Gripla - 20.12.2018, Page 231

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STEPHEN PELLE
FRAGMENTS
OF AN ICELANDIC CHRISTMAS SERMON
BASED ON TWO SERMONS
OF VINCENT FERRER
1. Introduction
to the extent that medieval Icelandic sermons and sermon manuscripts
give any clues at all about their authors and audiences, these clues nearly
always point to either the Benedictines or the augustinians. thomas n.
Hall summarizes:
Institutionally [the old West norse sermons’] affiliations are al-
most wholly with Benedictine and augustinian foundations, since
these are the orders that dominated the norwegian and Icelandic
churches until well into the thirteenth century, whereas the Danish
and Swedish corpora reflect a much greater influence from the
french mendicant orders.1
textual evidence in support of this conclusion is not hard to find. for
instance, the Icelandic Homily Book (Holm Perg. 4to no. 15; ca. 1200),
the most important early Icelandic preaching manuscript, contains a chap-
ter from the Benedictine rule apparently intended to serve as a kind of
homily.2 the works of several important augustinian authors, especially
Victorines, were known in Iceland from an early date.3 A sermon by the
1 thomas n. Hall, “old norse-Icelandic Sermons,” The Sermon, ed. Beverly Mayne Kienzle,
typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental, vols. 81–83 (turnhout: Brepols, 2000),
667.
2 The Icelandic Homily Book: Perg. 15 4o in the Royal Library, Stockholm, ed. andrea de Leeuw
van Weenen, Icelandic Manuscripts, Series in Quarto, vol. 3 (reykjavík: Stofnun Árna
Magnússonar á Íslandi, 1993), 89r–89v and introduction p. 15. See Joan turville-Petre,
“Sources of the Vernacular Homily in England, norway and Iceland,” Arkiv för nordisk
filologi 75 (1960), 170–71.
3 Hans Bekker-nielsen, “the Victorines and their Influence on old norse Literature,” The
Fifth Viking Congress: Tórshavn, July 1965, ed. Bjarni niclasen (tórshavn: føroya Landsstyri
et al., 1968), 32–36.
Gripla XXIX (2018): 231–259