part iv • intellectual legal history • søren koch had deliberately chosen, structured, and supplemented texts and fragments in a way tailored to the particular legal cultural context and the expectations and demands of his audience. Occasionally, legal historians have indicated that these texts, regardless of the authors’ reputations or the works’ scholarship, had a crucial impact on intellectual elements of theDanish–Norwegian legal culture, such as legal methodology, attitudes towards professionalization, and underlying ideals of justice and ways of achieving these ideals.90 In other words, compiling legal texts was a way of creating a legal canon. In aNordic context, abetter understanding of the function and impact of legal compilation may be achieved by analysing other types of compilation of legal texts. For compilation was not just a way of producing legal literature; it was also the prevailing legislative technique in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition it was a technique for collecting statutory law, and became a precondition for the use of case law as a source of law in the second half of the eighteenth century. Inmediaeval times, compilation was a common technique for producing law books (such as the collections of customary law-rules in the Gulating and Frostating Lov), codes (e.g. King Magnus Lagabøtes Code of the Realm [1274] and Code of the Cities [1276]), and to a lesser degree ordinances (retterbøter).91 Interestingly, the rather negative connotations of the Danish and Norwegian term for compilation today seem to be the 90 For the concept of legal culture, see Jørn Ø. Sunde, ‘Champagne at the funeral’, in Jørn Ø. Sunde & Knut Einar Skodvin (eds.), Rendezvous of Legal Cultures (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget 2010), 11 ff.; for individual institutional and intellectual elements, see Björne 1995; Sunde 2007; Koch & Sunde 2020, 27 ff., 43 ff. 91 For use of the term ‘compilation’ (kompilasjon), Jørn Ø. Sunde, Speculum Legale, Rettsspegelen(Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2010), 109 ff.; id, ‘Daughters of God and Counsellors of the Judges of Men: Changes in the Legal Culture of the Norwegian Realm in the High Middle Ages’, in Stefan Brink (ed.), New Approaches to Early Law in Scandinavia (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 132 ff. 92 Taylor 2019, 1 ff., with his constant mentions of compilation and compiling; see also, Honore 2001; Jansen 2010. 220 Compiling as a legislative technique
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