2 - Psalters and psalter glosses in Anglo-Saxon England

Summary

Owing to its paramount importance in the liturgy of the Christian Church, the transmission of the psalter has always been distinct from the transmission of other books of the Old Testament (OT). Such a distinction is most evident in the number of surviving manuscripts. In his study of the transmission of the OT (apart from the psalter) in Anglo-Saxon England, Richard Marsden has listed thirteen Bibles or part-Bibles containing OT books, written or owned in pre-Conquest England, nine of these being fragments, often no more than single folios (which leaves us without a means of estimating the amount of text originally contained in the manuscripts in question). In addition, individual OT books (or extracts from them) have been preserved in three more non-biblical manuscripts.

By contrast, we still have thirty-seven psalter manuscripts from Anglo-Saxon England. Of these, eight are minor fragments, twenty-nine complete (or almost complete) psalters; twenty-seven of the twenty-nine complete psalters were arguably used for liturgical purposes. A liturgical use is traditionally assumed if a manuscript, in addition to the psalter, contains the ten canticles from the Old and the New Testament (to be sung at Lauds, Vespers and Compline in the monastic and secular Office), and (from the tenth century onwards) the Gloria in excelsis, the Credo in Deum patrem (or ‘Apostles' Creed’) and the Quicumque uult (or ‘Athanasian Creed’), texts also chanted in the liturgy.