Das Danske Lov und dessen materielle Rezeption. Eine explorative buch- und hilfswissenschaftliche Rekontextualisierung einer stark annotierten frühen Ausgabe (The Danske Lov and its material reception. An explorative recontextualisation of a heavily annotated early edition in book studies and auxiliary studies)

This study explores the material reception and usage of the Danske Lov (DL), the 1683 Danish Code of Law, through an in-depth examination of a heavily annotated and interleaved six-volume first edition acquired in 2022. While absolutism is often regarded as a defining feature of 18th-century governance, Denmark-Norway remains one of the few states where it was formally institutionalized through the Lex Regia of 1665. The Danske Lov served as a comprehensive legal codification within this framework, reflecting both the absolutist state structure and the broader legal traditions of the period.

The digital copies of the six volumes of the Danske Lov and their annotations are available and can be accessed in the DFG Viewer: https://danskelov.netlify.app 

The paper related to the dataset can be found at the moment here: https://www.academia.edu/128004227 

Rather than focusing solely on the legal content of the Danske Lov, this study adopts an object-historical perspective to investigate its reception and practical use. By combining bibliographic analysis with a semi-automated quantitative assessment of annotations, the research examines how legal professionals and scholars engaged with the text—reading, annotating, and repurposing it. The concept of material reception is central to this approach, emphasizing the physical interaction with legal texts, their circulation, and the ways in which they were studied and adapted. The results of the semi-automated quantitative assessment of annotations are listed here for each book in tables as a data set. On the one hand, the tables reflect the content structure of the books, on the other hand they summarise the total number of annotations. This could be used for comparisons with similar annotated copies in the Royal Library of Copenhagen.