Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1980, Qupperneq 206

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There is a lag of four hundred odd years between Ziirich, the oldest
witness of the Italo-German series, and Alpirsbach-Bremen. Surpris-
ingly, the Ziirich prayer to St. Andrew reappears in Bremen as a
second choice. The secret life of these prayers through the centuries
cannot be charted, except for the undercurrents which surface in the
fifteenth-century Carmelite Harley 211, where the prayers to St. Paul
and to St. John reappear in a different setting. A few texts, the prayers
to St. Philip, St. Simon, and St. Jude also appear separately in some
late-medieval prayer books which are invariably of German origin. A
Swedish translation of the prayer to St. Bartholomew seems, strange
enough, to reflect the Marturi text.
Dom Lemarié has pointed out the relationship between some of the
prayers found in the Pontifical of Hugues de Salins and Alpirsbach
(see Lemarié 1979, p. 9). Bremen’s second choice for the prayer to all
the Apostles is identical to that of Hugues de Salins, ed. Lemarié
1978, p. 414, no. 56, apparently not identified in other sources.
But that is not the whole story. Our Icelandic series was culled from
more than one source. With the remaining seven prayers to the
Apostles there is a change of climate. Gone is the penitential abjection
and the fear of hell, expressed with litanic monotony. A longing for
heaven suffuses these seven prayers for the Apostles’ intercession.
They are not without stylistic distinction.
Alas, of these seven, only the graceful prayer to St. John (no. 5),
‘Johannes magne Dei’ has been identified in an English manuscript
from the mid-twelfth century, while the prayers to St. Andrew (no.
3), to St. Philip (no. 7), St. Bartholomew (no. 9), St. Matthew (no.
10), Sts. Simon and Jude (no. 12), and St. Matthias (no. 13) so far
remain unidentified.
The Icelandic series has not hitherto been traced in other Northern
manuscripts, Latin or vemacular, while the Peterborough prayer to St.
James (frater S. Johannis) is found in a Danish, and the Italo-German
prayer to St. Bartholomew in a Swedish translation. The manuscripts
containing these translations are of late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-
century date.1
Some of our prayer texts are very corrupt. The beginning of the
1 Series of rhymed prayers to the apostles which were wide-spread in the late Middle
Ages are extant in Danish and Swedish translations.
The series beginning ‘Petre princeps fidei et apostolorura’ (AH 15, no. 140) are in a