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Edward became king of England when he was thirteen, and was murdered already as a sixteen-year-old by his enemies. One of the characteristics of the manuscript is the English Saint Edward, whose feast day was celebrated 18 March. These have in some places been supplied more or less randomly or as needed.
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The current state of the manuscript would suggest that it was not finished with rubrics and initials. The different units, registered as three different missals by the liturgist Lilli Gjerløw (Mi 24, Mi 25 and Mi 64), are connected by some ‘awkward’ secondary rubrics. This missal is a curious one, since it is very diverse and variable in style and content. Norway (Trondheim?), first half of the 12th century This suggests that the missal, or a dismantled part of it, was kept in the same place and used there as binding material over several years. The fragments from this missal were taken from four different account books, all from the same area in Northern Norway (Nordland and Vesterålen), the dates of the accounts following each other directly: 1626, 1627, 1628, and 1629. The script, at least in the running text, seems to be the work of a single scribe, writing in an elegant Gothic hand. The initials alternate between blue with red flourishes and red with blue flourishes, while red is used for the rubrics, the foliations (“paginations”), the line-fillers, and the musical staves, as well as to highlight capitals within the text. The reconstructed missal is about 28 cm tall and 18 cm wide, the writing distributed in two columns on each page. This is especially clear in the case of the epistle “Libenter suffertis”, which starts on the bottom of page 6 (folio 2v) and continues directly onto the next leaf (folio 3r, or page 7). Several of the reconstructed leaves follow one another directly. The surviving fragments contain chants, prayers and Bible readings for use in the time from Sexagesima Sunday (the eighth Sunday before Easter) to the Holy Week. This missal, named after its post-medieval provenance, was written in England or France at the end of the thirteenth century. It is a useful reminder that codicology is far more than an ‘art of measurement’. One of the characteristics of the manuscripts is the relaxed manner in which the scribes related to the ruling, the lines and the measurements. The music and the coloured initials are very distinct and recognizable. There are three different scribes present in the transmitted fragments. The fragments were used to bind accounts from Trondheim, and it is in this case not unlikely that the missal was also written and used in Trondheim. The liturgist Lilli Gjerløw registered a number of fragments from the missal in her files as Mi 75.
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The content includes parts of Christmas, Lent and Easter. The Saint Alphegus missal is pieced together from 41 small to medium size fragments in the National Archives of Norway. Saint Alphegus had very modest appeal outside England, and this missal is the only known reference to him in Norway.
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When he refused to pay ransom, they made him a martyr. Alphegus (or Ælfheah) was the archbishop of Canterbury and was taken hostage by the Danes in 1012. The feast for the English saint Alphegus is one of the unusual features of a fragmentary missal from the 12 th century. Norway (Trondheim?), second half of the 12th century Please take a closer look at our selection of virtual manuscripts, and leaf through some of the pages! To reconnect pieces from medieval manuscripts is one element of the research project ‘From manuscript fragments to book history’. But through digital reproductions we can once again leaf through some of the manuscripts from Norwegian book chests – however fragmentary they may be. We cannot get away from the fact that most of the manuscript is gone. The fact that the binding is gone and the fragments are kept in separate envelopes and boxes, or even still wrapped around paper booklets, is no longer an issue in itself. In a digital format it is easier to visualize the book which once existed. The fragments form a giant book puzzle containing ca 6500 single pieces.įor more than a century scholars have been connecting pieces from the old manuscripts, and the work is still ongoing. Today, the National Archives and other collections hold fragments from about a thousand ‘recycled’ manuscripts. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century thousands of Norway's medieval manuscripts disappeared or were reduced to fragments.