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Freedom of the Press Writings

From 1770-73 there was freedom of the press in Denmark, and around 1,000 very diverse “freedom of the press writings” were published. The dataset contains the raw digital text from these writings.

The title page of MG Birckner's "On Freedom of the Press and its Laws." 1797

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The material behind the dataset

On 14 September 1770, Christian VII published a rescript (that means a law) which decreed complete freedom of the press in Denmark-Norway and the duchies. Over the next three years, around 1,000 “freedom of the press” publications were published. They were already known by this name in the contemporary period, as they were distinguished from those that might have been published before the new legislation. The new publications were very diverse and included everything from serious political, philosophical, and economic treatises, to political commentary, criticism, and satire, to essays, fiction, and entertainment, to gossip, libel, and pornography.

The civil servant Bolle Willum Luxdorph (1716-88) was already an experienced civil servant in the Danish Chancellery in 1770 – and a scholar, poet, and book collector. He saw the uniqueness of the new situation with freedom of the press and organized a collection of writings, pamphlets, booklets, and books, which he considered to be freedom of the press writings in the stated sense that they could not have been published without the new law. He did this as a private book collector, and he organised the material thematically and had the result bound in 47 volumes.

Luxdorph's collection has been used by researchers as source material for various topics and issues during the period, but the first major comprehensive exploration of the Writings of the Freedom of the Press and the Freedom of the Press era was presented in 2020, the 250th anniversary of the Freedom of the Press, by Henrik Horstbøll, Ulrik Langen and Frederik Stjernfelt under the title "Grov Konfækt - tre vilde år med tryckerfrihed 1770-73, I-II", published by Gyldendal. In connection with the research project and with support from the Carlsberg Foundation, the writings were digitised and made available online.

About the dataset

The dataset consists of the raw digital text from the individual pages in the freedom of the press writings. The page texts are stored as txt files and are structured so that there is metadata about which series, volume and text the raw digital text originates from.

The dataset is free of copyright.

The creation of the dataset

The writings have been digitized by Royal Danish Library in connection with the research project. The material consists of pamphlets of varying quality, most often written in fraktur. Several languages appear; especially Danish, German, French, and Latin.

Digital text quality: Partially proofread OCR in ALTO format. Please note that there may be many incorrect transcriptions. Thus, the digital texts should not be considered as correct reproductions of the original texts.

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