Articles de revues sur le sujet « Sermons, old norse – manuscripts »

The Son of the Widow from Nain.By Kaj ThaningThis article intends to elucidate the distinctions that Grundtvig made in his world of ideas in the course of the years from 1824 to 1834, first between spirit and letter, church and church-school (1826-1830), and then between natural life and Christian life (in 1832). In His "Literary Testament" (1827), Grundtvig himself admits that there was a "Chaos" in his writings, due to the youthful fervour that pervaded his literary works and his sermons in the years 1822-1824. But not until 1832 does he acknowledge that "when I speak or write as a citizen, or a bard, or a scholar, it is not the time nor the place to either preach or confess, so when I have done so, it was a mistake which can only be excused with the all too familiar disorder pertaining to our church, our civic life, and our scholarship...", as it says in a passage omitted from the manuscript for "Norse Mythology”, 1832. (The passage is printed in its entirety in ”A Human first...”, p. 259f.)The point of departure for Thaning’s article is a sermon on the Son of the Widow from Nain, delivered in 1834, which the editor, Christian Thodberg also found "singularly personal”, since Grundtvig keeps using the pronoun ”1”. In this sermon Grundtvig says that those who have heard him preaching on this text before, would remember that he regarded the mourning widow as ”an image of the same broken heart at all times”, and her comforter, Jesus, not only as a great prophet in Israel, but ”as the living Being who sees us and is with us always until the end of the world”. Thodberg is of the opinion that Grundtvig refers to his sermon from 1823. Thaning, however, thinks that the reference is to the sermon from 1824. But Grundtvig adds that one may now rightly ask him whether he ’’still regards the gospel for the day with the same eyes, the same hope and fear as before.” He wants to discuss this, among other things ’’because the best thing we can do when we grow old is ... to develop and explain what in the days of our youth .. sprang up before our eyes and echoes in our innermost mind.” In other words, he speaks as if he had grown old. So Thaning asks: "What happened on the way from Our Saviour’s Church to Frederick’s Church?"Thaning’s answer is that there was a change in Grundtvig’s view of life. Already in his first sermon in 1832, he says that his final and truly real hour as a pastor has now arrived. Thaning’s explanation is that Grundtvig has now passed from the time of strong emotions to that of calm reflections. Not until now does he realize "what is essential and what is not". And in 1834 he says that our Christian views, too, must go through a purgatorial fire when we grow older. This is not only true of the lofty views of human life which, naturally, go through this purgatory and most often lose themselves in it. Here Grundtvig distinguishes between natural and Christian life which is something new in a sermon. Thaning adds that this purgatorial fire pervades Grundtvig’s drafts for the Introduction to "Norse Mythology" in 1832. But then, Grundtvig’s lofty views did not lose themselves in purgatory. He got through it. His view of life changed. (Here Thaning refers to his dissertation, "A Human First...", p. 306ff).This is vaguely perceptible throughout the sermon in question. But according to Thaning Grundtvig slightly distorts the picture of his old sermon. In the latter he did not mix up natural and Christian life. It is Thaning’s view that Grundtvig is thinking of the distinct mixture of Christianity and Danish national feeling in the poem "New Year’s Morning" (1824). But he also refers to Grundtvig’s sermon on Easter Monday, 1824, printed in Helge Toldberg’s dissertation, "Grundtvig’s World of Symbols" (1950), p. 233ff, showing that he has been captured by imagery in a novel manner. He seems to want to impose himself upon his audience. In 1834 he knows he has changed. But 1832 is the dividing year. In the passage omitted from the manuscript for "Norse Mythology", Grundtvig states explicitly that faith is "a free matter": "Faith is a matter of its own, and truly each man’s own matter". Grundtvig could not say this before 1832. Thaning is of the opinion that this new insight lies behind the distinction that he makes in the sermon in 1834, where he says that he used to mix up Christian life with "the natural life of our people", which involved the risk that his Christian view might be misinterpreted and doubted. Now it has been through purgatory. And in the process it has only lost its "absurdity and obscurity, which did not come from the Lord, but from myself”.Later in the sermon he says: "The view is no more obscured by my Danish national feeling; I certainly do not by any means fail to appreciate the particularly friendly relationship that has prevailed through centuries between the Christian faith and the life of this people, and nor do I by any means renounce my hope that the rebirth of Christianity here will become apparent to the world, too, as a good deed, but yet this is only a dream, and the prophet will by no means tell us such dreams, but he bids us separate them sharply from the word of God, like the straw from the grain...". This cannot be polemically directed against his own sermons from 1824. It must necessarily reflect a reaction against the fundamental view expressed in "New Year’s Morning" and its vision of Christianity and Danishness in one. (Note that in his dissertation for the Degree of Divinity, Bent Christensen calls the poem "a dream", as Thaning adds).In his "Literary Testament" (1827) Grundtvig speaks about the "Chaos" caused by "the spirits of the Bible, of history, and of the Nordic countries, whom I serve and confuse in turn." But there is not yet any recognition of the same need for a distinction between Danishness and Christianity, which in the sermon he calls "the straw and the grain". Here he speaks of the distinction between "church and church-school, Christianity and theology, the spirit of the Bible and the letter of the Bible", as a consequence of his discovery in 1825. He still identifies the spirit of human history with the spirit of the Bible: "Here is the explanation over my chaos", Grundtvig says. But it is this chaos that resolves itself, leading to the insight and understanding in the sermon from 1834.In the year after "The Literary Testament", 