legal compilation in early modern denmark and norway full evaluation of the extensive source material available. My intention is to provide examples from Denmark and Norway between 1584 and 1814 which illustrate the need for further research. This period saw compilation and original authorship come into competition in national legal writing, with the latter becoming the predominant ideal in the eighteenth century.31 Moreover, this period saw new printing technologies used more often for a range of legal texts. This enabled the writers of all kinds of legal texts to reach a much wider readership, and triggered an intellectual revolution – the earlymodern equivalent of the revolution caused by the digitization of texts, allowing radical new ways of disseminating legal texts today.32 By regarding compilation as a creative process, it is possible to systematically analyse what kind of legal knowledge was disseminated, and how compilations created authoritative views on the law and its function in society. Applying this broad definition of compilation, I have looked at treatises produced by compiling fragments of other legal texts in a new format. My first example is the first Nordic textbook on law, De diversis regulis iuris antiqui (1584) by Nicolaus Theophilus (1541–1604).33 The author’s original contributions are limited to the foreword and a short summary. 31 Caspar Hirschi, ‘Compiler into Genius’, in André Holenstein, Hubert Steinke & Martin Stuber (eds.) Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill 2013). 32 Bjarne Kvam, ‘Communication and Technology as Agents of legal Change’, in JørnØ. Sunde & Knut E. Skodvin (eds.), Rendezvous of European Legal Cultures (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget 2010), 185 ff.; Eisenstein 1979); Alastair J. Mann, ‘The Anatomy of the Printed Book in Early Modern Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review 80(2010), 181–200, 195. The impact of this change occurred earlier in other legal cultures, for example, David J. Harvey, The Law Emprynted and Englysshed: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change in Law and Legal Culture, 1475–1642(London: Hart, 2015). For digitization’s impact on company law, see European Commission, Optimity Study on the Impact of Digitalisation (2018), ec.europa.eu/info/ publications/digitalisation-company-law_en. 33 Nicolaus Theophilus, De Diversis Regulis Iuris Antiqui (Copenhagen, 1584) published as Theophilus’ gyldne retsregler, ed. Ditlev Tamm & Kaare Bangert (Copenhagen: Jurist- og Økonomforbundets Forlag, 1984); Ditlev Tamm, Retsvidenskaben i Danmark: En historisk oversigt (Copenhagen: DJØF1992), 57–60. 207 Compiling legal treatises
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