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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.

The notion of charlatanism is central to the social workings of the eighteenth-century republic of letters. Starting with Johann Burkhard Mencke's famous treatise The Charlatanry of the Learned, this paper traces how accusations of academic and scientific misconduct put in terms of ‘charlatanry’ initially helped to produce the new species of the erudite ‘charlatan’. Facing a growing complexity of scientific culture, this new frame of meaning, structured by numerous examples of scientific misconduct, offered a way of mapping the world of learning. But besides its cognitive impacts, the discourse of charlatanry allowed the creation of symbolic boundaries, which determined decisions as to the affiliation or non-affiliation to this recently forming scientific community by separating honourable from dishonourable scientific personae. Speaking of charlatanry therefore always implied a social distinction as much as a scientific one. The discourses on charlatanry also mirror differentiations within the scientific...