1828, Grundtvig publishes the second part of his "Sunday Book", in which the only sermon on the Son of the Widow in this work appears. It is the last sermon in this volume, and it is an elaboration of the sermon from 1824. What is particularly characteristic of it is its talk about hope. "When the heart sees its hope at death’s door, where is comfort to be found for it, save in a divine voice, intoning Weep not!" Here Grundtvig quotes St. John 3:16 and says that when this "word of Life" is heard, when hope revives and rises from its bier, is it not then, and not until then, that we feel that God has visited his people...?" In the edition of this sermon in the "Sunday Book" a note of doubt has slipped in which did not occur in the original sermon from 1824. The conclusion of the sermon bears evidence that penitential Christianity has not yet been overcome: "What death would be too hard a transition to eternal life?" - "Then, in the march of time, let it stand, that great hope which is created by the Word ... like the son of the great woman from Nain."It is a strange transition to go from this sermon to the next one about the son of the widow, the sermon from 1832, where Christ is no longer called "hope". The faith has been moved to the present: "... only in the Word do we find him, the Word was the sign of life when we rose from the dead, and if we fell silent, it was the sign of death." - "Therefore, as the Lord has visited us and has opened our mouths, we shall speak about him always, in the certain knowledge that it is as necessary and as pleasurable as to breathe..." The emphasis of faith is no longer in words like longing and hope.In a sense this and other sermons in the 1830s anticipate the hymn "The Lord has visited his people" ("Hymn Book" (Sangv.rk) I, no. 23): the night has turned into morning, the sorrow has been removed. The gospel has become the present. As before the Church is compared with the widow who cried herself blind at the foot of the cross. Therefore the Saviour lay in the black earth, nights and days long. But now the Word of life has risen from the dead and shall no more taste death. The dismissal of the traditional Christianity, handed down from the past, is extended to include the destructive teaching in schools. The young man on the bier has been compared with the dead Christianity which Grundtvig now rejects. At an early stage Grundtvig was aware of its effects, such as in the Easter sermon in 1830 ("Sunday Book" III, p. 263) where Grundtvig speaks as if he had experienced a breakthrough to his new view. So, the discovery of the Apostles’ Creed in 1825 must have been an enormous feeling of liberation for him – from the worship of the letter that so pervaded his age. Grundtvig speaks about the "living, certain, oral, audible" word in contrast to the "dead, uncertain, written, mute" sign in the book. However, there is as yet no mention of the "Word from the Mouth of our Lord", which belongs to a much later time. Only then does he acquire the calm confidence that enables him to preach on the background of what has happened that the Word has risen from the dead. The question to ask then is what gave him this conviction."Personally I think that it came to him at the same time as life became a present reality for him through the journeys to England," Thaning says. By the same token, Christianity also became a present reality. The discovery of 1825 was readily at hand to grant him a means of expression to convey this present reality and the address to him "from the Lord’s own mouth", on which he was to live. It is no longer enough for him to speak about "the living, solemn evidence at baptism of the whole congregation, the faith we are all to share and confess" as much more certain than everything that is written in all the books of the world. The "Sunday Book" is far from containing the serene insight which, in spite of everything, the Easter sermon, written incidentally on Easter Day, bears witness to. But in 1830 he was not yet ready to sing "The Lord has visited his people", says Thaning.In the sermon from 1834 one meets, as so often in Grundtvig, his emphasis on the continuity in his preaching. In the mourning widow he has always seen an image of the Church, as it appears for the first time in an addition to the sermon on the text in the year 1821 ("Pr.st. Sermons", vol I, p. 296). It ends with a clue: "The Church of Christ now is the Widow of Nain". He will probably have elaborated that idea and concluded his sermon with it. Nevertheless, as it has appeared, the sermon in 1834 is polemically directed against his former view, the mixture of Christian and natural life. He recognizes that there is an element of "something fantastic" sticking to the "view of our youth".Already in a draft for a sermon from March 4,1832, Grundtvig says:"... this was truly a great error among us that we contented ourselves with an obscure and indefinite idea of the Spirit as well as the Truth, for as a consequence of that we were so doubtful and despondent, and we so often mistook the letter for the spirit, or the spirit of phantasy and delusion for that of God..." (vol. V, p. 79f).The heart-searchings which this sermon draft and the sermon on the 16th Sunday after Trinity are evidence of, provide enough argument to point to 1832 as a year of breakthrough. We, his readers, would not have been able to indicate the difference between before and now with stronger expressions than Grundtvig’s own. "He must really have turned into a different kind of person", Thaning says. At the conclusion of the article attention is drawn to the fact that the image of the Son of the Widow also appears in an entirely different context than that of the sermon, viz. in the article about Popular Life and Christianity that Grundtvig wrote in 1847. "What still remains alive of Danish national feeling is exactly like the disconsolate widow at the gate of Nain who follows her only begotten son to the grave" (US DC, p. 86f). The dead youth should not be spoken to about the way to eternal life, but a "Rise!" should be pronounced, and that apparently means: become a living person! On this occasion Grundtvig found an opportunity to clarify his ideas. His "popular life first" is an extension of his "a human being first" from 1837. He had progressed over the last ten years. But the foundation was laid with the distinction between Christian and natural life at the beginning of the 1830s.

