The Victorine Library and Scholarly Networks Behind Niðrstigningar saga

In the present essay, I advance the research on Niðrstigningar saga by surveying the fertile subsoil that favored its composition, a text that is highly indebted to the intellectual and theological concerns of the Victorine schools of late twelfth-century Paris. Accordingly, I first sketch a history of the “mousetrap” simile for the cross, tracing its routes from Roman Africa to twelfth-century Paris, and then outline a partial reconstruction of the Victorine libraries of Norway and Iceland from the evidence provided by Latin manuscript fragments dating to the second half of the twelfth century, which include items and analogues that may have been consulted for the composition of the vernacular text. Finally, I offer a fresh and more in-depth reading of the Victorine archival sources which testify to the factual or possible arrival of Norwegian and Icelandic clerics at the Abbeys of Saint-Victor and Sainte- Geneviève throughout the second half of the twelfth century. While most of these sources were mentioned in previous studies, it is my intent to reassess them here through a more exhaustive analysis within their material and historical contexts. Among these, three Latin and French excerpts from previously unpublished or dispersed manuscript and archival material are made available here for the first time in diplomatic transcriptions and English translations