Chapter 4, ‘Writing It Down: Innovation, Secrecy, and Print’ explains how mining, and subterranean geometry, evolved during the troubled time of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). It brings together issues related to book history as well as the history of training and teaching practices. Balthasar Rösler (1605–1673) introduced numerous innovations, and his teaching was disseminated by his students among mining regions, in a series of beautifully illustrated and hitherto unstudied manuscripts. The birth of this technical genre is presented in detail, with its evolution and uses within the training system of mining regions. In 1686, Nicolaus Voigtel then published the first practical textbook on the topic. Surprisingly, the craftsmen’s manuscripts weathered the rise of the printed press. I argue that authoring and publishing books failed to supersede the authority of practitioners precisely because their know-how was embedded in a specific technical and cultural setting. Subterranean geometry would stay an underground knowledge for another century, as most innovations arose within this handwritten tradition.

Chapter 1 of Discourse Syntax introduces the concept of discourse syntax and connects this topic to what students likely already know from a basic introduction to English syntax, like parts of speech, basic principles of canonical word order in English and basic patterns of grammatical variation, such as syntactic movement. It emphasizes that patterns of variation are systematic and often rooted in the surrounding discourse. The chapter also introduces corpora of English, such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the notion of reference grammars.

This chapter considers the role of textbooks in constituting the field of medical jurisprudence or ‘law and medical ethics’. This inquiry helps us to understand the importance of Graeme Laurie’s work as the author of Law and Medical Ethics, a leading textbook in this field. The chapter begins by considering the relationship between scholarship and research in academic work in general terms. It then moves to a particular consideration of the nature of the field of medical jurisprudence, and how this arose out of deliberate assemblage by some early scholars in the emerging field of pre-existing legal materials and other academic resources. It focuses especially on the relationship between law and ethics, arguing against an understanding of ethics as a theoretical foundation for law and in favour of seeing principles as emerging through the practice of the common law. It concludes by discussing how textbooks give shape to this material, in the form of what Thomas Kuhn called a ‘paradigm’. In this way, they are essential tools of shaping and passing on the legacy of the field of ‘law and medical ethics’.

This introductory chapter uses the framework of pedagogical choice to articulate and compare competing visions of how the field should be conceptualized and taught. Part 2 explicates the practical challenge that renders pedagogy in the field of comparative constitutional law unusually difficult – namely, the problem of capacity. Part 3 articulates and evaluates five competing models of pedagogy, which might be called instrumentalism, tourism, immersion, abstraction, and representation. Each model is defined by a distinctive set of pedagogical goals and a practical strategy for pursuing those goals in the face of the problem of capacity. Part 4 uses the contents of Constitutionalism in Context to illustrate how the representation model might be implemented in textbook form, and what intellectual and pedagogical benefits might result. Many of the representation model’s unique benefits stem from the fact that it invites and even demands that we explore what might be called boundary cases – namely, extreme, novel, or otherwise nonstandard cases that require us to test or apply familiar concepts and strategies in unfamiliar ways. Part 5 concludes by arguing that the challenges of teaching comparative constitutional law call for pedagogical pluralism.