February 15, 2024 | Laura Gazzoli | HI Research Blog
The Life of Ansgar is a text that anyone with an interest in viking-age Scandinavia has to read at some point. At my own first encounter with it as an undergraduate I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I was quickly swept away by the rich detail and the remarkable, living story that I hadn’t expected to find in a work of hagiography. Ansgar was not the first Christian missionary to make it to Scandinavia – Willibrord and Ebo of Rheims both preceded him. But he was the first missionary who made Scandinavia the focus of his life’s work, and visited for several protracted periods. The accounts of these in the Life – written in part by Rimbert, his disciple and successor who accompanied him on some of his later travels – offer us an unparalleled view of Scandinavia at the height of the Viking Age: peril at sea from vikings, captured Christians in the slave-emporia of Denmark and Sweden, conflicts over power and tribute in the Baltic, interactions with Danish and Swedish kings and public debates with representatives of the pagan gods. Even – or perhaps especially? - allowing for the hagiographic nature of the material, it is a remarkable text.
In 2012, I was given the great privilege to start working on an edition of this text, thanks to a Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the British Academy. That edition, which will include a much-needed facing-page English translation, is now nearing completion. In this post, I’d like to share a bit about why we need a new edition, and what has gone into making my new one!
The text was last edited by Georg Waitz in the MGH in 1884, and his edition has been the basis of modern scholarship on the text. Waitz did not, however, have access to all the manuscripts we have now, and his knowledge of the ones he knew about was less than what one might desire. Waitz closely follows the oldest manuscript (A1), Stuttgart, Würtembergische Landesbibliothek HB XIV 7. It’s an excellent (and beautiful!) manuscript, and you can have a look for yourself here: https://digital.wlb-stuttgart.de/index.php?id=6&tx_dlf%5Bid%5D=9434&tx_dlf%5Bpage%5D=9
In the view of Bernhard Bischoff, this manuscript was probably produced at Corvey not long after 865, probably under Rimbert’s supervision. It was known to be in the Cathedral library of Konstanz in the fourteenth century, probably a presentation copy to Salomo of Konstanz, who was associated with Ansgar.
So why should we need anything else? Well, we have two other manuscripts of the original version of the text (it was revised – and extensively! - later in the middle ages, I’ll come to that soon). These are from Corbie, which was the monastery in northeastern France where Ansgar began his career, and to whose monks Rimbert addressed the Life. They would have doubtless been the recipients of a presentation copy no less splendid, which has not survived, but has two descendants (A2 and A3, now in Paris and Amiens respectively). Waitz had not in fact seen A2, and knew it only from notes made by a colleague; often he assumed it had the same readings as A1 when it didn’t. Consulting A2 means that I have found some readings that are actually preferable to those of A1. So, just in terms of a version of the text that reflects what the original ninth-century text was, we can improve on Waitz’ edition.
The revised version
But, it goes beyond the original version! Sometime in the earlier twelfth century (between 1118 and 1123), the text of the Vita was fairly extensively revised. And this wasn’t just a little cleaning-up either – the text was altered, and its focus changed. This was probably the work of Vizelin – magister scholarum at Bremen and later himself a missionary to the Slavs of Holstein, Bishop of Oldenburg and founder of Neumünster (Faldera) - in effect a direct successor to Ansgar, who was charged with the mission to the Slavs of this area, although we have no record of him going there. The Life, at this point, was around 250 years old and no longer reflected the needs of the see of Hamburg-Bremen, and so it tidied away some inconvenient details, rephrased things to make their case clearer, and recast their founding figure in a different light.
This has become known as the B-Version, following Waitz’ numeration of its manuscripts as B1, B2, etc. (in contrast to those of the original version as A1, A2, A3). Its main changes were:
• The Christian world had become bigger: not only was there more knowledge of Scandinavia on the European continent, but Denmark, Norway and Sweden had taken form as Christian kingdoms, and the Icelanders and Greenlanders had also taken on the faith. Moreover, in 1104, the diocese of Lund (then in Denmark, now in Sweden) was elevated to the status of an archbishopric, with authority over all the Nordic world, depriving Hamburg-Bremen of its raison d’etre, which the see vigorously contested. Consequently, the original text was emended to expand Ansgar’s realm of authority as designated by the Pope from merely ‘Danes, Swedes and Slavs’ to also include Norwegians, Finns, Icelanders, Greenlanders, and any other northern or eastern peoples, no matter what they were called. This is a bit of an obvious giveaway – Iceland and Greenland had not been discovered or settled by Norse-speakers in the 830s when the Vita claims this grant happened. In the revision, Ansgar’s authority is also specifically designated as passing to his successors – again, this is a clear response to the elevation of Lund.
