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Kristinréttr Árna, the “new” Christian laws accepted in Iceland in 1275.7
These manuscripts often contain additional texts that further detail how
Si quis suadente was understood in Iceland, including both prescriptive lists
and formulas for oaths like the one proposed by Bishop Árni to the king’s
officials. These sources allow us to understand how an important aspect of
canon law was interpreted in Iceland during the later Middle Ages.
Although recent scholarship has increasingly studied the role of
Latin canon law in vernacular laws (both secular and ecclesiastical) in
Scandinavia, there still remains much work to be done within the field,
particularly with regard to the Latin sources for vernacular ecclesiastical
laws.8 This article evaluates the manuscripts in detail to illuminate the his-
excerpts from canonical works in the manuscript AM 671 4to in his doctoral thesis, “Bruk
av kanonistisk litteratur i Nidarosprovinsen ca. 1250–1340, ” (Ph.D. Dissertation, The
University of Oslo, 2015).
7 There are 50 surviving medieval manuscripts that contain at least a portion of Kristinréttr
Árna. for further discussion of these manuscripts see, Magnús Lyngdal Magnússon, “Kátt
er þeim af kristinrétti, kærur vilja margar læra: af kristinrétti Árna, setning hans og vald-
sviði,” Gripla 15 (2004): 43–90. Árna saga, 48–49 narrates how the law was composed and
accepted at the Alþing.
8 Recent research on canon law in a Nordic context and on the influences of European law
on the north includes: Agnes S. Arnórsdóttir, “Two Models of Marriage? Canon Law and
Icelandic Marriage Practice in the Late Middle Ages,” Nordic Perspectives on Medieval Canon
Law, edited by Mia Korpiola (Helsinki: Matthias Calonius Society, 1999), 79–92; Agnes
S. Arnórsdóttir, Property and Virginity: The Christianization of Marriage in Medieval Iceland
1200–1600 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2010); Joel Anderson, “Disseminating and
Dispensing Canon Law in Medieval Iceland," Arkiv för nordisk filologi 128 (2013): 79–95;
Per Andersen, Kirsi Salonen, Helle I. M. Sigh, and Helle Vogt (eds.) How Nordic Are the
Nordic Medieval laws? Ten Years After; Proceedings of the Tenth Carlsberg Academy Conference
on Medieval Legal History 2013 (Copenhagen: DJØF Publishing, 2014); Per Andersen,
Ditlev Tamm and Helle Vogt (eds.) How Nordic are the Nordic Medieval Laws?: Proceedings
from the first Carlsberg Conference on Medieval Legal History, 2nd. ed. (Copenhagen: DJØF
Publishing, 2011). Lára Magnúsardóttir, Bannfæring og kirkjuvald á Íslandi 1275–1550: Lög og
rannsóknarforsendur, (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 2007); Lára Magnúsardóttir, “Icelandic
Church Law in the Vernacular 1275-1550,” Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law 23 (2015): 127–
43; Torgeir Landro, “Kristenrett og kyrkjerett: Borgartingskristenretten i eit komparativt
perspektiv,” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Bergen, 2010); Bertil Nilsson, De sepulturis.
Gravrätten i Corpus iuris canonici och i medeltida nordisk lagstiftning (Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell International, 1993); Vadum, “Bruk av kanonistisk litteratur;” Kristoffer Vadum,
“Canon Law and Politics in Grímr Hólmsteinsson’s Jóns Saga Baptista II” trans. by Alan
Crozier. Intellectual Culture in Medieval Scandinavia, c. 1100–1350. ed. by Stefka Georgieva
Eriksen, Disput 28 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 175–209; Sigurður Líndal, “Um þekkingu
íslendinga á rómverskum og kanónískum rétti frá 12. öld til miðrar 16. aldar," Úlfljótur
50 (1997): 241–273; Anders Winroth, “Canon Law in the Artic,” Texts and Contexts in
THE CANON SI QUIS SUADENTE