Recycling and Recontextualisation in Medieval and Early Modern Icelandic Palimpsests

Abstract

In medieval and early modern Iceland, palimpsestation, that is the removal and substitution of the original writing through new writing, of books that had become damaged, obsolete or in any other way useless, was a common phenomenon. In most cases, an obsolete manuscript was dismembered so that a new manuscript may be created from its material components which would otherwise be considered waste. While parchment recycling was common in Iceland both in the medieval and early modern period, it was most productive in the century following the introduction of the Icelandic Reformation when palimpsested parchment from Latin Catholic books was frequently used for religious and legal manuscripts as a cheaper and more readily available alternative to paper. In addition, the Icelandic material includes two parchment prints of Jónsbók which are printed on palimpsest parchment. While palimpsestation was common all over Europe in medieval and early modern times, printing on palimpsest parchment seems to have been an exclusively Icelandic phenomenon. In other cases, an obsolete manuscript was recontextualised by substituting certain elements of the original manuscript while retaining other elements. After the Icelandic Reformation, Catholic liturgical manuscripts such as AM 618 4to, NKS 1931/NKS 340 8vo and AM 90 8vo were palimpsested to adapt them to a Protestant context. In an analogue way, manuscripts written in Icelandic could be modified by substituting old for new content (AM 161 4to) or by removing undesirable texts or text passages (AM 556 a 4to and AM 586 4to). Moreover, palimpsestation was used in several cases to create forgeries of medieval charters. As the Icelandic manuscript material does not provide any example of manuscript recontextualisation dating to the medieval period, this form of palimpsestation may have been an early modern phenomenon. To better describe these different types of Icelandic palimpsests, I propose redefining the term ‘palimpsest’ as multi-layered written artefact consisting of an ‘underlayer’ of partly or completely removed original textual and non- textual content and an ‘overlayer’ of newly-added textual or non-textual content. Furthermore, I propose the term ‘retained elements’ for those elements of an original manuscript that are not removed but intentionally retained and incorporated into the new manuscript as a separate component of palimpsests in addition to the ‘underlayer’ and the ‘overlayer’. Based on this definition, I propose to distinguish parchment recycling and manuscript recontextualisation as two main types of palimpsests.