In the Nordic countries, as in many other parts of Europe, municipal courts experienced avast increase in the production and use of administrative and juridical records during theEarly Modern period. Among other external factors, in Sweden, this intensification can belinked to the steadily increasing use since the fourteenth century of the vernacular as thewritten language in legal contexts. With the establishment of the Svea Court of Appeal (1614), it was decided that all lower courts in Sweden would send their records there. Inconsequence, scribes, in addition to writing a draft and a transcript, had to formulate yetanother version of the court record for the higher court. This led to a three-phase writingprocess: three versions of the court record were created, each one written at different timeswith a somewhat different purpose and with different requirements in terms of content andlinguistic style, but all of them legally valid. Empirical comparisons show there may be vastdifferences between the first draft and the edited transcription, both in style and content, withthe second text a modified version, with greater use of legal linguistic markers. Anyonestudying these historical texts needs to know where they fit into the cycle and in whatcircumstances they were produced.

The aim of this poster presentation is to discuss empirical and theoretical aspects of thetextual process of court records in Early Modern Sweden. Drawing on social semiotics, wefocus on court records in terms of ‘social practice’ (van Leeuwen 2008), making use oftheoretical concepts such as ‘intertextuality’ (Bakhtin 1986), ‘recontextualisation’ (Linell1998) and ‘entextualisation’ (Park and Bucholtz 2009). We will present a theoretical modelthat captures the text-making process from spoken utterance in court to written legaldocument. In addition, we will examine the question of written discourse as verbatim,proposing a functional stance, where the scribes’ use of reported speech must be seen as aprocess of recontextualisation of the speakers’ utterance into an institutionally relevantwritten account.

The presentation is given as part of the multidisciplinary research project Town scribes in thekingdom of Sweden in the Early Modern period (1614–1714): Their profession, agency anduse of language, financed by the Kone Foundation (2020–2024). The project focuses on theperiod from the foundation of the Svea Court of Appeal in Stockholm (1614) to the GreatNorthern War (1714) from the point of view of historical linguistics and history. The focus inthe presentation is the people who drew up the magistrate’s court records, a most importantsource for historians of Sweden and Finland. The century was an important period in thehistory of Swedish and Swedish state-building. The growing superpower needed a languageand scribes; the vernacular enabled more complex government. In our study, the magistrate’scourt records are being utilised for the first time from an interdisciplinary perspective bybringing together theoretical and methodological expertise in historical linguistics andhistory. The project has three major goals: 1) a prosopographic scribe database, containinginformation on the social and professional backgrounds and lifetime of the scribes, 2)analysis of town scribes as professionals and language experts, developers of language andproducers of texts, and 3) case studies on town scribes as government servants and privatecitizens in their local community. The result will be an overall picture of professional townscribes as the most pivotal, but often invisible, agents in history: as experts in language andrecorders of the past.