Latin Liturgical Manuscripts in the collection of Arni Magnusson

On his travels around Iceland (1702-10) an Icelandic scholar named Arni Magnusson collected manuscripts. What he preserved and what he chose to throw away has shaped our understanding of early-medieval Icelandic book culture, and through this, the socio-cultural history more widely. While much attention has been paid to the Arnamagnaean collections' Old Norse vernacular material and the Latin fragments he used for bookbinding (AM Acc 7) a full palaeographical and codicological study of the Icelandic Latin liturgical fragments in the AM collection and Arni's direct role in curating the extant collection has not been attempted.

This is particularly important because liturgical material made up the majority of books in circulation, but are the minority of extant manuscripts, and are fragmentary. Current scholarship on Iceland's Latin liturgical fragments centres around their textual content, thus neglecting important material philological approaches

central in other areas of Scandinavian manuscript studies that will enrich the analysis of textual liturgical content. This project seeks to examine the 24 liturgical manuscript fragments under the AM shelfmark in the Arnamagaean Institutes' collections, seeking to both comment on the use of the book in and the liturgical practices in early medieval Iceland.

It will take a material-centric approach and consider the role of Arni's agency in shaping the material and thus the conclusions we draw from them today.