Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2003, Page 16
6
Michael Chesnutt
The account of Knud Lavard’s death in the Older Zealand Chronicle is
not, however, drawn from Robert of Ely but from another text of later date.
This second biography - referred to below as the Vita altera10 - survives as
part of the medieval Danish liturgy of the saint, and extracts from it appear-
ing in late medieval service books were known to pioneer scholars such as
Stephanius the Younger (1599-1650; cf. section 2.2.3), Åmi Magnusson
(1663-1730; cf. section 2.2.4), and Jacob Langebek (1710-1775). In the
fourth volume of the monumental series Scriptores Rerum Danicarum,
published after Langebek’s death by P. F. Suhm, there is a collection of ma-
terial entitled “Legendæ aliqvot de S. Canuto Duce” gleaned from - among
other books - the breviaries of Lund, Roskilde, Schleswig, Odense, and
Vasterås (Sweden).11 In all of these sources the Vita altera has been drasti-
cally abridged and the full text remained unknown until the middle of the
nineteenth century, when a medieval manuscript preserving not only
words but also music (Gregorian chant) for the entire liturgy of both calen-
dar feasts was brought to light by the German historian August Potthast.
This text - but not the chant, which remains largely unpublished - was first
printed by Georg Waitz in 1858, in an edition that was posthumously reis-
sued with corrections in 1892;12 it was re-edited by Rudolf Usinger (also
posthumously) in 1875,13 and most recently by the great Danish philologist
M. Cl. Gertz in his Vitae Sanctorum Danorum,14
10 After the title supplied in Waitz2 (n. 12 below), applied there inclusively to the saint’s
life as such and the supplementary account of his Translation; I adopt the title without pre-
judice to the question of whether the two narratives constituted an integral whole from the
beginning (see further p. 57 with n. 97).
11 Jacobus Langebek et al. (eds.), Scriptores Rerum Danicarum Medii Ævi [...] (1772-
1878), reprint Nendeln 1969 [SRD], IV 261-77, no. cix.
12 Georg Waitz (ed.), Eine ungedruckte Lebensbeschreibung des Herzogs Knud Laward
von Schleswig, Gottingen 1858 [Waitz1]; idem (ed.), “Vita altera Kanuti ducis,” in: Monu-
menta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores 29 (1892), reprint Stuttgart/New York 1964,
11-20 [Waitz2; seen through the press by O. Holder-Egger].
13 Rudolf Usinger (ed.), “Officium Sancti Kanuti Ducis,” in: Scriptores minores rerum
Slesvico-Holtsatensium, Erste Sammlung, Kiel 1875, 1-72, no. i [Usinger].
14 VSD 171-80 (introduction), 189-204 (lessons from the first and second noctums of
Matins), 221-29 (antiphons, responds, hymns, etc.), 229-33 (lessons from the third noc-
turns of Matins). - The text of the antiphons and responds according to the Breviarium
Roschildense of 1517 was also printed, without knowledge of the work of Waitz and
Usinger, in Guido Maria Dreves s.J. (ed.), Analecta hymnica 26, Leipzig 1897, 191-94,
no. 67; earlier the same editor had printed the hymns from the Roskilde book in Analecta
hymnica 23, Leipzig 1896, 214-15, nos. 370-71, and the two Mass sequences in Analecta
hymnica 8, Leipzig 1890, 159-61, no. 208 (from Missale Hafniense 1510) and no. 209
(from Missale Slesvicense 1486).