Mirrors of Virtue: Manuscript and Print in Late Pre-Modern Iceland ed. by Margrét Eggertsdóttir, Matthew James Driscoll (review)

As a field, northern archipelagic studies still struggle to get the attention it deserves. While Iceland's import to the fields of geology, social science, and economics have rightly studied for decades, the humanities have been late to catch up, particularly regarding print and manuscript culture. Though medievalists have, in this millennium, done important work in examining Icelandic Old Norse culture on its own terms, instead of in comparison to other cultures, there still exists a woeful lack of work that covers what the humanities terms the "pre-modern." It is this gap in scholarship that Mirrors of Virtue aims to cover, though you wouldn't know its importance or groundbreaking work based on its scant introduction, which does an excellent job providing a précis of each article, but it fails to provide an overview of the field or its intervention. Indeed, the volume as a whole seems to have a confused audience. One incredibly beneficial aspect of the text comes at the close of the introduction, headed "Terms Used in this Book," geared towards a readership unfamiliar with the "political and social structure of Iceland in the period, which differed in many ways from that of other countries" (xvi). This is absolutely correct, and the breakdown of Icelandic administrative, cultural, secular, and ecclesiastical boundaries and authorities are critical to the arguments articulated throughout the essays contained within the volume. However, in many places, this volume seems to assume that its audience paradoxically has a wide-ranging knowledge in Icelandic culture and, particularly, knowledge of the cultural shifts post-print (which, it has to be said, this volume also attempts to elucidate). For instance, the opening of the introduction asserts a definition of "'late pre-modern' Iceland, the period between the advent of print in Iceland in the early sixteenth century (1530) to the establishment of the Icelandic State Broadcasting Service in the early twentieth (1930)" (ix). No time is spent further defining the "late pre-modern Icelandic period," though this term serves as the guiding through line of the text more broadly. Are we to assume, then, that Icelandic literary culture remained completely static during the four hundred years under consideration? The very presence of the essays contained throughout this volume seem to indicate otherwise, yet there is a troubling sense of temporal conflation that permeates this book, one that simultaneously elides differences even as it claims to illuminate them.

In this vein, the introduction spends no time outlining shifts throughout this time, much less referencing the pre-print tradition of late medieval Iceland. This lacuna seemingly indicates that medieval manuscript culture is irrelevant to post-printing press Icelandic texts, an assumption furthered in the first essay in the collection, "Post-Medieval Manuscript Culture and the Historiography of Texts" by Davíð Ólafsson. Indeed, this article seems to serve as the introduction to the subject of the volume itself, providing a wide-ranging overview of the state of the field of codicology beyond a solely Icelandic context "in order to better understand its significance for the study of the wealth of handwritten materials in late pre-modern Iceland" (29). Indeed, Ólafsson's conclusion attempts to push back against the very periodizing aim that the introduction seems to gesture toward, arguing that the "the term 'late pre-modern'" serves to indicate that "by all conventional standards, Iceland's first significant steps into modernity came only around the turn of the twentieth century" (29). Speaking for all of the members of this volume, Ólafsson contends that "this does not mean that we view what Icelanders did as 'medieval' practices, somehow gone astray from an otherwise unswerving path to modernity" (29). He rightly cites Fernando Bouza's work that contests the periodizing tendency in historiography, but his very denigration of the Middle Ages in this context both fails to clarify the boundaries of the book's period while simultaneously...