legal compilation in early modern denmark and norway national law and legal scholarship, particularly in peripheral legal orders with a notorious lack of learned lawyers and self-sustaining legal science. Making texts and text fragments available to an audience that often had no or at best limited access to the original sources was thus an essential precondition for the dissemination of legal knowledge and creating legal authority by harmonizing and canonizing the law. Why were the original sources not accessible? Of the various reasons, the main ones were that the original had not been published and was available only as a manuscript, or the original source was written in a language that could not be read by the intended audience. In the early modern period a burgeoning state bureaucracy, international trade, and later the Enlightenment’s educational ideals increased demand for legal literature of all kinds.10 At the same time, the invention of movable type printing allowed for the wider distribution of ideas, and laid the technical foundations for a new type of dissemination of legal knowledge. Compilations helped lawyers implement new legal ideas, adapted to the specific requirements of their legal cultures.11 However, they had different purposes and functions according to the legal culture and the period. As such, the compilation of legal knowledge and its impact on legal authority regains relevance in today’s increasingly polycentric and internationalized world. Analysing the dialogue between original sources and compilations can provide a unique insight into the specific dynamics and effects of text movability, which again deserves our attention in times of popular compilations such as Wikipedia and of law by database such as Westlaw, Lovdata, and Juris compiling legal texts for use by lawyers. The technique is also widely used in commentaries and statutory reform. Moreover, in 2019 a new age began in Norway, as the widely used semiofficial compilation of Norwegian statutory law, Norges Lover, edited by the law faculty of Oslo, was updated in print for the last time.12 In future, 10 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an agent of Change: Communication and Cultural Transformations in the Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: CUP, 1997), 53 ff. 11 For example, John D. Ford, Law and Opinion in Scotland during the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Hart, 2000). 12 See preface toNorges Lover, 1687–2018, ed. Inge Lorange Backer & Henrik Bull (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget). 201
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