In my last blog entry I wrote about the paper uses of the last Catholic bishop of Skálholt, Ögmundur Pálsson, and of his Lutheran successor, Gissur Einarsson. In this blog I focus on their northern colleague, Bishop Jón Arason.
Jón Arason (1484-1550, consecrated in 1524) is best known as the last Catholic bishop of Iceland who was beheaded in 1550, together with two of his sons (yes, he had children and acknowledged them officially: three of his sons were priests, one of which, Sigurður Jónsson, drew up the famous Sigurðarregistur, the inventory of Hólar after the demise of his father, but I am getting ahead of myself). He was also a celebrated poet and is well known in connection with printing. He established the first printing press of Iceland around the year 1530. It seems, though, that Jón Arason’s life was more connected to violence than to learning and printing. He strongly and violently opposed the Reformation. He took, for example, Bishop Gissur’s successor hostage and tried to oust all leading Lutherans but was finally taken prisoner and decapitated in 1550.
During his lifetime, Bishop Jón Arason made good use of paper for both official and administrative uses, even though little evidence has survived. The Sigurðarregistur includes paper books, too, and mentions, for example, 17 copies of an Icelandic breviary. This refers to the Breviarium Holense that Bishop Jón had printed in 1534; no copies of it have survived, apart from two fragmentary leaves that were found in the binding of a book in the National Library in Stockholm, Sweden.
The breviary is said to have closely followed the Breviarium Nidrosiense, the breviary of the Niðarós-diocese (today Trondheim/Norway) printed in Paris in 1519, but may not have contained all parts of the Norwegian exemplar. It presumably contained the sanctorale, the Psalms and a calendar. Together with the temporale (texts for movable feasts), the sanctorale (texts for fixed feasts) covers the liturgical year of the Roman Catholic church. It seems thus logical that the Icelandic breviary contained both the sanctorale and the temporale, beside the Psalms and calendar. For these four texts, at least 53 sheets of paper per copy were needed. If we calculate with 100 copies, one for each main church in the Hólar-diocese, Bishop Jón would have needed at least 5,300 sheets of printing paper; if every of the approx. 330 main churches in all of Iceland were to receive a copy, he would have needed at least 17,490 sheets; and if every of the 400-450 priests were to receive a copy, he would have needed at least between 21,200 and 23,850 sheets. These are certainly high numbers for a poor island in the North Atlantic, and perhaps lack of funds or general difficulty in obtaining printing paper were reasons why Bishop Jón had presumably only one other book printed, the Gospels. Or perhaps the bishop preferred weapons of steel to weapons of paper and ink.
Further reading:
Halldór Hermannsson, Icelandic Books of the Sixteenth Century (1534–1600). Islandica 9. Ithaca: Cornell University Library, 1916.
Isak Collijn, “Två blad af det förlorade Breviarium Nidrosiense, Hólar 1534,” Nordisk tidskrift för bok- och biblioteksväsen 1 (1914): 11–16.
Vilborg Auður Ísleinfsdóttir-Bickel, Die Einführung der Reformation in Island 1537-1565: Die Revolution von oben. Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe III 708. Frankurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996.
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