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the example of emergency baptism in snow illustrates the relationship
between European and Icelandic canon law. Icelandic law followed the lead
of general law. But that influence was neither quick nor uncomplicated.
Every one of the Icelandic manuscripts that preserve the rules from the
older Christian Law allowing baptism in snow was written in the late
thirteenth century or later, in other words, decades or centuries after that
rule had become obsolete and, in fact, against current canon law. Many
manuscripts, such as the important Skálholtsbók (aM 351 fol.), copied in
the second half of the fourteenth century, contain both the older and the
Younger Christian Laws of Iceland, and thus they include both the old rule
allowing baptism with snow and Árni’s rule permitting only baptism with
water. readers of such books required considerable skill to navigate these
kinds of inconsistencies and contradictions.
Let us return to emergency baptisms of children to see what else we
may learn. Lay men may perform such baptisms, according to the older
Christian Law.19 But what if there were no men present, or at least no
man who knew the formula of baptism? Might women then baptize? the
European canon law originally answered no. a greatly influential collec-
tion of disciplinary canons from southern france, compiled in the second
half of the fifth century, determined that “However learned and pious she
is, no woman should presume to baptize anyone.”20 this statement was
included in the lawbooks from an early point and was thus accepted as law,
which it continued to be until a priest in Brixen in South tirolia asked
Pope urban II in the last decade of the eleventh century whether a child
who had been given emergency baptism by a woman should count as truly

lotio, nec in niue, eo quod non est aqua fluida lotioni conueniens.” for the use of these
kinds of treatises as a convenient gateway to the doctrines of medieval canon law, see
Helmholz, Spirit of Classical Canon Law, 23–24.
19 Grágás: Staðarhólsbók, 4: “Ef barn er sva siúkt at við bana se hǽtt oc nair eigi prestz
fundi. oc a þa karl maðr olærðr at skira barn.” Key words in this passage are missing in
Konungsbók, since a part of the page has been torn away, see Grágás: Konungsbók, 5, n. 2.
20 the collection is known as the Statuta ecclesiae antiqua, see Concilia Galliae A. 314–A. 506,
ed. by C. Munier, Corpus Christianorum: Series latina 248 (turnholti: typographi Brepols
Editores pontificii, 1963), 173, accepted into canon law and reproduced (and expanded) in
many collections, notably in Gratian, Decretum (second recension) de cons. D. 4 c. 20, ed.
Corpus iuris canonici, 1.1367: “Mulier, quamuis docta et sancta, baptizare aliquos uel uiros
docere in conuentu non presumat.”
THE CANON LAW OF EMERGENCY BAPTISM