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of extant law manuscripts, Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir has found only 30 legal
manuscripts out of 255 dating from the medieval period until 1730 that
were, at some point, owned, or thought to have been owned, by women.50
no female names are found in Icelandic legal manuscripts before the late
Middle Ages.51 the earliest known occurrence of a woman owning a law
manuscript seems to be Þorbjörg Guðmundsdóttir’s (c. 1385–1431) inherit-
ance of aM 350 fol. (Skarðsbók manuscript of Jónsbók) from her father,
the son of the manuscript’s patron; Þorbjörg subsequently passed aM
350 fol. on to her own daughter, Kristín Guðnadóttir (c. 1410 until after
1490).52 another late medieval example is aM 132 4to, which was written
around 1450 in the environment of Möðruvellir farm in Eyjafjörður and
was owned by Margrét Vigfúsdóttir (1406–1486), the manuscript’s likely
patron and an important member of one of the most powerful and wealthy
families of her time.53 an increase in female ownership of legal manu-
scripts is detectable only in the second half of the seventeenth century, and
is still very low compared to female ownership of literary and religious
manuscripts.54 the fact that a woman, Helga, who could write, owned MS
Boreal 91 is therefore noteworthy.
Concluding remarks
finding dry point writing is most certainly challenging because raking
light is needed for the incised inscriptions to become visible, but most
der frühen neuzeit, reihe 1: Konferenzbeiträge und Studien 3 (Budapest: Eötvös-József-
Collegium, 2016), 152 and 155.
50 See the short manuscript descriptions in Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir, Á hverju liggja ekki vorar göf-
ugu kellíngar, 305–336. We might expect to add a few additional manuscripts, such as aM
132 4to.
51 Lena rohrbach, e-mail communication 21 March 2018.
52 Ólafur Halldórsson, “Skarðsbók – uppruni og ferill,” Skarðsbók: Codex Scardensis; AM
350 fol., with a foreword by Jónas Kristjánsson, Ólafur Halldórsson and Sigurður Líndal,
Íslensk miðaldahandrit 1 (reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar, 1981), 33.
53 Hans Jacob orning, “the truth of tales: Fornaldarsögur as Sources of Contemporary
History,” Legendary Legacy: Transmission and Reception of the Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda,
ed. by Matthew Driscoll, Silvia Hufnagel, Philip Lavender and Beeke Stegmann, the
Viking Collection 24 (odense: university Press of Southern Denmark, 2018), 94–99.
54 this observation is based on my analysis of the manuscript descriptions provided by
Guðrún Ingólfsdóttir in Á hverju liggja ekki vorar göfugu kellíngar, 305–336. Guðrún gives
birth and/or death dates for the female owners of 30 legal manuscripts, as noted above.