A ‘new’ manuscript of the Life of Anskar in Stockholm

Dr Paul Gazzoli writes:

Following up from my previous announcement of a new manuscript, I can now report on another manuscript of Rimbert’s Life of Anskar, this one the first Latin manuscript of the text from Scandinavia.

Last month I went to Stockholm in order to have a closer look at the medieval Old Swedish translation of the Life, which is in the Royal Library (Kungliga Biblioteket) with the shelf-mark A 49. While there, I decided also to take a look at K 92:2, which was listed by Sven Helander in his work on Anskar’s cult in medieval Scandinavia (Ansgarkulten i Norden, 1989) as an abbreviated version of the Life. From his description (on p. 38), I had expected the very short version of only a few pages which circulated in the later middle ages, which I have seen in manuscripts from Hamburg and Bordesholm.

Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholm

I was very pleasantly surprised then, to find that this version of the text occupies folia 30v–49v, and although it is indeed abbreviated, leaving out several chapters and longer passages as well as sentences and individual words in places, it does nonetheless belong among manuscripts of the Life rather than the few-page abbreviation. Its readings show a similarity to Cuijk, St Agatha C 13, which has similar (but not always the same) omissions, and once the ‘new’ Bordesholmmanuscript has been restored, I suspect that too will have similar readings (as the number of pages the Life takes up in it indicate that it too was a version with omissions).

Another pleasing realisation was that K 92:2 had belonged to Stephan Hansen Stephanius (1599–1650), a Danish philologist and historian who produced an edition of Saxo Grammaticus. In the latter, he references in a note a manuscript of the Life of Anskar, which previous editors believed lost. That manuscript does indeed seem to be lost – but K 92:2 contains what must be a transcript of it, in an elegant and legible seventeenth-century hand. Anna Wolodarski of the Royal Library has informed me that the manuscript came to Stockholm from the Kalmar Gymnasiebibliotek in 1919, and it is not known how they acquired it. It is a collection of texts that Stephanius copied or had copied at various times, mostly relating to Danish history, saints and the Churches of Lund and Aarhus.

Over the past three years I have been working on manuscripts of the Life, I have been able to develop a fuller picture of its transmission throughout northern Europe, and this new manuscript, even though it is the furthest removed from the original text, as the only known Latin manuscript from Scandinavia, does much to complete that picture.

If you want to hear more about this (and the other) manuscripts, my work on a new edition of Anskar, and much else about Hamburg-Bremen and its mission besides, come to Mission,Empire and the North in ASNC on 4 July 2015! Click on the link to register by 25 June.

 

Mission, Empire and the North: The Archdiocese of Hamburg-Bremen, c. 830–c. 1200

Dr Paul Gazzoli writes:

In connection with my British Academy-funded research project to produce a new edition of Rimbert’s Life of Anskar, I and Dr Erik Niblaeus of Durham University are hosting a conference this summer, on the 4^th of July 2015 (the Saturday before the Leeds International Medieval Congress). This will focus on Hamburg-Bremen not only in Anskar’s day but through the time of the great chronicler Adam of Bremen up through the end of the twelfth century.

Bremen cathedral

Hamburg-Bremen, and the written sources it produced in the middle ages, are essential to Scandinavian historians: history-writing only began in Scandinavia in the 12^th century, and the Icelandic sagas were not written until the 13^th century. But Adam of Bremen wrote in the 1070s, and had the Danish King Svend Estridsen (1047–76) as his informant, while Rimbert wrote the Life of Anskar in the 860s or 870s (Anskar was the first Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen and worked as a missionary among the Danes and Swedes from the 820s through the 850s, and his Life records much about Scandinavia during that time). Thus both sources provide extremely valuable evidence for Scandinavia during the Viking Age.

Part of Anskar’s legacy was Hamburg-Bremen’s enduring claim to supremacy over all the Church in Scandinavia. The creation of the archdiocese of Lund in 1104 mostly ended this, but Hamburg-Bremen did try to regain Scandinavia through the twelfth century. As part of this struggle, documents were forged, and sorting out truth from falsehood has many important implications for the history not only of Hamburg-Bremen but of Scandinavia. Scholars have also seen distortions in Adam of Bremen’s work, and recently Eric Knibbs has argued that the falsification of history goes back to the ninth century with Anskar and Rimbert themselves.

Against this difficult background, the conference will be looking at a variety of types of evidence: Dr Britta Mischke (of the University of Cologne) will look at the evidence of diplomas, while Prof. Matthias Hardt (Leipzig) and Morten Søvsø (Sydvestjyske Museer) will be discussing the archaeological traces of Christianisation among the Baltic Slavs and southern Scandinavia respectively. Prof. Hans-Werner Goetz (Hamburg) will be discussing Hamburg-Bremen’s claim on Scandinavia through the 11^th century, while Prof. Michael Gelting (Aberdeen/Danish National Archives) will address Hamburg-Bremen’s struggle to control the Nordic church in the 12^th century. Dr Erik Niblaeus (Durham) will situate Hamburg-Bremen in its Salian context, while Dr John-Henry Clay (Durham) will set Anskar against the background of earlier missionaries in Germany. I (Paul Gazzoli, Cambridge) will be talking about the transmission and re-writing of the Life of Anskar at Bremen in the twelfth century. All papers will be followed by discussion. 

We hope you can join us to help make for a lively and valuable conference! More information (including the schedule) will be available at https://hamburgbremen2015.wordpress.com/ while you can register here. Registration is £18 (£13 for students) and includes morning and afternoon tea/coffee, lunch and a wine reception. There will be a conference dinner at St Catharine’s College, priced £35 (with wine £10 extra).

St Anskar, painting from the old Cathedral (torn down in the 19^th century) in Hamburg