Katalog over AM Accessoria 7. De latinske fragmenter (review)

This most recent volume, edited by Jonna Louis-Jensen on behalf of the Arnamagnaean Collection and the Arnamagnaean Commission, in the venerable Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana series, is a catalogue compiled by theologian Merete Geert Andersen of fragments of medieval vellum manuscripts housed in the Copenhagen branch of the Arnamagnaean Collection.

Accessoria 7 is a shelf mark comprising some 500 fragments of manuscripts, which were in various states of disrepair when they were acquired by Árni Magnússon, the great Icelandic collector of manuscripts and books (1663–1730), who used the leaves from these manuscripts to make bindings for his secular paper manuscripts and printed books. The history of Accessoria 7, which is described in detail in Merete Geert Andersen’s article “Colligere fragmenta, ne pereant” in Opuscula 7, Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana, 34 (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1979), pp. 1–35, and summarized in her informative introduction to the present volume, is in many ways a fascinating one that begins in 1911–1913, when the vellum leaves were removed from the bindings in which they were incorporated. With the help of musicologist Angul Hammerich, Kristian Kålund, librarian of the Arnamagnaean Collection, divided the fragments into six groups on the basis of their contents, and Hammerich was able to identify a significant number of sequence fragments. The task of grouping the fragments with a view to reconstructing the codices from which they derived fell to Gudbrandur Jónsson, later librarian at the National Library of Iceland. By the time of Kålund’s death in 1919, only a small number of the many fragments had been identified, however, and the work was continued in the 1950s by the historian of music Erik Eggen and later, in the 1960s, by the liturgical scholar Lilli Gjerløw. In 1978, the author of the present volume was asked by the Arnamagnaean Institute to complete the work and catalogue the fragments in the Accessoria 7 collection, but, as she notes in her introduction, the project was a slow one. Among other things, it turned out that the six sequence-fragments, which Gudbrandur Jónsson had reconstructed in 1914, needed to be re-reconstructed, and Andersen has since demonstrated that they derive from two large manuscripts: a (defective) Missale Scardense and a (defective) Graduale Gufudalense. In 1986, she was able to resume the cataloguing work; Katalog over AM Accessoria 7. De latinske fragmenter, dedicated to the memory of Lille Gjerløw, then, is the fruit of many years of labor by Icelandic, Norwegian, and Danish scholars, and by Merete Geert Andersen in particular.

The fragments in Accessoria 7 are shown to derive from altogether 147 manuscripts, 144 Latin and 3 Norse. The oldest have been dated to the twelfth century, the youngest to the sixteenth century. In addition, there are five diplomas and six leaves from five printed books (five missals and a collection of hymns). The vast number of manuscripts are liturgical, containing missals, graduals, breviaries, antiphoners, and psalters, etc., and date from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Of the 147 manuscripts, 135 consist of one or more leaves and have been used for the binding of 4to, 8vo, and 12mo size manuscripts. The remaining twelve manuscripts consist of only one or more strips or shreds. The smallest fragment, likely from a gradual or an antiphoner, is the size of only a finger nail. The author is of the opinion that most of the binding was done in Copenhagen and points out that several of the fragments go back to a collection of diplomas from Schwerin purchased by Árni Magnússon. Other manuscripts are bound in remnants of charts, which have not been included in the present catalogue.

Katalog over AM Accessoria 7. De latinske fragmenter follows the general rules and guidelines for the cataloguing of manuscripts laid down by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in 1973. Following an identification of the text of the fragment in question (missal...