The era from 1300 to 1900 CE, so significant for European processes of statebuilding and institutional intensification, coincided with accelerating changes in the way written documents functioned within European political cultures.1 For statebuilding in republican contexts, foundational documents and the practices they endorsed came to play a particularly important role. For the moment, let us take for granted the historical preconditions that enabled this particular pattern of development. As Charles MacIlwain noted half a century ago, the theory and practice of constitutional government in the early modern period rested largely on Roman concepts of law and polity.2 The special authority that Latin Christianity attributed to certain texts, and the rapidly increasing availability of many texts to a wide spectrum of readers after 1400 were equally important preconditions.3 Statebuilding of any kind in late medieval and early modern Europe, we now recognize, took place in an environment in which not only those with power,

1 Special thanks to Hildegard Elisabeth Keller, Ansara Martino and Martina Stercken for comments and assistance and to the Staatsarchiv Zürich, the Kantonsbibliothek Thurgau, the Library of Congress (European History Reading Room) and the Rivera Library and the Academic Senate at the University of California, Riverside for support.