This article explores post-medieval Icelandic manuscript culture from the Reformation in the 1550s to the first decades of the twentieth century when the culture surrounding manuscripts (the production, dissemination and reception of handwritten texts) gave way to social change, urbanization and new media types.
Iceland was settled in the late nineth to early tenth centuries by Norse settlers. Following the conversion to Christianity in the eleventh century, religious and learned manuscripts were produced within monasteries, historical and literary works patroned by chieftains and written in the vernacular, including the Icelandic (family) sagas, King´s sagas and Eddas. This so-called “golden age” of Icelandic medieval manuscript production, typically attributed to the thirteenth and
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Citation: Þ. Ólafsson, Bragi. "Icelandic post-medieval manuscript culture". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 13 November 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19653, accessed 21 November 2024.]
