In the early period three types of journals stood out, forming what could be called the ‘European journal system’. The promptness with which this system was imported and adapted to local settings in the conglomerate state of Denmark–Norway is striking. The learned journals in the tradition of the Paris-based Journal des Sçavans (1665) had somewhat of a counterpart in the Nova literaria Maris Balthici (1698–1708), the (multi)scientific journals such as the pioneering Philosophical Transactions of the British Royal Society (from 1665) inspired the Acta Medica et Philosophica Hafniensia (1673–80), while, finally, adaptations of the moral weeklies in the style of Addison and Steele’s Tatler and Spectator would appear from the 1720s onwards.
From a quantitative perspective the number of journals published in Denmark (excluding Norway) from the beginning in 1673 to 1850, when the handpress period was coming to an end and when newspapers were taking over many of the functions of the journals, totals around 900.
1 The journal titles are primarily extracted from the National Danish Library Catalogue, Bibliotheca Danica [ranging from 1482 to 1830] and its Supplement 1831–40. Strikingly, around 35 per cent of the titles were published for less than a year (often in only one to three issues), which speaks to the ephemeral and momentary character of the periodicals as such while also seeming to indicate an excessive idealism and/or moderate market know-how on behalf of the publishers. More positively, the short-livedness can be seen as a proxy for experimentation and innovation, unwarranted or not within the constraints of the small-sized Dano-Norwegian book market. A comparison with numbers from the major book markets (the British, German or French) could illuminate whether we are dealing with a case of Scandinavian conformism or exceptionalism in the adaption of the journal system.
Longue durée perspectives on the journals are challenged by the dynamics of experimentation but also by the principal hybridity of the medium, which meant that the boundaries between books, newspapers and journals were not firmly established before late in the eighteenth century.
2 See A. Nøding, ‘Hva er et 1700-tallstidskrift?’. The boundaries between the three principal types – a typology not all scholars would necessarily agree on in the first place – were blurred by historical change with subtypes developing from them and new types of journals (including magazines) appearing. This generic instability can be exemplified by the many names for the type of journals inspired by
The Spectator (‘political’, ‘essay’ or ‘Spectator’ journals, ‘moral weeklies’ etc.), which in the Danish national bibliography, the
Bibliotheca Danica, as an expression of understandable resignation on behalf of the cataloguers, are bundled into the category of ‘Miscellanies’ [
Blandede tidsskrifter] together with other kinds of journals far away from the tradition of Steele and Addison.
Similar problems of designation are related to the type of journal in focus in this chapter. The category of ‘learned journals’ only makes historical sense in relation to late seventeenth and early-to-mid eighteenth-century cultural practices. Scholarly specialisation and institutionalisation lead to a diffusion of the broad-ranging agenda of the learned journals into different kinds of journals, literary journals, review journals, scientific journals.
3 See S. B. Barnes, ‘The Editing of Early Learned Journals’, Osiris, 1 (January, 1936), 155–72; on Scandinavian, especially Swedish learned journals, see I. Oscarsson, ‘En revolution i offentligheten: om lärda tidskrifter i Europa under tidigmodern tid och om hur svensk vetenskap representerades i dem’, Sjuttonhundratal (2011), 93–115; on review journals, see T. Munck, ‘Eighteenth-Century Review Journals and the Internationalization of the European Book Market’, The International History Review, 32:3 (2010), 415–35. An overarching term for this, too rather mixed, category could be ‘literary journals’, whereby, however, the concept of literature was object to crucial historical change and specialisation in a related cultural trajectory. From denoting writing as such, the concept of ‘literature’ would increasingly become synonymous with
belles lettres, fiction and poetry. Tellingly, journals played a role in this redefinition of literature.
4 See L. Morrissey, The Constitution of Literature. Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (Stanford, 2008) and R. Rosenberg, ‘Eine verworrene Geschichte. Vorüberlegungen zu einer Biographie des Literaturbegriffs’, Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik, 77 (1990), 36–65.The question of publication language is of course crucial to gaining an understanding of the way in which the European infrastructure of journals was culturally translated to Scandinavian conditions. If we look at the learned or literary journals published in Denmark (not including Norway until 1814), a total of 61 can be identified. Out of these, 38 were in Danish, 18 in German, 3 in French and 2 in Latin. If we zoom in on 18 of the journals published from 1800 to 1850, 15 out of these were in Danish, 2 in German and 1 in French. The trend of nationalisation is clear, in other words, whereby three central shifts and corresponding Grossperioden can be identified: the aftermath of Humanism with Latin as the lingua franca, followed by the Enlightenment with the introduction of modern European languages, German, French and of course vernacular Danish, and finally the age of Romanticism and (romantic) nationalism with Danish totally dominant.