• All references to Ebo of Rheims, who preached in Denmark before Ansgar and was involved in supporting his missions, were removed. Not only did someone being there earlier detract from Ansgar’s glory, but Ebo, due to the memory of his role in the public penance of Louis the Pious, was also not necessarily a good figure to be associated with.
• In the original text, Ansgar was justified as a ‘bloodless martyr’, on the basis of Gregory the Great’s statement that there were two types of martyrdom, one open and another ‘hidden’ in times of peace among those who were willing to martyrdom but did not have the opportunity to receive it. The discussion of this at the end, and the intermittent references to martyrdom throughout the text are removed. It may have been felt improper or embarrassing in a later context, when the procedure for canonisation of saints had become more codified.
• Ansgar emerges as a harsher figure – passages showing his compassion and pity are removed. This is may be in line with Vizelin’s own character: his biographer, Helmold of Bosau, states that his main fault was how viciously and mercilessly he beat his pupils.
Discussion of this version has focused heavily on its political implications – as these are readily obvious and of great significance for the ecclesiastical history of northern Europe. The changes in Ansgar’s status and character, however, the downplaying of his martyrdom and the recasting of him as a harsher figure are more overlooked – not least because Waitz’s edition does not in fact note how much material has been removed from the B version. Naturally, fully bringing the character of this important revision to the attention of scholars is a vital task for a new edition. The B-version (and its further editing as the C-version, discussed below) is, after all, the way the text was most widely known in the later middle ages and accounts for most of our manuscripts – this was the text as Hamburg-Bremen actively promoted it, and it is notable that manuscripts of the A-version have only been found in France and southern Germany, outside of Hamburg-Bremen’s sphere of influence.
New manuscripts – and a new version
There are three manuscripts of the Latin text that were unknown to Waitz – one of these, from Bordesholm (the successor to Vizelin’s community of Neumünster or Faldera) belongs to the B-version and shows a strong similarity to the other manuscripts found in northern Germany – it's probably a descendant, with at least one intermediary, from a copy presumably taken by Vizelin to Faldera when it was founded. The two others, however, are representatives of a new recension, unknown to Waitz: I’ve referred to this as the ‘Late Medieval Bremen Version’, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll continue the established pattern and call it the C-Version.
This revision shows textual similarities to Philippus Caesar’s editio princeps which was based on a lost Bremen manuscript, and the explicits of the manuscripts often refer to Ansgar as the Bishop of Bremen, rather than emphasising Hamburg or his missionary activity among the northern peoples. Both of these argue for Bremen as the point where this text was created. And it is clearly the result of a concentrated revision: the manuscripts share distinctive textual changes – mostly additions to the texts that show the work of a careful reader, most notably a conjecture in chapter 2 where the B-version had a sentence that had been rendered ungrammatical in the B-version through the omission of a crucial word: whoever produced the C-version has thoughtfully replaced the word devotionis, lost from the A-version, with the conjecture virtutum, which works nicely. Waitz knew some of this version through a fragmentary transcript of the early chapters, but as he knew of no other manuscripts that shared its readings, was not able to see the extent of the revision to the text or the geographical extent of the area this version was spread to. This version also served as the basis for medieval translations into Old Swedish and into Middle Low German – the latter of which I have also edited. The text was known in this form in the low countries, northern Germany and Scandinavia: in fact, our only Latin manuscript of the Vita from Scandinavia is a transcript of a lost Sorø manuscript of the C-version. This shows us that Bremen was still interested in revising and spreading the life in the later middle ages – and that other centres wanted to have it from them.
A new edition – why and how?
I hope I’ve made clear some of the reasons why a new edition is desirable: Waitz’s edition is not familiar with all of the manuscripts and hence neither gives the best readings in all places for the manuscripts of the original version, nor does it give us a full view of just how revised the text was in the B-version, and there is practically no inclusion of the manuscripts of the C-version at all. My new edition will give us both a more accurate representation of the original text as well as a clear depiction of how this text, as a centrepiece of the institutional identity of Hamburg-Bremen, continued to be refashioned and diffused by that centre through the middle ages. It’s a text with a long life, and a critical edition should carry us up through all its manuscript transmission.
A question people often ask me is – how will you do this? To be honest, I quite like a traditional edition, in the form of a book available in print and digitally. An editor can use her discretion to highlight the changes of different versions beyond a simple apparatus listing all variants so that the B- and C-versions of the text are readily apparent – and also translated; there will be a facing-page translation into English. Thoroughness, accessibility and ease of use together are key.
And when?
I don’t have a specific date yet, but soon! I’ve been working on this project for over ten years now – the edition is done, the translation, introduction and commentary remain to be polished off. It’s been a privilege to be able to work in so many libraries and with so many manuscripts directly, from Stuttgart to Stockholm, from Paris to Vienna – it’s an experience that’s hard to beat for any medievalist. A lot of research has gone into this, and I’m looking forward to being able to let you enjoy the fruits of it all.
