“Gunnlaugr Leifsson had a problem” (1). No one familiar with Icelandic religious writers active around the year 1200 will be able to resist such an opening. Anyone who studies hagiography will recognize the problem faced by Gunnlaugr: that of an author required to prepare an inspiring biography of a man who had died some three generations earlier, and about whom few details may have been remembered. That fact could be used to advantage, however. Whatever traditions did in fact survive about Gunnlaugrʼs subject, the recently canonized Bishop Jón Ögmundarson of Hólar, no one would have been able to contradict tales of demonic seduction, miraculous visions, and a haunted cow-stall, all of which would add to Jón’s reputation as a wonder-worker. Gunnlaugr also turned the fact that Jón had been married twice into an asset by sending him to Rome to obtain a dispensation from the Pope.
The volume under review examines how Gunnlaugr and other Icelandic authors presented--and justified--practices that conflicted with the norms of the Church and canon law, such as episcopal celibacy. In this they were not alone; the same practices and techniques will be known to all those who deal with medieval hagiography or history in other European cultures. In the process, Anderson flags as doubtful or unbelievable numerous historical claims and documents referred to in sagas about Icelandic bishops and a Norwegian king. Much of the evidence cited in the present volume is taken from these vernacular narratives. Anderson usually reminds us of this fact when quoting them, but it is well to bear the literary contexts in mind from the start. It is worth remembering that many of the sagas (notably those about Jón Ögmundarson and Guðmundr Arason, as well as Oddaverja þáttr) were written or revised three or more generations after the lifetime of the subject. The ideas and ideals presented in them are those of the commissioner or scribe, not the protagonist. The titles and dates of the different versions of the sagas are listed in Appendix 2. Other aids to readers are Appendix 1, a list of bishops of Skálholt and Hólar with their terms of office, and Appendix 3, a glossary of technical terms.
Questions of the authenticity of documents are the leitmotif of the volume. From creative hagiography, Anderson turns to outright forgery. The discussion ranges from Iceland and Norway to Rome and Avignon; comparison to events outside Iceland enables the Icelandic texts to be seen in context. Stephen Kuttner showed long ago that the stated result of one of St. Jón Ögmundarson’s trips to Rome--a dispensation for having been married twice--is impossible; Anderson shows that the purported dispensation reflects arguments concerning conflicts between papal power and canon law current in Gunnlaugr’s time. Furthermore, Jón’s supposed dispensation shows that news of the controversy about the “bigamous archbishop of Palermo” must have reached Iceland by the time Gunnlaugr composed his vita (for the precise connotations of “bigamy” in the medieval ecclesiastical context, see page 63). Without the dispensation, there is no reason to assume that Jón’s second journey to Rome took place at all. More than a century later, another tale of a trip to Rome (adapted from a collection of exemplars), this time involving an ignorant priest, reflects knowledge of a decree of Pope Clement VI (1342-52) in Avignon prohibiting petitioners from throwing messages at the pope (100). Here, one might observe that the priest Einar Hafliðason (the assumed author of Lárentius saga) spent nine nights in Avignon in 1346, according to Lögmannsannáll, generally believed to have been compiled by Einar himself.
Those interested in church-state clashes will enjoy the discussion of King Sverrir Sigurðsson in Chapter 1 and elsewhere. Papal taxes are addressed in Chapter 4, “Choreographing the Crusades,” which does not deal with crusading per se but rather how it was financed in the north. Chapters 4 and 5 include accounts of the bureaucracy and bookkeeping necessary for a papal messenger. Those who have had to fill out expense-account forms will sympathise.
