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grasp on the types of cases that he should not attempt to address alone. At
least one bishop, Árni Þorláksson, may have obtained a special privilege
from Rome to exercise this authority, but many other bishops seem to
have assumed it reflexively, whether or not they thought about Cardinal
William’s statute from 1247. Previous scholars have addressed these texts
on automatic excommunication, especially in regard to the relationship
between royal power and the church,97 but in some ways, they are just as
much about the internal hierarchy of the church in Iceland and its pastoral
administration, a field ripe for further research.98
This study shows that, at least for an important canon such as Si quis
suadente, we cannot imagine that the local law developed out of a single
act of translation or a single period in which the law was translated. The
sources examined here show that churchmen in Iceland moved frequently
between languages and sources and that while some translations became
fixed and were copied repeatedly, other translations continued to be made
at later periods and from different versions of similar texts. Moreover,
these texts were copied repeatedly in different manuscripts throughout
the fourteenth century, suggesting their relevance outside of any single
political conflict.
Texts concerning the causes for and administration of automatic excom-
munication are preserved in a wide range of fourteenth-century Icelandic
manuscripts. They occur in manuscripts associated with the episcopal see
of Skálaholt as well as in at least one manuscript connected to the Helgafell
monastery (AM 347 fol).99 They occur in large, richly-decorated folio
manuscripts and small, plain, single-column fragments. The most common
text is also the shortest, the brief translation “vm banns verk.” Sometimes,
as is common in Icelandic legal texts, different provisions on the same
topic are preserved in the same manuscript (sometimes in the same hand)
calling for careful interpretation for those using the book.100
97 Haug, “Konkordat – Konflikt – Privilegium;” Lára Magnúsardóttir, Bannfæring, esp.
320–440; and Vadum, “Canon Law and Politics,” 175–205.
98 For recent research on this topic see Sigurdson, The Church in Fourteenth-Century Iceland.
99 Stefán Karlsson, “Lovskriver i to lande: Codex Hardenbergensis og Codex Belgsdalensis,”
Festskrift til Alfred Jakobsen, ed. by Jan Ragnar Hagland, Jan Terje Faarlund and Jarle
Rønhovd (Trondheim: Tapir, 1987), 166–184.
100 Winroth, “Canon Law of Emergency Baptism,” 209.
THE CANON SI QUIS SUADENTE