The Medieval Low Countries

The Christianisation of Scandinavia, generally viewed as having been conducted from England and Germany, has formed the context in which evidence of saints’ cults has been interpreted in Denmark and Norway, not only during the early days of organised Christendom, but also during the High Middle Ages. Consequently, saints associated with the Low Countries and appearing in Danish and Norwegian manuscripts has been partly overlooked in the scholarship, partly assigned to other categories such as ‘French’ and ‘German’. This article examines the inclusion of such saints in twelfth-century manuscripts with a provenance from the archsees of Lund and Nidaros, bringing nuance to the standard narrative and shedding new light on connections that have so far been little studied.

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.

The study of book fragments in the Nordic countries often returns to the question of the ‘where and when’ of the making of the original manuscript. This article highlights some of the palaeographical characteristics which over time have been interpreted as evidence of scribes trained in the Low Countries or showing influence from this region. Several cases also treated in previous scholarship have been selected to exemplify some of the different modes of influence from the Low Countries identifiable in the fragment material: book import, scribes travelling north, or local scribes imitating models or teachers from the Low Countries. Among these, the movement of scribes represents the most elusive form of interaction, but also the most rewarding as it testifies to direct contact and collaboration across borders.

Marie of Oignies (Maria Oigniacensis) was a mulier religiosa who lived in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries in the southern Low Countries. Upon her death, she was immortalised by the cleric Jacques of Vitry, who wrote the Vita beatae Mariae Oigniacensis in c. 1215. Her Vita became rather well known and would also reach the North, where manuscripts containing abridged Old Norse translations of the text can be found. The oldest of these is believed to be the fourteenth-century fragment AM 240 fol. IV, which can be traced back to Iceland. This study places the vernacular vita of Marie of Oignies within a tradition of Maríu sögur and the practices of the North Icelandic Benedictine school during the golden age of manuscript production. For the first time, it identifies Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum historiale as a source for the Old Norse translation of Marie’s life. Thus, the article furthers our understanding of both the dissemination of Marie of Oignies’s life and the religious literary milieu of fourteenth-century Iceland.

Found in the municipal archives of Breda (present-day North Brabant, Netherlands) is a conspicuous but ill-studied late fifteenth or early sixteenth-century codex, whose contents are deemed to have been composed within the late medieval town. Although characterised as a local cross legend, the Middle Dutch work is customarily referred to by its modern moniker of Denensage (i.e. Dane saga) due to the presence and pursuits of ‘viking’ mariners over the course of its verse narrative. By imparting how a group of Danes found their way to Breda and established a stronghold there – refashioning a prominent local tree into a cross in the process – the work occupies a distinct confluence of historiographical, devotional, and literary authorship. Situating the Dane saga in its sociocultural context, this article explores the wide-ranging narrative influences underpinning it, whilst determining its potential authorship and intended audience(s). Lastly, as well as furnishing a new edition of the manuscript, it offers the first English translation of this important, idiosyncratic text.