Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2003, Síða 72
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Michael Chesnutt
Vita\ a central initiative of this kind is all the more likely in view of the
general campaign for liturgical uniformity launched by Absalon in
1187.98 Quite another matter is whether this postulated nationwide litur-
gy, which would be from the last decades of the twelfth or the first
decades of the thirteenth century, was identical with the material trans-
mitted in K. Standing in the way of such an assumption is the faet that a
liturgy sponsored by the archdiocese would have been secular, not
monastic. Gertz envisaged that the texts of the late medieval secular bre-
viaries were individually extracted from the monastic recension pre-
served in K." Those books that show no trace of K’s metrical propers
should rather be interpreted as codifying the independent usage of the
Danish cathedrals, the fuller text in K being the result of expansion by
the Benedictines of Ringsted.
On this view the breviaries A, S (and V) are not, as Gertz would have
us believe, the result of selective shortening of the Benedictine order of
service; on the contrary, they are witnesses to an early secular recension
that originated some three centuries before the surviving books were
printed. The breviaries L, O, and R, which show contact with the more
complex Benedictine tradition, must then be the product of secondary
developments. In all likelihood K itself played a pivotal role in these de-
velopments by transmitting the Benedictine recension to Roskilde,
whence parts of it diffused out as far as the diocese of Funen (cf. sec-
tions 4.2.1 and 4.2.3 above), but not as far as Jutland or Schleswig.100
Employing *k as a designation for the service books at Ringsted from
which the Benedictine recension was copied into K, we may express this
model of evolution in a new stemma incorporating elements from the
stemmata already presented (pp. 46, 53):
98 Cf. the posthumously published contribution of Niels Skyum-Nielsen, “En nyfunden
kilde til Absalons historie,” in: Historie. Jyske Samlinger, Ny række 19, 1991-93, 244—64.
For previous discussion of the existence of a medieval Danish archdiocesan ordinal see
Christopher Hohler, “Structures and Patterns in Surviving Breviaries from Scandinavia,”
in: Nordiskt kollokvium III (n. 19 above) 27-45, esp. 38-39.
99 “[M]an maa vel tænke sig dem affattede af en eller anden Gejstlig fra hver vedkom-
mende Kirke især, som ved et Besøg i Ringsted har faaet Ordinalet overladt og derefter har
udskrevet saa meget af det, som han mente at have Brug for” (VSD 180).
100 The occurrence of one of the rhymed sequences in MH and Missale Lundense would
support contact with the Roskilde tradition in these sources and L (cf. sections 4.1.4-5 and
4.2.5 above); the occurrence of the other sequence in Ms must be due to secondary influ-
ence from the same tradition, presumably due to the editorial intervention of Jacob
Horstman (cf. section 4.1.2).