| Paper 1632-c | Secundum ordinem?: Office Lectionaries from Medieval Norway
(Language: English)
Astrid Maria Katharina Marner, Department of Linguistic, Literary & Aesthetic Studies, Universitetet i Bergen
Index terms: Ecclesiastical History, Liturgy, Manuscripts and Palaeography, Religious Life |
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| Abstract | Paper -a:
Early Carolingian gospel books are usually considered in the context of the 're-naissance' of classical learning and the revival of early Christian manuscript production. This approach fails to consider how the additions and changes made in Carolingian gospel books, like new scripts, new frontispiece or title miniatures, and altered layouts, would have altered perception of the whole. This paper argues that these reused and revised visual elements, like canon tables, author portraits, and incipit pages, should be understood differently than their late antique predecessors in light of their additional visual material and their early medieval context.
Paper -b:
Among the medieval books, the ones which suffered the most important destruction and dispersion are liturgical books. Because of the renewal of the liturgy, and because of the introduction of new canonized saints, liturgical books became quickly obsolete and unuseful. For that reason, they were destroyed or re-used in several ways, most of all as fly-leaves, binding pieces or wrappers for notarial documents. This paper presents the case of the State Archive of Pavia: more than 2000 fragments tell us the story of their use, obsolescence, and destruction, and at the same time they are the only traces of the local medieval liturgy.
Paper -c:
Liturgical reforms originated with synods or councils, they were implemented through formal prescriptions and realised in scriptoria. Changing patterns in the production and dissemination of books therefore correlate to these reforms and give evidence for their success. In 1205/24, the archiepiscopal see of Nidaros supposedly issued a new, unified liturgy for Western Scandinavia, the so-called
Nidaros Ordo. Manuscript evidence, however, indicates that many Norwegian books deviate from this use throughout the medieval period.
In my paper, I compare a choice of reconstructed office lectionaries to the lessons prescribed in the Nidaros Ordo and show a systematic employment of different reading patterns. Based on the assumption that this divergence originates in a misjudgement of the Nidaros Ordo, I reassess sources on the transmission and genesis of the Nidaros Ordo in order to demonstrate that the Ordo in its preserved form can only attest to the use of 13th and 14th-century Iceland.
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