The Making of Magnús í Vigur’s Personal Library

Dr Sheryl McDonald Werronen, Marie Curie Fellow, Department of Nordic Research, University of Copenhagen, holds the lecture.

Bring your lunch and we will provide coffee and tea. All interested are welcome.

Abstract

Magnús Jónsson í Vigur (1637–1702) has long been recognized as an important figure in the history of manuscript production in post-Reformation Iceland. His collection of around forty surviving manuscripts, many of them large and splendid volumes of several hundred pages each, has been praised as a cross-section of most of the literature available in Iceland at the time — ancient and contemporary, poetry and prose.

But until now there has been no study of the production of Magnús's library as a unit, how he commissioned new copies of texts and how the scribes he engaged carried out their work. This is the subject of my current research project, and in this paper I will focus on the evidence from one of the last scribes to work for Magnús í Vigur in the late 1690s, in a role that suggests his patron was in the process of organizing his collection of texts into a library.