Abstract Guðbrandur Vigfússon, an Icelander born in Galtardalur, Dalasýsla, was without doubt one of the most influential scholars of Old Norse studies of his day. His diplomatic edition of Flateyjarbók, his critical edition of Sturlunga saga, and his anthology An Icelandic Prose Reader are still of use to those without access to the relevant manuscripts. In this essay, I would like to survey his career (in Copenhagen and Oxford) as an editor of Old Norse-Icelandic texts and the legacy that he has left to his successors in the field of Old Norse studies.

This article traces the manuscript filiation and the routes of textual transmission of Viðrǿða líkams ok sálar, the first soul-and-body debate that is preserved in Old Norse translation, a fairly faithful yet succinct translation of the Anglo-Norman poem known alternatively as Desputisun de l’âme et du corps and Un Samedi par nuit. The Norse text survives today in four manuscripts: AM 619 4to (Old Norwegian Homily Book), AM 696 XXXII 4to, AM 764 4to, and JS 405 8vo. Through a qualitative analysis of concurrent readings, the present study confirms and expands the stemma hypothesized by Ole Widding and Hans Bekker-Nielsen in 1959. The presence in the Norse text of readings typical of a newly identified “Continental tradition” within the Anglo-Norman family of manuscripts indicates that the nowlost manuscript source may have been a French codex, produced in all probability in a Flemish Benedictine monastery (Picardy, northeastern Artois or Hainaut) during the second half of the twelfth century. Subsequently, the codex may have been transferred from Flanders to a sister Benedictine house in Norway—such as Munkeliv in Bergen—via well-attested profitable monastic and trade networks that connected Flemish and Norwegian scriptoria between the twelfth and the fourteenth centuries.

Abstract: In a collection of essays, thirteen writers discuss texts from medieval Britain and beyond, the common theme being translation or events abroad. Helen Fulton describes manuscripts and libraries in Wales; Elena Parina, Welsh medical texts; Victoria Flood, English Tudor versions of Welsh political prophecies. Joanna Bellis sets out Latin propaganda poems of the Hundred Years’ War; Rory McTurk, possible links between Langland and skaldic verse. Then come four studies relating to Ireland. Erich Poppe takes on the Charlemagne legend in Irish; Aisling Byrne, Irish texts on the Crusades; Mariamne Briggs, Statius in Irish; Julie Leblanc, legends in Irish about Aeneas. After that, four contributions on Iceland. Mathias Egeler surveys Otherworld islands in Norse, includ­ing the Land of Women; Sif Rikhardsdottir explores emotive literary identity in the Old North; Sarah Bacchianti analyzes Norse translations of Geoffrey of Monmouth; Sabine Heidi Walther examines the personality of Hercules in the Old Norse saga of Troy.

Rolf Bremmer (2007) concludes that the language of the Old Frisian Riustring manuscripts shows traces of copying from texts written in other Old Frisian dialects, notably from the Ems region. The strongest indication for his hypothesis comes from the masculine plural ending-ar, which is the rule in Ems Old Frisian but the exception in R1 and absent from other Riustring manuscripts. In this contribution, Bremmer’s hypothesis is partly confirmed, but augmented with the reconstruction of an indigenous Riustring plural ending-arin masculinea-stem nouns denoting an animate subject, which appear substantially more often in the nominative. Nouns with a higher frequency of occurrence in the accusative take the plural ending-a. This is taken to reflect a former Proto-Frisian situation, with the ending-arin the nom. pl. of masculinea-stem nouns against-ain the acc. pl., similar to Old Norse. The earlier distribution had become lexicalised by the time of Riustring Old Frisian. Some of the attested instances, however, are better explained as remnants of a copying process from Ems Old Frisian.

AbstractIn the present chapter, the design of select margins of late medieval Old Norse manuscripts containing the Icelandic ‘Jónsbók’, ‘Kristinréttr Árna biskups’ and Norwegian ‘Landslǫg’ law codes is addressed. In particular, it discusses the size and fillings of margins in these codices and the relation to their modes of use by original clients and later owners. Although it is well-known that Scandinavian law manuscripts contain a large number of notes written by both original and later users, the particular use of marginal spaces by original scribes and illuminators for glosses and other annotations and illuminations has scarcely been investigated to date. In my contribution, two distinctive features will be addressed: (1.) The different use of margins by Norwegian and Icelandic readers of the manuscripts, and (2.) the use of margins by illuminators surrounding the column(s) and incorporated initials.

AbstractIn 1891, Germain Morin identified a set of brief, anonymous Latin sermons that he controversially attributed to Alcuin’s Anglo-Saxon pupil named ‘Witto’ or ‘Wizo’ in Old English, ‘Candidus’ in Latin. The texts in question are of considerable interest but have remained unprinted and thus scarcely known. The present article offers an edition of them, based on all the known manuscripts, as well as a translation and commentary. An introductory discussion reviews the state of scholarship on Candidus’s career and writings, then examines in detail the content and sources of the four texts, the evidence supporting their attribution to Candidus, and some points of comparison between the items here edited and other Latin sermons produced at Carolingian centres in the early ninth century.

