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some borrowing of German theological and ecclesiastical terms occurred
earlier.25 With so little of the text surviving it is difficult to judge the sig-
nificance of these loans, but it may be noted that they seem to occur with
less frequency in this text than in certain late medieval Icelandic works
known to have been translated from Low German sources, such as Saga
heilagrar Önnu and most of Reykjahólabók.26
4. Sources
the sermon found in aM 696 VIII and IX 4to is based on two sermons
by Vincent ferrer (1350–1419) — the first for Christmas Eve, from which
the Icelandic author took the exemplum of the merchant, and the second
for Christmas Day, from which almost all of the other surviving material
in the Icelandic text derives. ferrer, a Dominican friar from Valencia, was
one of the most renowned preachers of the later Middle ages, delivering
sermons to large audiences not only on the Iberian Peninsula but also
in france, Brittany, Switzerland, and Italy.27 as Sánchez has described,
ferrer’s preaching was innovative in that it incorporated a popular tone
and rhetorical directness into the (by then traditional) Scholastic, thematic
sermon structure:
[I]n my opinion, ferrer’s sermons do not differ in their essential
structure from those of his contemporaries. His preaching is always
thematica; he practices divisio and focusses on dilatatio. What does
25 See Veturliði Óskarsson, “om hansesprogets påvirkning på islandsk administrativt sprog
i senmiddelalderen,” Útnorður: West Nordic Standardisation and Variation, ed. Kristján
Árnason (reykjavík: university of Iceland, 2003), 163–78; alaric Hall, “Jón the fleming:
Low German in thirteenth-Century norway and fourteenth-Century Iceland,” Leeds
Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 18 (2013): 1–33.
26 Saga heilagrar Önnu, ed. Kirsten Wolf, rit 52 (reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar,
2001), esp. cxv–cxxxv; Kalinke, The Book of Reykjahólar, 45–124. Even in works translated
from Low German, many Low German loans were employed without a precedent in the
source text; see Dario Bullitta, “Prestiti basso tedeschi nella Saga heilagrar Önnu: i termini
senza modello testuale” in Le rune: epigrafia e letteratura, ed. Vittorio Dolcetti Corazza and
renato Gendre, Bibliotheca Germanica: Studi e testi 26 (alessandria: Edizioni dell’orso,
2009), 303–23.
27 for a recent account of ferrer’s career, see Philip Daileader, Saint Vincent Ferrer, his World
and Life: Religion and Society in Late Medieval Europe (new York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2016), esp. 191–99.