Tänkeboken som texthistoriskt vittne : Skrivarstrategier och textprocesser i 1630-talets Stockholm

Abstract

In the Nordic countries, municipal courts experienced a vast increase in the production and use of administrative and juridical records during the Early Modern period. Among other external factors, in Sweden, this intensification can be linked to the steadily increasing use since the fourteenth century of the vernacular as the written language in legal contexts. With the establishment of the Svea Court of Appeal in Stockholm (1614), it was decided that all lower courts would send their records there. In consequence, town scribes, in addition to writing a draft (in Swedish koncept) and a transcript (renskrift), had to formulate yet another version of the court record for the higher court (renovation). This led to a dynamic writing process: differing versions of the court record were created, each one written at a different time for a somewhat different purpose and with different requirements in terms of content and linguistic style, but all of them legally valid. Empirical comparisons show there may be vast differences between the first draft and the edited transcript, both in style and content, with the second text a modified version, with greater use of legal linguistic markers. In this article, we discuss the empirical and theoretical aspects of the textual transmission of court records in Early Modern Sweden. We focus on Stockholm municipal court records 1634 in draft and transcript and analyse the scribal strategies in the two versions. First, we present a comparative analysis of the versions and describe how the draft and transcript were rephrased and stylized. Second, we present a material-philological analysis of the manuscripts in order to enhance the discussion of the function and use of the versions. The study shows that the town scribe Eggert Matsson Aurelius has made use of the following strategies when transforming the draft into a transcript: copying, rephrasing, expanding, summarising, and omitting.