“Hardly any Latin books from medieval Iceland have survived. Due to their rarity, recycled parchment from disassembled Latin books is one of our most important sources in the history of medieval Icelandic books,” said Lorenz. “I follow Latin traces from Icelandic manuscripts, but the Latin written material has been forgotten. Previous research has focused mostly on texts in Old Norse in Icelandic manuscripts.”
While collecting Iceland’s literature, Árni Magnússon’s interest was primarily in works written in Old Norse over those in Latin. He went so far as to use Latin parchments as book covers for Old Norse books. The book covers were removed in the early twentieth century and largely ignored until recently.
Now, Lorenz is using them in his search for hidden writings. Of Magnússon’s 3,000 book collection, half was returned to Iceland between 1917 and 1997, housed at the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies in Reykjavík. The rest of the known collection resides at the Arnamagnæan Institute in Copenhagen, although Lorenz continues to hunt Norway, Denmark, and Sweden for any stray Icelandic material.
Lorenz’s work has slowly revealed the theological and liturgical texts in circulation in medieval Iceland and Icelander’s participation in European intellectual culture.
Fundamentally, investigating Iceland’s medieval palimpsests reveals a rich tapestry of literary ingenuity, religious transformation, and European intellectual exchange, showcasing how resourceful Icelanders preserved their cultural heritage through reused manuscripts and hidden texts.
The new paper, “Recycling and Recontextualisation in Medieval and Early Modern Icelandic Palimpsests,” appeared on December 16, 2024 in the journal Gripla.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
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Publish date : 2024-12-30 06:23:00
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