ABSTRACT
In the early modern period, compilation had been a respectable and perfectly normal manner of composing historical works. During the eighteenth century, however, it appears that compilation became increasingly contested in the European Republic of Letters. The practice came to be associated with pedantry and lack of originality, and the compiler could even be accused by his peers of plagiarism and intellectual theft. Faced with this novel situation, historical compilers formulated a defence of their mode of writing that stressed the utility of their craft to the public in an enlightened age. This chapter discusses how compilers presented their own work, and what these instances of self-fashioning reveal about the changing function and status of historical compilations, with particular emphasis on the Danish-Norwegian playwright and historian Ludvig Holberg. Among the arguments made in favour of compilation in this period was the notion that the compiler performed the central role of curating and sifting information in a world inundated by an overabundance of books. The compiler had long been associated with this function, but in the eighteenth century, the compilers presented themselves as more discriminating, philosophical—in short, more enlightened—than their predecessors in previous centuries. The eighteenth-century historical compilers’ refashioning of their role also emphasised their own stylistic accomplishments and original methods (i.e., plans, systems, inventions) of presenting information.