This contribution starts with a brief outline of Augustine’s life and then proceeds with the various ways by which his works have been named and set in order. Recent digital developments were key to the removal of apologetic and theological assumptions from the list of Augustine’s works: objective, alphabetical and chronological lists have become more mainstream. These digital technologies have also been put to good use to find unknown Augustinian texts hidden in old manuscripts. The same means can be deployed to check whether texts were really authored by him. This may certainly enhance our esteem of former Augustinian researchers for their achievements in this field. In particular, one may bring to the fore their retrieval of Augustine’s letters and sermons, both in times long past and in recent decades. The next part of this article continues by looking closer into the research of Augustine’s Bible exposition and homiletics. Special attention is given to the relationship between the sermons that are catalogued as sermones ad populum and related sermons from the expositions of all 150 Psalms over against those that cover the whole gospel of John. New discoveries also raise questions about the way Augustine’s many short sermons relate to his long homilies. These questions are a reason to reconsider the way Augustine’s sermons are constructed and structured. Finally, we outline how new digital techniques are of help to reinvestigate the sermons in the way he uses words and Scripture in order to show in more detail Augustine’s pastoral profile. This pastoral fine-tuning is illustrated with three examples.

AbstractIn the first half of the 18th century, the position of the Catholic Church in the Commonwealth was strengthen and it dominated other Christian denominations. The network of the parishes was expanded, and the accessibility to churches improved. New forms of saints cult as well as other forms of piousness had developed. The preaching played an important role in this process. The preaching in the Commonwealth was not just a Sunday sermon, but above all sermons related to homiletics of the late Baroque, connected with religious ceremonies eg. funerals. The preacher was to work through emotions, the achievements of Baroque rhetoric used, although in the Commonwealth, own solutions were developed to enable effective communication with the recipient representing the Old Polish culture. The size of this impact was significant, as evidenced by numerous prints dating back to that period, but also manuscripts with recorded places of preaching, or impressions from preaching preserved in memoirs or correspondence. It should be emphasized that the sermons not only carved the system of moral values or the piety of the society, but also influenced the ideas of everyday life, the roles of individual and groups in society, as well as the relation to authority

Library institutions did not exist in early modern Iceland, meaning that private ownership was central to the preservation of pre-modern manuscripts and literature. However, personal collections are poorly documented in comparison to the activities of manuscript collectors such as Árni Magnússon. This article examines the case study of Helga Magnúsdóttir (1623–1677) and book ownership at her home of Bræðratunga in South Iceland, concluding that Helga Magnúsdóttir engaged in library-building as a social strategy following the death of her husband, Hákon Gíslason (1614–1652). The inventory of the Bræðratunga estate from 1653 includes only four books, all printed. However, nine manuscripts are conclusively identified as having been at Bræðratunga at least briefly during the period from c. 1653 to 1677, and evidence for the presence of another five items is discussed. Examination of surviving volumes suggests that Helga’s goal was to participate in an active culture of sharing manuscript material across distances, rather than to accumulate a large stationary collection of printed books and codices for Bræðratunga. She thereby played an important but easily overlooked role in the survival of Old Norse-Icelandic literature in the early modern period. Of the manuscripts at Bræðratunga, at least two likely came from Helga’s childhood home of Munkaþverá in North Iceland, the former site of a Benedictine monastery. Her cousin Bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson of Skálholt (1605–1675) also gifted books to Helga and her family, and on his death she inherited half of his collection of Icelandic books and manuscripts, making her the owner of one of the most significant collections of Icelandic manuscripts in the country. The survival of books from Helga’s library was negatively impacted by the Fire of Copenhagen in 1728, the extinction of her family line in the eighteenth century as a long-term consequence of the 1707–1709 smallpox epidemic and collector Árni Magnússon’s antagonistic relationship with two of her children’s heirs. Árni’s relationship with Oddur Sigurðsson (1681–1741), Helga’s grandson and last living descendent, did eventually improve; an appendix includes a list of manuscripts that Oddur loaned to Árni and may have come from the library at Bræðratunga.

In 1787, Grímur Thorkelin, the secretary of the Arnamagnæan Commission, gave the manuscript collector Thomas Astle two paper manuscripts and a parchment bifolium. After Astle’s death, these manuscripts found their way into the Stowe collection and are now kept in the British Library. The paper manuscripts contain transcriptions of texts found in a manuscript in the Arnamagnæan collection and were probably written by Thorkelin himself. The bifolium was, however, written in the fourteenth century. It contains a compilation of short stories about English bishops, mostly archbishops of Canterbury, preceded by a short prologue. For the compilation, the compiler has gathered and adapted material from sources that were already available in Old Norse-Icelandic translations, including Árni Lárentíusson’s Dunstanus saga. However, not all the texts in the compilation are known to exist elsewhere in Icelandic translation. An examination shows that the bifolium was written by the same scribe who wrote parts of Reynistaðarbók in AM 764 4to, and a closer look reveals that the bifolium was once a part of that same manuscript. The last narrative on the bifolium tells the life of St Cuthbert, but its conclusion is now at the top of f. 36r in AM 764 4to. Furthermore, catalogues of the Arnamagnæan collection compiled in the first third of the seventeenth century show that tales about archbishops of Canterbury were included in AM 764 4to, but they are now missing. It thus appears that Thorkelin, who had easy access to Arnamagnæan manuscripts, removed the bifolium before journeying to England, causing its text to fall into oblivion for over two centuries. In the article, the history of the bifolium is discussed, and the script and orthography of its scribe examined and compared to that of scribe E in AM 764 4to. The sources of the compilation’s texts are traced, and the compiler’s methods are analysed. Finally, a diplomatic edition of the texts of the compilation that is now split between the Stowe bifolium and AM 764 4to is presented.

