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comparison with Guðbrandur and Olmer’s previous work, Oleson was still
summarizing a massive amount of information in a few relatively short
publications, and the subject calls for more extensive treatment. In addi-
tion, many of the attempts to identify and describe the Old Norse terms
for different kinds of liturgical books, by both Oleson and others, have
been quite cursory. In the case of the aspiciensbœkr, these cursory attempts,
combined with limited interest in Icelandic liturgy as a subject, has led to
the misidentification of this type of book being propagated though more
than a century of scholarship.
The Books and Their Context
An aspiciensbók was, we can be fairly confident, an Antiphonal.4 However,
understanding what exactly that is requires some explanation. To begin at
the most general level, medieval liturgical books can be divided into three
broad categories: books of general instruction and information, books for
the Mass, and books for the Office.5 A general trend in thirteenth-century
Latin Europe led to compilation of liturgical texts into larger books, and
by the late thirteenth and earlier fourteenth century, there were five basic
books for the Mass and the Office: the Breviary, Antiphonal, and Psalter
for the Office, and the Missal and Gradual for the Mass. Before the shift
towards larger books, the components of these could be spread out across
a greater number of shorter volumes, often in practice divided accord-
ing to specific use of various officiants of whatever the liturgical service
was. Throughout the Middle Ages, however, it was normal for most of
4 There are numerous variations in both the Latin and English terminology for this and
other liturgical books: in English it can be an Antiphonal, Antiphonary, or Antiphoner,
in Latin an antiphonarium, antiphonarius, or antiphonale. The forms used in John Harper,
The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy from the Tenth to the Eighteenth Century: A Historical
Introduction and Guide for Students and Musicians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) have
been used in this study for the sake of consistency, but in quotations of sources and
scholarship other forms will appear.
5 The Mass refers to the core rite of the medieval Latin Church: the Eucharist, and the
liturgical rituals surrounding it. The Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours refers to the
cycle of daily prayer, based primarily around the psalms. For a summary of these two litur-
gies and their development, see Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western Liturgy, 73–126.
For the lists and categorizations of the basic types of books, see Andrew Hughes, Medieval
Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to their Organization and Terminology (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1982), 118–23 and Harper, The Forms and Orders of Western
Liturgy, 58–66.
THE LOST LITURGICAL BOOKS OF ICELAND