Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1996, Page 137
127
wegian linguistic features). The collection is said to be extremely un-
usual, revealing only famt traces of Mussafia’s series. The miraculous
vies with the historical, and many of the miracles deal with known per-
sons or events in ecclesiastical history. Behind the arrangement Ole
Widding detects an attempt to order the tales according to their content
which was in turn inherited by S. The order of the miracles in E1, L, S,
and the fragment G (AM 233a fol., c. 1350-1360, and 14th century) is
given in a table (p. 28-30).
The E2- and D-collections for the most part overlap, and both order
their material according to rank, the arrangement of the miracles being
determined by the position of the protagonist in the ecclesiastical hier-
archy (bishop, priest, abbot, ordinary monk or nun, secular lord, knight,
widow, etc.). D contains more miracles than E2, primarily because the
scribe of E has omitted the miracles in his exemplar that he had already
used in E1, but also because D has taken some material from post-clas-
sical collections. The principle of rank, on the other hånd, is followed
more consistently in E2 than in D, which according to Widding’s hy-
pothesis is due to D’s exemplar having become mixed up. Apart from
this rank-based organisational principle, a characteristic feature of E2
and D is that many of the miracles go back to Latin versions (derived
often from Speculum Historiale of Vincent of Beauvais) shorter than
the corresponding miracles in S, L, and E1.
In his conclusion Ole Widding provides a brief history of scholarship
along with a survey of the development of Mary miracles in Europe.
These miracles are said to have developed as veneration of the virgin
increased, and in particular in connection with the founding of many
new religious houses in the 12th century. The oldest collections, a type
not represented in Scandinavian sources, are local collections linked to
a particular town, church, or cloister (e.g. Roc-Amadour, Soissons,
Laon); the narratives in these collections are characteristically concise
and focus on the miracle itself. The next stage is composite collections
of the type represented by B, or on the continent by the large Latin col-
lections SV (Paris Bibi. Nat. 14.463, formerly St. Victor 248) and SG
(Paris Bibi. Nat. 12.593, formerly St. Germain lt. 486). Youngest are the
collections in which the material is ordered according to rank, referred
to by Widding as “Cloister collections”. Widding points out that none of
the Latin collections appears to have been the direct source for any of
the Norse collections. He names Pez, Dexter, Speculum Historiale, and