Digitised manuscripts
From list A I inspected the digitised manuscripts on handrit.org and noted down where any Latin text occurred. As I went along, I discovered that not all Latin text had actually been indexed in the catalogues. Especially marginalia and pen-trials had not been noted. I also found general tendencies. Many law codices contained legitimising gospel quotations either in the front or in the back. Almost all kinds of manuscripts – from saga to canon law – feature short lines of prayer as later additions, most commonly the Hail Mary. And a few manuscripts were composed bilingually with Latin and Old Norse text side-by-side. Most of these are faith-related.
I then turned to the individual manuscripts, a work which will continue until December next year. I created XML files for the transcription of each manuscript and transcribed the facsimile and diplomatic level of the Latin contents. In many cases a normalised edition does not make sense, simply because the Latin is so faulty or the text incomplete. The following transcriptions are now more or less finished: AM 45 fol., AM 62 fol., AM 226 fol., AM 233 a fol., AM 235 fol., AM 344 fol., AM 350 fol., AM 519 4to, AM 619 4to, AM 677 4to, AM 696 XXX 4to, AM 696 XXXI 4to, AM 732 b 4to, and AM 736 I 4to.
Out of these, AM 732 b 4to has really caught my attention. What an exciting manuscript of only eighteen pages! I am currently studying it in more detail and will write more about it in next week’s post.