Eagerly venerated and able to perform miracles, medieval relics and religious artefacts in the Latin West would occasionally also be subject to sensorial and tactile devotional practices. Evidenced by various reports, artefacts were grasped and stroked, kissed and tasted, carried and pulled. For medieval Norway, however, there is very little documentary and/or physical evidence of such sensorial engagements with religious artefacts. Nevertheless, two church inventories for the parish churches in Hålandsdalen (1306) and Ylmheim (1321/1323) offer a small glimpse of what may have been a semi-domestic devotional practice related to sculpture, namely the embellishing of wooden sculptures in parish churches with silver bracelets and silver brooches. According to wills from England and the continent, jewellery was a common material gift donated to parishes by women. Such a practice is likely to have been taking place in Norway, too, yet the lack of coherent source material complicate the matter. Nonetheless, using a few preserved objects and archaeological finds as well as medieval sermons, homiletic texts and events recorded in Old Norse sagas, this article teases out more of the significances of the silver items mentioned in the two inventories by exploring the interfaces between devotional acts, decorative needs, and possibly gendered experiences, as well as object itineraries between the domestic and the religious space.

В статье публикуется новое критическое издание первого из двух древнегрузинских отрывков проповеди «На Рождество Христово» (CPG 7899a; BHGa 1914m) Леонтия, пресвитера Константинопольского, которые не сохранились в дошедших до нас греческих рукописях. Издание основано на тексте «Афонского многоглава» (Ivir. georg. 11); в критическом аппарате указаны разночтения с «Пархальским многоглавом» (Tbilisi, A-95) по предыдущему изданию Нино Меликишвили. На основании анализа разночтений высказывается гипотеза о редакционной правке, проведённой на грузинской почве над изначальным текстом перевода. Также в введении рассматриваются параллели первого грузинского фрагмента с другими проповедями Леонтия и место грузинского фрагмента внутри греческого текста. Издание древнегрузинского фрагмента сопровождается переводом на русский язык. The present article features a new critical edition of the first of two Georgian fragments of the sermon “On the Nativity of Christ” (CPG 7899a; BHGa 1914m) by Leontius, Presbyter of Constantinople, which are lost in the extant Greek manuscripts. The edition is based on the text of the so-called “Athos Mravaltavi” (Ivir. georg. 11); the critical apparatus collates readings of the “Parchal Mravaltavi” (Tbilisi, A-95) published earlier by Nino Melikishvili. An analysis of readings allows to proceed to the hypothesis that initial Georgian translation underwent editorial interventions. Parallels between the Georgian fragment and other sermons by Leontius are assessed in the Introduction, as well as the emplacement of the Georgian fragment within the Greek text. A Russian translation accompanies the edition of the Georgian fragment.

For a long time Russian manuscript book has been famous for its rich artistic design. Miniatures containing parts of liturgical texts, sermons, saints’ lives, richly decorated miniatures, initials have changed over time, so they help to date a manuscript. The article studies the artistic design of northern manuscripts in order to figure out a more accurate date of the source. The subjects of the study are liturgical and theological books from the collection of the Arkhangelsk Museum Association “Russian North artistic culture”, created in the XV–XIX centuries. All researched manuscripts are written on paper and all of them are not dated, therefore the date of writing a book is first determined by paper signs, which is then confirmed by other facts, namely by drawings written at the same time as the main text. In “Prologue”, created at the end of the 15th century, the scribe uses the Balkan ornament, which was popular in Russian books of the second half of the 15th and 16th centuries. On the sheets with miniatures there are also large initials of the Balkan type. The “Psalter” of the late 18th century was copied from the printed edition of 1651. It contains the unfinished design of King David copied from the printed edition evidenced by the artist’s manner of performing this image. Some of the manuscripts are decorated by scribes with drawings copied or taken from printed editions of the same period as the book. Thus, in the collection of the early XIX century (a “white” date on paper – 1815) there is a miniature that occurs in such printed editions as “The Life of Basil the New”, 1792–1795 and 1801, or “Psalter” 1802–1803, 1812–1814 years. In the collection of the museum there are books consisting of printed and handwritten sheets, restored instead of lost printed ones. For example, in the “Tablet” of Patriarch Nikon, published in 1656, the text was restored by hand on several pages at the beginning of the 18th century that is determined by the paper signs on the pages of the book. On the one of the manuscript sheets there is a miniature taken from a printed source and pasted into the text. Such an ornament is found, for example, in the Minne December 1714. These data show that the handwritten text and design were made at one time. The collection of the museum contains several bright books, richly decorated with Pomor ornament, which was popular in Old Believers' manuscripts written in the Russian North, near the White Sea, in the second half of the 17th and 19th centuries. The Pomor ornament is noted in the books that were created in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and is no longer found in manuscripts of late writing, which also indicates that a text and a décor of the book were made the same time. Thereby, the studied material helped to confirm the dates of the creation of the manuscripts, and also showed once again that when the source is dated, all the data in the book are taken into account.

