Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.1996, Síða 146
Latin sources of the Old Icelandic Speculum Penitentis
Ian McDougall
In 1985, Knud-Erik Holme Pedersen and Jonna Louis-Jensen published
an edition of an Icelandic penitential treatise which they entitled Specu-
lum Penitentis (hereafter Spec. Pen.)} The treatise, for the most part a
classification of and commentary on various types of mortal and venial
sins, is preserved in four manuscripts. There are no grounds for believ-
ing that the tract is much older than the earliest of these manuscript wit-
nesses, which date from the fifteenth century.1 2 In her introductory re-
marks on Spec. Pen., Jonna Louis-Jensen noted that the Icelandic treat-
ise bears all the hallmarks of a translation from a Latin original, al-
though she regretted that she was unable to point to a single direct
source.3 It is understandable that the identification of a single source for
Spec. Pen. proved problematic, for examination of available Latin ana-
logues for the treatise demonstrates that if the Icelandic author did work
from a single Latin original, then it was certainly a composite derived
from a variety of earlier Latin sources. A review of the contents of Spec.
Pen. will provide an impression of the range of Latin sources behind the
Icelandic treatise, or behind the Latin treatise from which the Icelandic
translator worked.
1 Knud-Erik Holme Pedersen (t) and Jonna Louis-Jensen, ‘Speculum penitentis’, Biblio-
theca Arnamagnæana (Bibi. Arn.) 38/ Opuscula 8 (1985), pp. 199-225; on the title, see p.
200. All references to the Icelandic text follow the lineation printed in this edition. The
edition of Spec. Pen. is referred to throughout as the collaborative work of both authors.
It is based on Pedersen’s unfinished work on the text and variant apparatus, which was
published posthumously by Jonna Louis-Jensen, who completed Pedersen’s work on the
edition and checked it against the manuscripts, and who is also responsible for the com-
mentary on the text provided in the introduction and postscript to their collaborative art-
icle. Citations from Spec. Pen. follow the lineation of the printed edition. However,
manuscript abbreviations and italicized expansions of abbreviated forms have not been
reproduced, manuscript word-division has been normalized, and manuscript punctuation
has not always been followed.
2 See Ibid., p. 203.
3 Ibid., p. 200.