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independent textual values from the I-redaction than hitherto suggested.14
For a better understanding, stemmatic relations of all manuscripts and frag-
ments that contain (parts of) Jónsbók and that were written up to the end of
the fifteenth century, see Diagram 1.
In contrast to law manuscripts from the fourteenth century, few legal
codices from the following century can be connected to known workshops.
Without doubt, this situation is connected with the high mortality rate of
clerics during the Black Death in 1402–04 mentioned above,15 although it
is unlikely that monastic scriptoria ceased to exist altogether. Rather, they
seem to have worked side by side with secular workshops,16 and manu-
scripts produced at ecclesiastical institutions during the fourteenth century
remained important textual sources for both Latin and vernacular literature
after the Black Death.17 As is the case with Skarðsbók,18 law manuscripts
14 An example of further additions made to the II-redaction of Jónsbók is the so-called
Hirðsiðir section, which appears first in AM 343 fol. (Svalbarðsbók). Hirðsiðir is a sub-
section added at the end of the second section of Jónsbók, Kristindómsbálkr, and which
consists of thirteen chapters taken from the Norwegian court-law Hirðskrá and the
Icelandic ecclesiastical law Kristinréttr Árna Þorlákssonar. Similar to the inclusion of the
three Iceland-specific Réttarbœtr, the addition of sections of these laws is novel for its time,
since both were only individually transmitted before. For this, see Stefan Drechsler, “Jón
Halldórsson and Law Manuscripts of Western Iceland c. 1320–40,” Dominican Resonances
in Medieval Iceland: The Legacy of Bishop Jón Halldórsson of Skálholt, eds. Gunnar Harðarson
and Karl G. Johansson (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 133–36.
15 Gunnar Karlsson and Helgi Skúli Kjartansson, “Plágurnar miklu á Íslandi,” 19.
16 The separation of ecclesiastical and secular workshops in medieval and Early Modern
Iceland was the topic of a long-running debate between Stefán Karlsson and Lars
Lönnroth. For this, see Lars Lönnroth, “Tesen om de två kulturerna: Kritiska studier i
den isländska sagaskrivningens sociala förutsättningar,” Scripta Islandica 15 (1964): 1–97;
Lars Lönnroth, “Sponsors, Writers and Readers of Early Norse Literature,” Two Norse-
Icelandic Studies (Gothenburg: Göteborgs Universitet), 1–16; Stefán Karlsson, “Ritun
Reykjarfjarðarbókar. Excursus: Bókagerð bænda,” Opuscula 4 (1970): 120–40; and Stefán
Karlsson, “The Localisa tion and Dating of Medieval Icelandic Manuscripts,” Saga-Book
15/2 (1999): 138–58.
17 For monastic centres of writing in medieval Iceland, see Guðvarður Már Gunnlaugsson,
“Voru scriptoria í íslenskum klaustrum?” Íslensk klausturmenning á miðöldum, ed. Haraldur
Bernharðsson (Reykjavík: Háskólaútgáfan, 2016), 186–94.
18 AM 350 fol. (Skarðsbók features three production units: in the oldest unit on ff. 1–18
and ff. 24–150va, which was written by a single scribe at the Augustinian monastery at
Helgafell in western Iceland, it features the II-redaction of Jónsbók, the Norwegian court
law Hirðskrá, and the Icelandic Church law Kristinréttr Árna Þorlákssonar, as well as a large
number of statutes, clauses for statutes, formulas, and Réttarbœtr. During the fifteenth cen-
tury, the complete gathering 4 (ff. 18–23) was written and added by a single scribe, adapting
LAW MANUSCRIPTS