Medieval literature, philosophy, medicine, and many other fields cannot be imagined without considering the huge role played by translations. Scholars have worked on this field already for many years, leading among them Jeanette Beer, who here brings together a number of authors who address specific aspects pertinent to translation work mostly in medieval literature. While she herself offers a concise introduction, she rounds off the volume with a study of the work by the anonymous compiler of Li Fet des Romans from the early thirteenth century which represents the earliest extant work of ancient historiography translated into a European medieval vernacular. The translator offers most detailed comments about his motivation and translation strategies, which helps us understand considerably how medieval writers approached their task. But back to the Introduction. Here Beer traces the history of the earliest translations, beginning with the famous Strasbourg Oaths from 842, turning to Eulalia, the Valenciennes Fragment, and Marie de France, among others. Subsequently Beer outlines the major highlights of this collected volume, highlighting that the contributors address vernaculars such as Latin (not really a vernacular), French, Anglo-Norman, Italian, English, Old Norse, German, Arabic, and Hebrew. Indeed, some of the chapters cover those languages, but we do not hear anything about German, Arabic, or Hebrew, apart from some very fleeting references. She correctly notes that the world prior to the printing press was deeply determined by textual mouvance which provided enormous flexibility in the rendering and display of texts in the manuscripts. The Introduction concludes with a bibliography and a bibliographical note about the author. This model is applied throughout the entire volume.

The article presents the results of work on archaeographic research of the Metropolinate of Novosibirsk parish book collections, done in 2019–2020. The researchers of the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts of SPSTL SB RAS inventoried the books of Cyrillic and civil press kept in the parish library of Holy Apostle and Evangelist Luke in Kupino (Kupinsky district of Novosibirsk province). 35 Orthodox books of the Cyrillic tradition and of the Russian civil type of the first half of the 17th – early 20th centuries were made known, among them, 2 editions of the 17th century printed by the Moscow Print Yard, 4 Old Believer editions of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, 19 Synodal editions of the Cyrillic type from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries and 12 Synodal editions of the Russian civil type. The aim of the article is to present the results of scientific description and an archaeographic analysis of individual features of the most interesting book exemplars. Through complication of describing such book collections, which did not usually preserve intact or partially samples of pre-revolutionary parish book stocks and were shaped from various sources, priority was given to describing the owner’s signs of each sample that reflected the history of their existence in one or another social environment. Among the earliest there were described the perfectly preserved Moscow Gospel of 1627, the owner’s and donative records of which reflected its displacement from the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to Moscovia, where it could have come after Smolensk campaign of Tsar Alexey Mikhailovich. Another interesting example of editions of the Moscow Print Yard already from the post-schism period is the Irmologion of 1657, in which course of the description significant differences from other known copies were revealed. The late Old Believers liturgical books, that preserved the fragments of hand-written and early printed books, give interesting owners signs. The collection of synodal publications of the St Luke parish library covers a wide chronological and thematic range. Besides liturgical books such as psalteries, missal books, miscellanies of Akathist hymns there are also collections of sermons, manuals on theology, church singing and Sacred history. The article presents brief versions of the books of Cyrillic press of the St Like parish library, clearly showing the wide geographical distribution of the Russian Orthodox book both in the late medieval times and in the 20th century, as well as characteristic signs of its existence in various readership.

The silence of the artefacts?The traditional division between archaeology and history is created by the sources of the disciplines. Archaeology is normally defined by the material sources – the artefacts – and history by the focus on written sources. The article gives an introduction to the changing conception of artefacts and to the historians’ and archaeologists’ relation to the material sources.In the 18th century,the collection and description of artefacts was the main goal for the scholars, or antiquarians (fig. 1). In the second half of the century it became common to use the ancient monuments and artefacts in art and in complex combinations as national monuments and landscape gardens (fig. 3-6). The function of the monuments was to emphasise the antiquity of the royal power and the king’s right and relationship to the nation. In the 19th century art became more romantic – as did the interpretations of the artefacts. Now the Danish people and the ”true Danish spirit” made the artefacts valuable (fig. 7).Until the middle of the 19th century it was believed that the prehistoric artefacts were in fact ”historic” – that they belonged to the same period as the Old Norse writings. The artefacts were considered temporary with the writings of Saxo and the Icelandic manuscripts and the interpretation of the artefacts relied heavily on written sources. Also artefacts were often ascribed to supernatural beings such as giants and elves (fig. 2). From 1820 onwards, C.J. Thomsen developed an independent archaeological method according to which the artefacts were sources in their own right, and they were slowly accepted as the most reliable evidence of the distant past (fig 8-11). This development was partly caused by J.J.A. Worsaae’s critique of the traditional historical approach, which led to misinterpretations of mounds and artefacts.This new interpretation of the material sources put archaeology and history in opposition to each other. The cultural history of the archaeologist written on basis of ”speech less” sources conflicted with the political history of the historians dealing with great men and central events. As a result of these conflicting definitions of history the disciplines separated.This conflict is still evident in the disciplines’ attitude to each other. However, the postulated difference in the nature of written and material sources is untenable from the traditional viewpoint of a source as remnant or report (fig. 12).This definition of sources was created by Kristian Erslev in the late 19th century and can still be used when dealing with the apparent differences between archaeology and history. The article concludes that when archaeologists try to emphasise the truth of their sources, they are making a mistake. The fact that the artefacts are speechless, e.g. have no formulated report – does not make them true. The central question is the way the scientists interpret the sources, since no source ever speaks for itself.Anne Katrine GjerløffThe Department of History Copenhagen University

