Gripla - 2022, Blaðsíða 166
GRIPLA164
Clearly, not all provisions of the 1541 Church Ordinance applied to
Iceland, such as the section on schools for children in market and cathedral
towns, which addresses educational reform in Denmark and Norway but
was not adapted for the Icelandic context into which it was translated.27
However, in 1590, Bishop Oddur Einarsson confirmed that midwives – or
the most pious of men – could be entrusted with performing emergency
baptism, and he emphasised the importance of teaching girls and women
the prayers that midwives were required to know under the Church
Ordinance.28
Additional provisions were made in the Church Ritual of 1685 for
the education, preparation and certification of midwives in the kingdom
of Denmark-Norway, and it was furthermore stipulated that they had
the right to fair payment from those who could afford to pay for their
services but were to aid poor women free of charge.29 It is uncertain how
closely it was possible to follow the instructions in the Church Ritual in
Iceland: midwives were instructed to use only prayer and natural, utile
and Christian remedies to aid the birthing process and to seek the help of
the nearest doctor or barber-surgeon. There were no practising physicians
in Iceland before 1760, however, when Bjarni Pálsson arrived in Iceland
after completing his medical education at the University of Copenhagen
the previous year. The first professionally licensed midwife to practise in
Iceland was a Danish woman who came to the country in 1761, Margrethe
Katarine Magnussen (1718–1805).
In spite of various practices associated with magic being punishable
by death in early modern Iceland, there are no known instances of a
woman described as a midwife being accused of witchcraft or sorcery.30
Guðmundur Einarsson’s attack on the use of obstetrical magic in Hugrás
certainly does not target women: he argues that the obstetrical charm he
27 Cf. Morten Fink-Jensen, “Teaching and Educational Reforms in Denmark and Norway,
c. 1500–1750,” Exploring Textbooks and Cultural Change in Nordic Education 1536–2020,
ed. by Merethe Roos, Kjell Lars Berge, Henrik Edgren, Pirjo Hiidenmaa and Christina
Matthiesen (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 16–28. Iceland’s two cathedral schools taught only more
advanced students of Latin.
28 AÍ 2, 177–81, 185–87.
29 Lovsamling for Island 1, 444–48.
30 Midwives were not widely prosecuted for their practices in late medieval and early modern
Europe, cf. David Harley, “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-
witch,” Social History of Medicine 3.1 (1990): 1–26.