Disseminating and Dispensing Canon Law in Medieval Iceland

Abstract

This article addresses a L atin canonical-legal treatise, “Nota sex tantum casus,” that survives in fragmentary form in a little-noticed medieval Icelandic manuscript (AM 671 4to). The extant version of “Nota sex” preserved in AM 671 4to was copied in Iceland in the early fourteenth century, and its form as well as its function there merit close consideration. The work alternates between prose and verse, listing and explicating different situations (casus) that bring about canonical irregularity and thereby inhibit the reception or exercise of holy orders. The article begins by investigating the didactic-memorial poems embedded in “Nota sex,” approaching those as mechanisms designed to disseminate canonical-legal norms throughout the Church and thus help build broad ideological frames of reference. I then take up the notion of canonical irregularity in other Icelandic contexts. Drawing on an example from Jóns saga Hólabyskups, I suggest that medieval Icelandic clerics developed strategies both to recognize and to subvert canonical-legal principles and categories such as the “irregularities” listed in “Nota sex”.