Abstract This study applies statistical approaches to the analysis of the genre relationships of Old Norse-Icelandic literature in order to expand our understanding of the relationships between works, their transmission, and their possible modes of reception, as manifested in the extant manuscripts. This article contributes to the ongoing discussion of the genre boundaries of Old Norse-Icelandic literature and presents an alternative method of engaging with this material in the form of computer-assisted analysis, i.e. data visualization and network analysis. Using data collected from major online databases of Old Norse-Icelandic manuscripts, we present the most complete to date network of co-occurrences in manuscripts of works belonging to a number of literary genres. The present study empirically demonstrates the manifoldness of the connections between the Old Norse-Icelandic works which transcend traditional scholarly genre boundaries. The study identifies two main communities within the network: a community of romances, or works of narrative fiction, which includes mainly legendary sagas (fornaldarsögur) and chivalric sagas (riddarasögur), and a community of historicizing narratives, or pseudo-history, which includes mainly sagas of Icelanders (Íslendingasögur) and kings’ sagas (konungasögur).

Abstract The Old Norse medical corpus, both manuscript and epigraphic, illuminates understandings of the body and of the relationship between sickness, somatic emotion and the perceived integrity of the individual self in Viking and medieval Scandinavia. This essay argues that Old Norse medical texts and charms understand illness not only as an imbalance of humours but also as an invasive, anthropomorphised agent that seeks to breach the boundaries of the human body. Falling victim to illness is understood as a zero-sum power exchange, visualised through images of martial defeat and sexualised submission. Strong emotion can be rendered as physical illness in Old Norse literature because both forces threaten the integrity of the contained and individualised self. As a thematic case study, this essay examines runic healing charms, late medieval medical manuscripts and saga episodes dealing with boils and abscesses, which are attributed both to the surging of vital spirits and to the action of supernatural disease agents, to examine the way these texts understand the embodied self.

This article studies the genre characteristics of Andrei Denisov’s sermon; he was the most prominent leader of the second wave of Russian Old Belief, a writer, and a polemicist. The author refers to previously unknown texts by Andrei Denisov that were published by the author of this article earlier and to rhetorical manuscripts. The author implements the methodology of source studies and textology. The problematic context of this research is determined by Vyg Baroque as an essential part of Moscow Baroque. The hermeneutic approach underlying this study provides the interpretation of the writings of Andrei Denisov in the context of Vyg literary culture with a strong rhetorical accent. The article focuses on the main work created in the Vyg community, i. e. the Rhetoric Code, and the rhetorical studies of the Baroque poet and philosopher Andrei Belobotsky, in which Andrei Denisov showed great interest. The rhetorical thought of this period dictated the genre model of the sermon, the structure, and the style of the texts. The Baroque interpretation of hermeneutics influenced the semantics of the sermon, which was dominated by semantic duality and “allegorical meaning”. It manifests itself in the structure-forming role of biblical quotations (“themes”) and in the abundance of metaphors, symbols, and allegories. The article reveals metaphors that shaped the central eschatological myth based on the opposition of the hostile outdoor world, desecrated by the Antichrist, and the Vyg Pustyn as a space of spiritual sanctuary. Sermons created by Andrei Denisov reflect the typical Baroque concept of vanitas vanitatum. Their author was interested in the ontological nature of time and anthropological problems that became relevant during the Baroque period. The article also examines the communicative model of preaching discourse determined by the prophetic image of the author, who constructed it through biblical quotations. The article explains the rhythmic organisation of sermons designed for listening. Based on the analysis of the rhetorical techniques used by Andrei Denisov, it concludes that the author was eager to create a powerful sermon that would influence the establishment of the foundations of the faith and spiritual formation of Old Believers. The article also sheds light on the reception of the pan-European Baroque style in the literature of the Old Believers of the early eighteenth century. The heart of Vyg Baroque was functional didacticism, which served the main goal of preaching, i. e. asserting the religious and moral values that underlay the Vyg utopian project.

