Bibliotheca Arnamagnæana - 01.06.2003, Blaðsíða 77

Liturgy of St Knud Lavard - Introduction
63
tion conduit through which English influence on the liturgy of St Knud
Lavard will have passed. In this light it is not remarkable that material
associated with St Knud the King as well as St Alban occurs in the Ring-
sted text as transmitted in K.111
The topics treated in the twelve responds of the historia are derived
partly from the Passion narrative in the Vita altera, with particular em-
phasis on the saint’s upbringing and princely virtues, and partly from the
folklore of miracles at his burial place. Nothing concrete is told about
the murder and there is no thematic coordination with the prose text,
which is carelessly - and from the structural point of view unsatisfacto-
rily - distributed in eight portions for the first two nocturns of monastic
Matins. Here already it appears that the redactor has carved up a pre-ex-
isting source for which he felt no personal responsibility: a liturgical vita
could have been expected from the outset to be structured with a view to
being read aloud in self-contained portions, and the arbitrariness of the
subdivisions in K suggests that monastic nocturns were not what the
author had in mind.112 The miracles are touched on in the last two re-
sponds of the third noctum, which sing of a health-giving spring that
welled up on the site of the murder (§ 2c:2:3:2) and of cures for the deaf,
dumb, lame, and blind (§ 2c:2:4:2). The spring and the restoration of
sight to a blind man are motifs that appear in the canonisation buli of
Pope Alexander III (DD 1:2, 347,10-11 = VSD 246,11-12), while cures
for blindness, lameness, deafness, and leprosy are Gospel common-
places.113 All of these motifs recur in the miracle protocol from the
shrine at Ringsted as reconstructed by Gertz from copies of the lost
codex Veriloquium vetus (VSD 242-45, cf. 185-87). Their conventional
111 Cf. above, p. 41 on the Translation homily (the direction of borrowing cannot of course
be assumed a priori to be from the liturgy of the older saint to that of the younger).
112 Cf. Thomas J. Heffeman, “The Liturgy and the Literature of Saints’ Lives,” in: Heffer-
nan and Matter (n. 17 above) 73-105, here 98-99. It should be noted that the division into
nine lessons in BKB and V is much more structurally satisfactory, though in neither case
can it be original (see sections 2.2.2 and 4.2.4 respectively). The arbitrarily shortened
lessons in most of the printed breviaries express a general, and purely pragmatic, tendency
in the late medieval period, cf. Reames (as n. 17) 262-64.
113 See Mt. 11:5, Lc. 7:22. Further examples in VSD: 130,14-16 (Ailnoth on Knud the
King), cf. 152,66 (Lauds antiphon in historia of the same saint); 161,17-20 (Translation
sequence assigned to Knud Lavard in the Copenhagen and Lund missals, see above pp. 35,
37); 240 (couplet in versus rapportati from epitaph in Robert of Ely, Fragmenta Arnamag-
næana, Lib. II); 271-75, 282,79-81 (Miracula and Lauds antiphons of St Kjeld); 376,[10-
12] (Matins respond of St Vilhelm); 436-45 (Miracula of Erik Plovpenning).