legal compilation in early modern denmark and norway This essay is a compilation too, compiled from passages from a speech in honour of professor Lars Björne at the 350th anniversary of the law faculty in Lund and other texts written at different times for a variety of audiences.3 While not entirely new, then, it will still be an original contribution to this volume. The question it seeks to answer is why and how lawyers compiled legal texts, offering tentative answers for Denmark and Norway in the early modern period (roughly 1600–1800). What is ‘compilation’? A broad, orthodox definition might encompass both (a) the method of selecting text fragments, then editing and reassembling them in a new format and sources, and (b) the finished product so created.4 The distinction between method and product is important, because the concept is often unthinkingly used for both. What this broad definition lacks is an appreciation of the wider context of the relevant methodological processes and mechanisms, the impact of compilation on the source texts, and the impact on the perceived authority of the same. Moreover, the definition remains fluid between disciplines and has not been systematically tested for law.5 Instead, in law compilation is Springer, 2016), e.g. 10, 96; Claes Peterson, Peter the Great’s Administrative and Judicial Reforms, tr. Michael F. Metcalf (Stockholm: Nordiska Bokhandeln, 1979). 3 Including an application to the Norwegian Research Council for a comparative legal history project on compilation in early modern Scotland and Denmark–Norway, submitted in 2020 with Dr. Adelyn Wilson. 4 For related attempts to define this concept, see Martin Gierl, ‘Compilation and the production of Knowledge in the Early German Enlightment’, in Hans Erich Bödeker et al. (eds.) Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1999), 69 ff. 5 For law, seeNils Jansen, TheMaking of Legal Authority (Oxford:OUP, 2010), 90–2; for a variety of disciplines, see Laura Beck Varela, ‘The diffusion of Law Books in Early Modern Europe’, in Massimo Meccarelli & María Julia Solla Sastre (eds.), Spatial and Temporal Dimension for Legal History (Frankfurt am Main: Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, 2016), 195–239; Hartmut Bleumer, ‘Geschichtsschreibung zwischen Redaktion undKompilation’, Historische Zeitschrift 293 (2011), 439; Volker H. Drecoll, ‘Das Symbolum Quicumque als Kompilation augustinischer Tradition’, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum11 (2007), 30; Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 134–7; Rita Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: CUP, 1991). 199 Compilation
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