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The paper reconstructs the tension between the then emerging approach of emphasising authorial innovation and the traditional learned practice of adapting and reusing existing texts, which was cultivated in the early modern ars excerpendi. In 1717, a case of plagiarism occurred in the midst of a new historiographical genre (Reichshistorie) and attracted much attention. Complementing existing scholarship on early modern theories of plagiarism, the examination focuses on how learned communicative practice treated plagiarism. Contrary to the norm established in the discourse on plagiarism, the plagiariser and his work were not excluded from the respublica literaria. Instead, the case became part of academic memory, and was itself frequently reported in a plagiaristic manner. In closing, a comparative glance at the juridically‐based treatment of a current case of plagiarism (a politician's dissertation of 2009) is taken. The paper argues that the contradiction between the theoretical norm and the actual eighteenth‐century management of plagiarism resulted from the familiarity of unmarked „copying“ in pre‐modern scholarly practice. The paper shows that early modern learned culture, although characterised by Steven Shapin as a „moral economy,“ neither felt compelled to impose its crucial ethical norm in a case of open non‐conformance, nor did it consistently observe this norm for routine processes.

What is the basis for the enormous success of Historicism? In my paper I attempt to answer this question by deploying the concept of the cultural pattern. A ‘cultural pattern’ may be defined as the connection of concepts and practices which have gained a relative perpetuity through cultural habitualization. Cultural patterns include a combination of interpretative schemes according to which the world can be categorized, structured and interpreted with individual or social practices which either develop out of, or follow these schemes. Because they combine concepts and practices in a significant manner they gain a contour which enables the creation of communicative addressability, practical appropriation and discursive analysis and hence the creation of a long-term exemplary status. A cultural pattern according to this definition has a relative stability and an observable effect over a long period of time, but which is simultaneously liable to permanent actualization and adaption. Historicism has been considered to be a basic thought-pattern of modernity since Troeltsch, Meinecke and Koselleck; defining Historicism as a cultural pattern can help to explain its long-term effectiveness and its continuing productivity to the present day.

Zwei nahe verwandte, zugleich aber antinomische Begriffe markieren das Spannungsfeld, in dem vorliegender Beitrag einige Koordinaten aufzuweisen versucht: Geschichte und Geschichten. Ihr Verhältnis soll aus drei Perspektiven erörtert werden, zunächst hinsichtlich ihrer Rolle in der aktuellen Selbstaufklärung der Historie über ihren Status als "Textwissenschaft". Ein weiterer Abschnitt argumentiert historiographiegeschichtlich; er geht zurück auf die goethezeitliche Genese der Geschichte aus Geschichten. Ziel ist es, den poetikgeschichtlichen Ort der Geschichten, welche die Historie heute schreibt und denkt, zu umreißen. Wie "poetisch" und wie modern, lautet diese dritte Frage, sind die Texte der Geschichte - oder genauer: können sie sein?

Komik zu erzeugen ist im 17. Jahrhundert das Geschaft des Wanderschauspiels mehr als aller anderen Theaterformen. Wichtigstes Medium dieses Theaters und seiner Komik ist der Korper, doch griffe es zu kurz, in ihm nur einen karnevalesken Storfaktor herrschender Ordnungen zu sehen. Wie an Christoph Blumels Juden von Venetien gezeigt wird, kann der komische Korper vielmehr auch integraler Bestandteil tableauhafter Figurenkonstellationen sein, welche die Dramaturgie des Stucks durchschaubar und Hier archien in der vorgestellten Gesellschaft sichtbar machen. Ein weiteres beliebtes Medium der Wanderbuhnenkomik sind Verkleidungen; scheinbar paradoxerweise sollen auch sie Durchblicke schaffen.

Many comedies are instances of 'money on the stage' and not merely because their subject matter revolves around 'filthy lucre'. Numerous features characteristic of the genre serve to illustrate the social expectations geared to money. This being the case, it is possible to write a genre history of (baroque and Enlightenment) comedy in the form of 'social history on a cultural studies basis'. Proceeding from the homology between development and representation structures in comedy and the way money functions, the study essays a reconstruction of the evolution of the genre with special reference to its interrelations with the evolution of a market society.

History, as both literary critics and historians agree, is not a given, but forms itself in specific patterns of thought and the linguistic patterns which realize these modes of thinking. The present volume deveotes itself to history as a written construst by examining the broad spectrum of literary treatments of history from the late enlightenment to the early 21st century and discussing their theoretical and historiographic premisses. The introduction discusses the principal methods and leading aspects of the contemporary debate at the intersection of "literature" and "history". The main body of work then presents a series of chronologically arranged case studies which illuminate both the interplay of historical view and textual procedures and the social function of different forms and genres of historical representation. The volume thus provides a compendium which provides systematic access to a research field which has been rapidly expanding over the last few years in the 20th century, and examines its benefits for both literary studies and the theory of history; as such, it also serves as an introduction to a complex field of research.