NB: Artiklen er på dansk, resuméet på engelsk. Erik Petersen: Wulfstan’s Codex and Schumacher’s List. On the Oldest Record of Manuscripts in the Royal Library. It has hitherto been assumed that the earliest list of manuscripts in the Royal Library is the section of manuscripts in the catalogue preserved in the library’s archive as E 8: Catalogus librorum typis exaratorum, pariter ac Manuscriptorum, quibus, curante Petro Schu­machero, aucta est Regia Bibliotheca. A total of 82 manuscripts are recorded at the end (f. 17v-20r) of the Catalogus E 8, which was made by Willum Worm who signed and dated it on the 4th of January 1671at his accession as librarian to the Danish king, Christian V. Worm succeeded Peter Schumacher, perhaps better known as Griffenfeld, who act­ed as librarian to king Frederik III from 1663 to 1670 and to Christian V until Worm took over. The Catalogus E 8 has been known for long as ‘Schumacher’s catalogue’. Thus Ellen Jørgensen, the author of the Catalogus codicum Latinorum medii ævi Bib­liothecæ Regiæ Hafniensis (1926), referred to it as cat. Schumacheri, and stated, on its authority, that a given manuscript found in the Catalogus E 8 had been acquired by the library between 1663 and 1670. Others followed her example. The manuscript section of Catalogus E 8 was published by Harald Ilsøe in 1999 in his book on the history of the Royal Library’s holdings until ca. 1780 (Det kongelige Bibliotek i støbeskeen. Studier og samlinger til bestandens historie indtil ca. 1780, 1999, p. 574-581). However, the Catalogus E 8 is not the catalogue of Schumacher. It is the catalogue of Willum Worm. And the catalogue of Worm does not cover the entire period 1663 to the end of 1670, but only the latter part of it, i.e. the period from the beginning of 1666 to the end of 1670. In fact, Peter Schumacher made his own list, which has never received the atten­tion it deserves – if at all noticed, its contents have been misinterpreted. It is pre­served in the RL Archive as E 8 a. Schumacher’s list is neither dated nor signed. It contains records for more than a hundred printed books. It also contains a list of 45 manuscripts, several of which have dedications to king Frederik III. An analysis of the years of publication of the printed books and of the dedications in the manuscripts makes it possible to date Schumacher’s list in E 8 a to the end of 1665. The 45 manu­scripts thus represent the nucleus of the manuscript collection of the king’s growing library. Apparently it is exactly the aim and ambition of creating such a collection that Schumacher’s list reflects. It is important also because Worm’s list of 1671does not repeat entries of manuscripts on Schumacher’s list; in other words, the two lists of manuscripts supplement each other. Most of the manuscripts recorded on the list were contemporary, and many of them directly related to the king either by contents or by dedications by authors or donators. Whereas the printed books reflect an able awareness of what was going on in the intellectual centres of Europe, the manuscripts reveal a more limited horizon. Not a single manuscript on Schumacher’s list seems to have been acquired by pur­chase, neither on the European market nor in Denmark. There are, however, manuscripts of great importance on Schumacher’s list, amongst them the following medieval manuscripts (with my identifications of their present call numbers in the Old Royal Collection, Gammel Kongelig Samling or GKS): 4 Den Islandske Lovbog udgiffvet aff Kong Magnus Haagensøn. fol. = GKS 1154 2° 26 Descriptio Eccles. Romanæ cum omnibus suis ceremoniis, ritibus etc. Sic inci­pit: Apollogus de ordine Romano. MS. Pergam. = GKS 1595 4° 29 Liber Daticus Ecclesiæ et Capituli Lundensis. fol. in membran. = GKS 845 2° 36 Thaumbachius de Consolatione Theologiæ chartâ pergamenâ. = GKS 1370 4° 39 Biblia Lat. MSS. in 8°. anno 1237. = GKS 3375 8° Items 4 and 29 were produced in medieval Denmark. Items 36 and 39 were both very common in the late Middle Ages; none of them are ‘royal’ in any sense of the word, and may well have been found among the remnants of the old church somewhere in Denmark. The same is true of the most remarkable item on the list, the Descriptio Ecclesesiæ Romanæ cum omnibus suis ceremoniis, ritibus etc. with the incipit: Apollogus de ordine Romano, the famous codex of Wulfstan, produced just after the turn of the first millennium under the supervision of Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester and arch­bishop of York, and containing his autograph notes in Anglo-Saxon and Latin. Next to nothing has been known about its history in Denmark until now. It has, in fact, only been possible to state that it was in The Royal Library in 1786, when the Old Royal Collection was established. Due to Schumacher’s list we now know that it was in the king’s library already in 1665, and that it is likely to have been in Denmark long before then. As to the protestant king’s interest in a medieval book of the old church such as Wulfstan’s, a glimpse on the medieval manuscripts recorded in Worms’ Catalogus E 8 may be enlightening. The focus of collecting did not change or changed very little. Nos. 37, 47, 73, 78, 79, 80 are described as lawbooks, written in Danish or Old Norse. A few may be medieval, but they are not described in sufficient detail to be identified. The provenance of a single manuscript in Greek is unknown. The follow­ing are all in Latin: 2 Fundation paae biskop Byrges Capel i Lund 1518. = GKS 846 2° 11Evangelistæ in Membranâ. Probably = GKS 1347 4° (Ilsøe: GKS 12 2°, lost) 40 Justinus in Membranâ. = GKS 451 2° or GKS 452 2° (Ilsøe’s suggestions) 57 Bibliorum tomus II incipit a Iobo. = GKS 1310 4° 77 Notkirkes alterbog i gammel dage. = GKS 3453 8° Item 2 was produced in Lund, that is in medieval Denmark. Item 57 was produced in Italy, but belonged to the chapter of the cathedral of Lund in the later Middle Ages. If my identification is correct, item 11was produced in England, but it had migrated to Bergen in Norway in the Middle Ages. I am in doubt about the identity of item 40, but Iustinus was widely copied and read in the Middle Ages, even in Denmark. Item 77 is of particular interest in our context. It is a Latin manuale ecclesiasticum, and was found in the local church of Notmark on the island of Als in 1669 by king Frederik III himself. He visited the provincial church and required to take ‘the old monastic book in Latin’ as well as a copy in German of king Valdemar’s law book along to Copenhagen. His request was granted and the visit of the king recorded by the vicar in a Danish printed bible that remained in the church. The medieval books in the collection were not bought abroad because of their splen­dour or prestige, but inherited, received as gifts or gathered from places inside the king’s own realms. Thus the catalogues E 8 a and E 8 not only offer evidence of the presence of a given manuscript in the kings Library ante the end of 1665 or ante 1671. They also indicate that the manuscripts may well have had a much longer history in Denmark than hitherto known. Thus the list of Schumacher is not just a detail in the history of a library. It is also the mirror through which Wulfstan and his codex may become visible in the distant landscape of medieval Denmark.