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The historiography of individual academic subjects and disciplines is an indispensable part of both university history and the history of science. Scientific disciplines are a relatively recent phenomenon from the university-historical perspective of longue durée, whose study has nevertheless undergone some striking developments in the past forty years. At the level of the historiography of disciplines, structural patterns of academic subject histories are highlighted, leading from the philosophy of science of the 1970s to the cultural turns of the 1990s and 2000s. Disciplines are partial results of a broader process of diversification, fragmentation, and specialisation that began as early as the eighteenth century. This survey reconstructs processes of disciplinary differentiation and disciplining from the order of faculties to the “regime of disciplines” in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, focusing on the University of Göttingen as a dynamic hub of development. Using the example of German universities, the genealogies of individual chairs, subjects, and disciplines are traced. Special attention is paid to the dual character of disciplining as a submission to a system of rules and the organisation of knowledge.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, the practices of learning were regulated by an informal »moral economy of knowledge«. Practices like fraud, plagiarism and symbolic claims to a superior social status were difficult to control and could not be handled by the law alone. Setting the norms for scholarly practices can thus serve as a case study for the workings of multinormativity in early modern societies. The deviant practices of scholars were addressed by religious norms, the ideals of courtly society and the emerging bourgeois society, and they were articulated in different media like satires, academic dissertations and moralizing pamphlets. The multinormativity of the discourse of scholarly vices was not compensatory but operated on different layers of normativity concerning both the sources of articulation and the origins of different norms. The paper traces in three steps how the norms of conduct of the learned were implemented. First, it discusses norms beyond the law, then it focuses on the jurist as an object of that normative order, and third it takes a look at the challenges of regulating practices of social distinction in juridical terms. Practices of self-fashioning beyond the limits of what was deemed acceptable were counted as misdemeanours but nevertheless were hard to sanctify. Grappling with that challenge became a multinormative project that offers new insights into the historicity of normative orders as well as orders of knowledge.