66 Manuscripts from the Arnamagnæan Collection

This book appears in commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the birth of the Icelandic scholar and antiquarian Arni Magnusson (1663-1730), who, in addition to his duties as secretary of the Royal Archives and, from 1702, professor of Danish Antiquities at the University of Copenhagen, spent much of his life building up what is by common consent the single most important collection of early Scandinavian manuscripts in existence. While consisting predominantly of Icelandic manuscripts, the Arnamagnaean collection also contains many important Norwegian, Danish and Swedish manuscripts, along with about one hundred of continental provenance. In this book are presented descriptions of 66 manuscripts, one for each year Arni Magnusson lived, along with a comprehensive introduction to Arni Magnusson's life and work and a chapter on book production in the Middle Ages. High quality colour photographs complement the texts. The manuscripts collected in this volume are remarkably diverse, containing works of literature and science, religious texts and law books, calendars and music, etc. The value of the collection was recognised in 2009 when it was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.