Fragments and Palimpsests - Recycling and Recontextualisation of Latin Manuscripts Connected to Medieval Iceland

• Published in: Gripla
• Main Author: Lorenz, Tom
• Other Authors: Berg, Ivar, Wærdahl, Randi Bjørshol, Gunnlaugsson, Guðvarður Már
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: NTNU 2025
• Subjects: VDP::Humaniora: 000::Språkvitenskapelige fag: 010; Iceland
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3172799

The first books in Iceland were Latin manuscripts which were used for the performance of the Catholic liturgy, for personal devotion, as well as for teaching Latin. These Latin manuscripts were first imported from abroad, later also produced locally in Icelandic scriptoria and made up an important part of the books that existed in medieval Iceland (ca. 1000–1550). The introduction of the Protestant Reformation caused these old Catholic manuscripts to be gradually replaced by new Lutheran religious manuscripts and printed books. As a consequence, the obsolete Catholic manuscripts were no longer actively preserved and many were dismantled to recycle their material components or modified to adapt them to new Lutheran contexts. In this doctoral thesis, I investigate the destiny of the Catholic Latin manuscripts that were not simply lost. In the three research articles, I discuss three codicological practices for parchment recycling and manuscript recontextualisation: bookbindings, glossing and palimpsestation. Using leaves from dismantled books as material for the bookbinding of another book was the most common form of parchment recycling in early modern Iceland. However, most of these fragments were detached from the bookbindings of their host volumes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Article 1, I provide an overview of the Latin fragments which remain in situ (‘in place’) in Icelandic manuscripts. Glossing means the scribal practice of adding marginal or interlinear glosses to the main text of a manuscript. Several Latin psalters preserved as fragments contain Icelandic glosses written in the sixteenth century. In Article 2, I provide transcriptions of these vernacular glosses and demonstrate that they constitute two different forms of manuscript recontextualisation. Palimpsestation means the reuse of writing material by erasing the original texts of a manuscript and replacing it with new texts. Although palimpsestation is traditionally considered a form of recycling, in Article 3, I argue that ...