Nordic Latin Manuscript Fragments: The Destruction and Reconstruction of Medieval Books ed. by Åslaug Ommundsen and Tuomas Heikkilä (review)

National collections of medieval manuscripts are, at their best, spurious accounts of the history of European book production. The collections of manuscripts they now preserve, and the state in which those manuscripts survive, are nearly always born out of the characteristic vagaries of antiquarian interest, ideological bias, historical catastrophe, and random chance. Perhaps nowhere is this fact more apparent than in the national collections of the five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. These nations share closely linked histories which have affected the survival of their medieval manuscripts in such a peculiar way that their situation may in fact be unique. Following the end of the Swedish War of Liberation in 1523, the whole of the Nordic region was divided into two realms, the Danish Realm (including modern Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and the southern tip of Sweden), and the Swedish Realm (including modern Sweden and Finland). Both realms were enthusiastic participants in the Reformation, and Latin church manuscripts—now considered obsolete and reflecting poor ideology—were quickly and efficiently repurposed into a nearly inexhaustible source of binding materials for state documents. Government officials in both realms developed a practice of cutting out folios from these old books to cover and bind the unprecedented number of accounts they were now required to keep, rather than paying for fresh parchment to do the job. The practice was all-encompassing, lasting for over 150 years and reducing virtually all of the Nordic Latin manuscripts to mere fragments.

Research into the Nordic national collections, which now exist almost entirely as piles of folio fragments and account bindings, has made significant headway in the past three decades, and the ten chapters comprising this volume represent the next step in that historiography. Previous monographs and multi-authored collections have primarily focused on the archives of an individual nation, or manuscript fragments from a specific genre or diocese. Nordic Latin Manuscript Fragments is an attempt finally to bring together the collected wisdom of researchers from all across Scandinavia and Iceland, creating a holistic view of Scandinavian fragment studies as it currently stands.

The opening remarks of the editors are followed by Michael Gullick's substantial chapter of case studies on scribal styles in drawing capitals and large initials. Gullick provides a straightforward critique of the main methods that have been used in the study of Nordic fragment collections both past and present, as well as a sort of handbook of good practice for examining the fragments. For Gullick, the task of reconstructing manuscripts out of the fragments continues to be an urgent need, though he is more concerned at this point with identifying manuscripts whose fragments are scattered across multiple archives: most reconstruction is typically carried out within a single national collection—what he calls the isolated Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, and Helsinki collections—but the divisions between these groups are to a certain extent misleading, since historically they each formed the archives of two realms. Gullick calls these larger collections the 'Copenhagen-Oslo group' (for the Danish Realm) and 'Stockholm-Helsinki group' (for the Swedish Realm), and he implies that it is only by studying how the national collections each relate to their larger group that we can address what he sees as the real goal that lurks behind manuscript reconstruction: the identification of centres for book production in the medieval North.

In several case studies to illustrate his points, Gullick proposes that Nidaros, Linköping, and Uppsala were centres of production in the fifteenth century, and that the scribes who worked in each can be identified in part by examining the way in which they executed large and small initials. The evidence is good: in each case he includes a manuscript fragment that has a well documented connection to that diocese, another manuscript fragment copied by the same scribe or scribes and demonstrating the same styles...