Gripla - 20.12.2009, Blaðsíða 188

GRIPLA188
he was specifically talking about political power and not intellectual con­
cepts.9 Secondly, we would have to establish that the supposed native cul­
ture was different to this clerically-dominated culture and substantially so,
not just geographically and politico-socially, in the way that the 14th-centu­
ry Czech culture would have been different from 14th-century Italian cul­
ture, for example: nobody ever speaks of “two cultures” in this context,
although there would have been obvious differences both politically and
culturally.
III.
I will begin with the first point above, in order to try to show how the
clerical-learned culture of Iceland was related to the learned world of the
continent, when it comes to questions concerning a world view.
A “Division of Science” (arbor scientiae) in 13th­century Iceland does
not, at first sight, seem to conform with the canonical Septem Artes, the
Seven Liberal Arts, which we have come to accept as the norm for
Medieval subjects mainly on the grounds that the Middle Ages inherited
this concept from antiquity via Martianus Capella and other early Medieval
authors. However, there is no need to think that the Icelandic “Division of
Science” shows a deviant picture of the Seven Liberal Arts, because there is
also a multitude of different distinctions in Medieval Latin mss concerned
with arbor scientiae.
Within the Seven Liberal Arts, the single arts are very well represented
in Icelandic manuscripts: the four Grammatical treatises even cover
aspects of the trivium (rhetoric, grammar, and dialectics). the Icelanders
seem to have had a particular predilection for the quadrivium, however;
although musical manuscripts are not overly well preserved (perhaps
because many of them contained Latin hymns and were therefore destroyed
during the reformation),10 we find tracts on mathematics and geometry
(AM 194 4to, AM 685 d 4to, GkS 1812 4to, AM 764 4to) and especially
astronomy. It seems that Iceland was particularly up-to-date in the field of
astronomy: we find the latest 12th-century theories, like that concerning
the heliocentricity of Mercury and Venus, as well as far more traditional
9 Jesse Byock, “The Power and Wealth of the Icelandic Church: Some Talking Points,”
Proceedings of the 6th Saga Conference (Helsingør, 1985), 89–101.
10 Cf. john Bergsagel, “Music and Musical Instruments,” Medieval Scandinavia: An En ­
cyclopedia, (New York and London: Garland, 1993), 420–423.