In the Middle Ages, taking the sea route was often the safest and most efficient way to travel. Strategically located on the coast of the English channel, Flanders was not only a cultural and commercial crossroads between mainland Europe and the British Isles, but also an important stop along the route for Danes, Norwegians, and other Northerners travelling southwards to Paris, Rome, or the Holy Land. Some of them brought “souvenirs” back home with them – books that ranged from the ordinary to the lavishly decorated. But who brought the books, why did they do it, and what happened to the manuscripts later?

Historical sources tell us of intriguing connections, both political, religious, and commercial, between the historical region of Flanders and the medieval kingdoms of Denmark and Norway. A well-known example is the marriage between King Knud of Denmark (d. 1086) and Adela, daughter of Count Robert I of Flanders; after Knud’s murder in St. Alban’s church in Odense, she fled back home with her son, the future Count Charles – who met a similar (and similarly grisly) fate to that of his father in 1127, when he was ambushed in St Donatian’s church in Bruges. Someone who fled in the opposite direction, probably after being compromised by Charles’s murder, was Helias (d. 1162), the former dean of St Donatian’s, who became a canon of Roskilde and subsequently Bishop of Ribe in Denmark. In Norway, we find another Flemish churchman, Jon the Fleming, working as a juridical scholar in the Archbishop’s service towards the end of the thirteenth century. The archbishopric of Nidaros had extensive ties to the Cistercian abbey of Ter Doest, an abbey which was also visited by several Danish churchmen.

What role did such connections play in the transmission of texts and books between Flanders, Denmark, and Norway? In Danish and Norwegian collections of manuscript fragments, we find several examples of fragments from books copied in Flanders or Northern France from the late twelfth century and onwards. Some of these may have come from an hitherto unknown copy of the Legendarium Flandrense, a collection of saints’ legends that circulated amongst monastic houses in Flanders in the High Middle Ages. One of the oldest surviving copies of this legendary, Brugge Openbare Bibliotheek Ms. 403, was owned by the abbey of Ter Doest and contains a copy of “the oldest history of Denmark” – the writer Ailnoth’s account of the murder of King Knud in Odense in 1086. This text thus found its way to Flanders, where it was copied and circulated, then possibly returned to Denmark, now as part of an established legendary, where only fragments survive.

Exactly how many texts and manuscripts travelled like this, north and south across the sea, we will never know. But the investigation of surviving manuscript material, combined with careful consideration of historical sources, may still put us on their trace, yielding information about the way these contacts helped to shape medieval Scandinavian book culture.

Literature

Delaissé, E. “The Cistercian Network: The Flemish Abbey of Ter Doest and Scandinavia,” in Monastic Culture: The Long Thirteenth Century: Essays in Honour of Brian Patrick McGuire, ed. L. Bisgaard et al. (Odense, 2014), 268–83

Gelting, M.H. ”Un prélat flamand au Danemark au XIIe siècle: Hélie, évêque de Ribe (1142–1162),” Handelingen van het Genootschap voor geschiedenis gesticht onder de benaming Société d’Emulation te Brugge 122 (1985), 159–79

Harpsøe, S. “Contacts Between Denmark and Flanders in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: The Tiniest of Evidence,” in Denmark and Europe in the Middle Ages, c.1000–1525: Essays in Honour of Professor Michael H. Gelting, ed. K. Hundahl, L. Kjær, and N. Lund (Farnham, 2014), 77–89

Myking, S.M. “Ter Doest, Lund, and the Legendarium Flandrense: Danish-Flemish connections in the Late Twelfth Century”, Journal of Medieval Latin 27 (2018), 115-140

Myking, S.M. “Money Deposits and Shipwrecked Saints. The Norwegian Presence in Medieval Bruges”, in Ad Brudgias Portum: Bruges’ medieval port system as a maritime cultural landscape, ed. W. De Clercq et al. (Brepols, forthcoming)

Ommundsen, Å. “Two French or Flemish Manuscripts and their Scandinavian Fate”, Viator 48 no. 1 (2017), 337-358