetoric in an Ordinary Sixteenth Century German Formulary

Abstract

The title pages of multiple editions of the most popular German language notarial treatise from the sixteenth century, Rhetoric und Teutsch Formular, feature woodcuts depicting an array of writing utensils, sometimes complemented with a writing notary and some further tools. Those pictures bare striking similarity to the imagery used to illustrate the booming genre of practical guidebooks for artisans of various sorts. As such they bring to the fore a peculiarly materialist understanding of legal work and offer thus a welcome counterpoint to most jurisprudence. In some title pages, the composition of writing utensils is supplemented with emblematic tools of both mechanical and liberal arts thus pointing to notarial art as carrying elements of both and standing between the two. Those illustrations also match the vision of the book which in its theoretical section defines the notarial art as consisting in saving transactions and agreements from the feebleness of human memory and oblivion by giving them endurance by way of diligent writing. Overall, the book and its title page illustrations thus emphasise what is becoming the central contribution of the craft of law to the development of capitalist modernity: fixing agreements in potent writing. Understanding notarial art as the artisanship of document fabrication, those images also show the transformative power of writing.