For the Love of the Truth: The Dissertation as a Genre of Scholarly Publication in Early Modern Europe

The “dissertation,” a text prepared for public disputation, constituted a special but expansive genre of scholarly publication in early modern Europe. This article explicates the significance of the dissertation in the production, communication, and organization of knowledge in this period, especially in Protestant Germanic countries. It shows how different the early modern dissertation was from its descendant today and places it in the context of development from the medieval disputation to the modern dissertation. It also explicates the importance of the dissertation in intellectual, cultural, and publication history and supplements the literature on the Republic of Letters.