Gripla - 2019, Blaðsíða 162

GRIPLA162
century, several Icelandic bishops were either Norwegian or educated in
Norway.25 Moreover, Icelandic churchmen traveled to Norway and be-
yond, and Norse churchmen were sometimes educated in the European
schools. Bishop Jón Halldórsson of Skálaholt (1322–1339), for example,
studied at the universities in both Paris and Bologna, the centers of canon
law scholarship in the Middle Ages.26
By the fourteenth century, expertise in Latin and canon law were
extolled as important traits for a bishop, at least within the elite clerical
culture that produced many of the sagas of bishops.27 Although the major-
ity of Latin legal works once extant in Iceland no longer survive, indirect
evidence such as church inventories as well as surviving fragmentary texts
point to a range of standard works of and commentaries on canon law
being available and in use in all centers of church power in Niðaróss epis-
copal province.28
Sources for Iceland: Letters
The earliest sources from Niðaróss province that address Si quis suadente
are found in letters. These early letters clarify the basic interpretation
of the canon, concerning who can absolve from what and in some cases
whether or not a person should be considered a cleric for the purposes of
the canon. In one letter from Pope Clement III to the Bishop elect of Oslo,
dated to 1190–1191, the pope answers a specific question in connection
25 Erika Sigurdsson, The Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland: The Formation of an Elite
Clerical Identity (London and Boston: Brill, 2016), 85–92.
26 Alfred Jakobsen, “Jóns þáttr biskups Halldórssonar,” Medieval Scandinavia: An Encyclo-
pedia, edited by Phillip Pulsiano and Kirsten Wolf (New York and London: Garland,
1993), 346. See also, Sverre Bagge, “Nordic Students at Foreign Universities until 1660,”
Scandinavian Journal of History 9 (1984): 1–29.
27 Sigurdsson, The Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland, 96–175.
28 Evidence about which texts were available to clerics in Niðaróss province is of three types,
sources mentioned in inventories, wills, or sagas; preserved translations (usually of short
excerpts); or fragments of Latin texts. There seems to be one surviving manuscript of an
entire canonical commentary that was known to be in Niðaróss province in the Middle
Ages, a copy of Goffredus of Trano’s Summa. This manuscript was probably owned by the
Bishop of Bergen but is now preserved in Uppsala as Cod. Upsal. C 564. For more detailed
discussion of these sources see, Sveinbjörn Rafnsson,“Skriftaboð Þorláks biskups,” Gripla 5
(1982), 97; Sigurður Líndal, “Um þekkingu íslendinga á rómverskum og kanónískum rétti.”
A number of Latin fragments connected with canon law survive in the Norwegian national
archives. Vadum lists them in, “Canon law and politics,” 178 note 10.