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usual. reading ability was ubiquitous at that time though,42 and there is
evidence that many manuscripts were owned by women. In general, wo-
men played an important role in manuscript production and transmission
in medieval and post-medieval times.43 the oldest extant Icelandic manu-
scripts known to have been owned by women date from the second half
of the fourteenth century; until the seventeenth century, female owners
were often from wealthy and influential families, but from the seventeenth
century onwards we also find women with more modest socio-economic
backgrounds as manuscript owners.44 the manuscripts owned by women
were often religious or saga manuscripts (notably Margrétar saga manu-
scripts45) and, from the seventeenth century onwards, poetry manuscripts
and miscellanies or handbooks.46 Metrical psalm manuscripts, too, were
frequently written for women, most of whom were from wealthy and
powerful families.47
although women used legal manuscripts to teach their children to
read,48 female ownership of law manuscripts seems to have been rather
rare. C. 170 Icelandic manuscripts and manuscript fragments dated to
the fifteenth century survive, of which approximately 15 percent contain
law texts; of the c. 2,000 manuscripts that were written between c. 1500
and c. 1700, one quarter contain law texts.49 Despite the large numbers
42 Ibid., 135.
43 Susanne Miriam arthur, “the Importance of Marital and Maternal ties in the Distribution
of Icelandic Manuscripts from the Middle ages to the Seventeenth Century,” Gripla 23
(2012): 201–233.
44 Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir, Á hverju liggja ekki vorar göfugu kellíngar: Bókmenning íslenskra
kvenna frá miðöldum fram á 18. öld. Sýnisbók íslenskrar alþýðumenningar 20 (reykjavík:
Háskólaútgáfan, 2016).
45 Ásdís Egilsdóttir, “Handrit handa konum,” Góssið hans Árna: Minningar heimsins í íslenskum
handritum, ed. by Jóhanna Katrín friðriksdóttir (reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í
íslenskum fræðum, 2014), 51–61.
46 Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir, Á hverju liggja ekki vorar göfugu kellíngar.
47 Margrét Eggertsdóttir, “Script and Print in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Iceland,”
Mirrors of Virtue: Manuscript and Print in Late Pre-Modern Iceland, ed. by Margrét Egg-
ertsdóttir and Matthew James Driscoll (Copenhagen: Museum tusculanum, 2017), 132–
137.
48 Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir, Á hverju liggja ekki vorar göfugu kellíngar, 87–117 and 139–140.
49 Based on my own statistics and Silvia Hufnagel, “Projektbericht ‘alt und neu’: Isländische
Handschriften, Bücher und die Gesellschaft des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts,” Quelle und
Deutung III: Beiträge der Tagung Quelle und Deutung III am 25. November 2015, ed. by Balázs
Sára. EC-Beiträge zur Erforschung deutschsprachiger Handschriften des Mittelalters und
“HELGa Á ÞESSa LÖ GBÓ K”