Gripla - 2023, Side 268

266 GRIPLA
Women and men could equally participate in networks of commu-
nity exchange in early modern Iceland, as seen in the case of Helga
Magnúsdóttir, Jórunn Hinriksdóttir and others. Women likewise partici-
pated enthusiastically in the project of building scholarly collections—lend-
ing books to be copied, selling or donating their personal libraries to collec-
tors and acting as facilitators within their families and communities. These
activities have greatly benefited the academic community, but the survival
of manuscript heritage in archives came at a cost. Once manuscripts were
securely stowed in a repository, women were no longer encouraged to act
as co-participants in literary scholarship. This was a gradual process, but
with the outcome that early modern women’s roles in the preservation of
literature were largely overshadowed by the efforts of university-educated
men with institutional support for their work. The reciprocity that char-
acterised manuscript culture within the community was lost.
Conclusion
While a philologist such as Brynjólfur Sveinsson or Árni Magnússon
sought to build as complete a literary collection as possible, libraries such
as Helga’s were carefully curated from objects of deep personal signifi-
cance. Helga had grown up surrounded by books, and as a widow who
needed to manage single-handedly the education of four young children,
acquiring books for her household at Bræðratunga was an important social
strategy. Her library told the story of who her family was and where they
had come from: from the printed Bible gifted by her husband’s brother-in-
law during their years at Hólar to the vellum leaves that spoke of a child-
hood spent at a former monastery.
Our understanding of seventeenth-century Icelandic libraries and man-
uscript ownership is heavily filtered through the lens of the interests of
collectors such as Árni Magnússon. Strikingly under-represented among
the manuscripts associated with Helga Magnúsdóttir are devotional works
or books of hymns and religious poetry, with the exception of the highly
fragmentary AM 608 4to and the Wolfenbüttel manuscript. As head of her
household from 1652 to her death in 1677, Helga was responsible for both
the financial and the spiritual well-being of Bræðratunga. Her biography