legal compilation in early modern denmark and norway and concepts in their respective fields in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, compiling was used in periodicals, learned journals, and encyclopaedias to promote and facilitate the European Enlightenment.24 In combination with the educational ideal of the Enlightenment (roughly speaking, to be up to date on everything), compilations became a key tool in the dissemination of knowledge and ideas.25 Fragments of supposedly authoritative European writers’ work were compiled in translation for a range of new audiences, contributing to the formation of new canons, and, eventually, dogmatic stabilization or sometimes even harmonization of the source material in a new format. This was especially true for law. A close examination of early modern legal literature reveals that compilation was aconventional technique for the production of all kinds of legal texts.26 I would argue that compilation as means of dissemination was an essential precondition for the creation of legal standards, or authoritative opinions discharging into a set of principles – in other words a canon of law – in the early modern period, particularly in the Protestant countries of northern Europe.27 As neither Roman nor canon law were accepted as legal sources, the legal principles derived from these already canonized legal orders could hardly serve as role models for the application of law in Denmark and Norway.28 As a consequence, other types of authoritative texts, includ24 Thomas Ewen Daltveit Slettebø, Holberg’s authorial personae, in Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen & Knud Haakonssen, Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754): Learning and Literature in the Nordic Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2017), 29–44; Nøtvik Jakobsen 2013, 126 ff. For the Enlightenment, see Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A publishing history of the Encyclopédie 1775–1800 (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1979); Martin Gierl, ‘Kompilation und die Produktion von Wissen im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Helmut Zedelmaier & Martin Mulsow (eds.), Die Praktiken der Gelehrsamkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001), 63–94. 25 Gierl 2001, 65–6; Carla Hesse, Enlightenment epistemology and the Laws of Authorship, in Law and the Order of Culture(Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991) 112. 26 For the extensive empirical research on the compilation of legal texts in Spain, see Laura Beck Varela, ‘Memoria de los libros que son necesarios para pasar, Sixteenth-century Jurists’ Reading in the Ibirian Penisula’, CIAN Revista de Historia de las Universitades, 21/2 (2018), 227–67. 27 BenitoCostas Rial (ed.), Print Culture and Peripheries in EarlyModern Europe: A contribution to the history of printing and booktrade in small European and Spanish cities (Leiden: Brill 2013). 28 Björne 1995, 10; Ditlev Tamm, Nolo falcem in alienammessemmittere: Der Dänische Theologe Niels Hemmingsen (1513–1600) aus juristischer Sicht (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1983), 47 205
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