oa Books from the Low Countries in high-medieval Scandinavia: A two-part manuscript from Saint-Omer in Denmark, its decorative practices, and their reflections in some Nordic fragments

Recent work on the Scandinavian fragment collections has drawn attention to the fact that many books were imported to the region from the Low Countries in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For fragmentarily preserved books, however, it is usually difficult to establish solid information on origin and ownership history due to the limitations of available evidence. To complement the picture, this article presents an analysis of a fully preserved manuscript that demonstrably travelled from the Low Countries to Denmark in the Middle Ages. As will be argued, this manuscript, now divided into two units (Stockholm, Kungliga Biblioteket, MS D 1311 and Uppsala, Universitetsbiblioteket, MS C 691), was produced at Saint-Omer, c. 1200, and was taken to Denmark before the fifteenth century, probably relatively soon after its making. Its story complements our understanding of the medieval import of books from the Low Countries to Scandinavia in a significant way. The article also draws attention to the stylistic affinity that the Saint-Omer manuscript and other manuscripts from the same region show with some of the fragments preserved in Swedish, Finnish, and Danish fragment collections.