Anderson views the papacy itself as a reactive institution, rather than a top-down expansionist one with consistent and coherent policies that were effectively carried out, the model commonly used by those who deal with Icelandic history. His monograph does, however, give the impression of a coherent and continuous Icelandic concept of the papacy. I myself see the authors of the various Icelandic works as simply grabbing whatever form of authorization they needed for the case they wanted to make, without worrying too much about the nature of the papacy per se. In fact, Bishops Árni of Skálholt and Lárentius of Hólar generally made use of the procedures of canon law rather than attempting to evade them. And it was not only Icelanders who evaded the demands of canon law: both the archbishop of Lund, who consecrated the twice-married Jón in 1106 (with or without a papal dispensation), and the bishop of Hamar and a later archbishop of Lund, the former of whom who ordained Páll Jónsson as priest and the latter of whom consecrated him as bishop of Skálholt in 1195, would appear to have been sympathetic to the Icelanders’ ecclesiastical needs. As Anderson points out, Páll was not only illegitimate but also held a goðorð (chieftaincy) and was married (his wife followed him to Skálholt, where she ruled the episcopal household, just as Jón Ögmundarson’s second wife is said to have done in an early version of his saga). Although presented in the saga as an indication of the esteem in which Páll was held, his consecration in Lund rather than Nidaros was probably necessitated by these irregularities. It could be added that Páll appears to have handed over the goðorð to his son, Loptr, in accordance with an archepiscopal decree of 1190, a transfer not mentioned in his saga. The fact that the consecration ceremony took place precisely on the feast of St. Jón Ögmundarson can be taken as an indication that high foreign ecclesiastics gave more recognition to the cults of Icelandic saints than the sagas of those saints give them credit for.
Andersonʼs translations from Old Icelandic are accurate, although summaries and descriptions sometimes miss the appropriate register. The description of Bishop Pállʼs wife, Herdís, as “adoring” on page 38 has far too modern a tone for the woman described as “awe-inspiring” a few lines earlier. Adoration was not a quality valued in wives in medieval literature outside of romances, and it is Herdísʼs administrative abilities, first at Skarð and then at Skálholt, that the author of the saga praised. The reference to Pállʼs “two wives” on page 39 also strikes a false note. As Anderson has just described in detail, the cathedral at Skálholt was Pállʼs “spiritual bride.” On page 39, however, the discussion concerns worldly relationships rather than spiritual ones, and one automatically thinks of Jón of Hólar, whose two (successive) human wives were problematic for the author of his saga.
Actual errors are few and far between. Saints were never canonized at the national assembly as Anderson suggests in the introduction (21); it did, however, occasionally add feasts (including those of the two locally canonized Icelandic saints) to the existing list of holy days observed throughout the country. The local canonizations of Jón and Þorlákr are mentioned in Chapter 2. The institutions at which St. Þorlákr studied (51) are unknown; his saga informs us only that he spent time in Paris and Lincoln. Otherwise, I disagree with Anderson on very few matters. The ability of the archbishop of Nidaros to control the liturgy within his archdiocese has recently been called into question by Astrid Marner. Even if the desire to do so were there, it was certainly not carried out, and the general consensus among liturgists is that variation, rather than uniformity, was the order of the day. Saga accounts of the refusal of Norwegian clerics to honor the feast of St. Þorlákr reflect a common motif of ecclesiastical folklore that can be added to Anderson’s list of imagined scenes. As noted above, the choice of the feast of St. Jón of Hólar for the consecration of Bishop Páll of Skálholt indicates that the archbishop of Lund, at least, had no such concerns; his choice of date (which celebrates the feast of the married episcopal saint) cannot have been random.
Of the sagas of Icelandic bishops, all but those of Árni and Lárentius are available in recent English translations, and translations of the latter two are in progress, as is a translation of the B version of the saga about Guðmundr Arason. The same cannot be said for the vernacular translations of papal and episcopal documents, some of which are known only from the sagas of the bishops who supposedly received them. Diplomatarium Islandicum, the 16-volume edition of documents pertaining to medieval Iceland, includes entries for some of the supposedly lost documents whose existence Anderson has justifiably called into question. In the opinion of this reviewer, only the documents that have survived to the present day, contained in medieval manuscripts such as Copenhagen, AM 671, 4to (1300-1340), which Anderson quotes, can be considered genuine.
In many ways it is the documents themselves, whether real, forged, or imagined, and their presentation or enactment, that are the heroes of this volume. Anderson’s analysis puts them in context and shows how they were marshalled for action by saga authors. Reimagining Christendom is to be highly recommended for the insight it grants into the forms of justification and authorization for which those documents were used, as well as the doubts it raises as to the accuracy, and even the existence, of some of them.