3 - The St. Edith Cycle in The Salisbury Breviary (c.1460)

Summary

The study of liturgical manuscripts has experienced a wealth of interdisciplinary activity in the last five years. Richard K. Emmerson has noted that examinations of illuminated manuscripts

have shifted from exclusive concern with stylistic and iconographic analyses to more extensive attention to the semiotics of representation and seeing and to the contextualization of image reception within social (e.g., interpretive communities) and material (e.g., the whole book) contexts.

Interdisciplinary analyses of deluxe illuminated manuscripts can thus provide contextualizations that include cultural and political considerations; for example, a recent analysis of the ordo of St. Louis demonstrates that this manuscript was “ordered to serve the political and ideological plans of Saint Louis,” so that “both the visual and the textual content of this codex cooperate to fully realize a monument to the glory of the very Christian sovereign.”

The deluxe manuscript called the Salisbury Breviary also lends itself to such an analysis. This breviary is a good example of what John Lowden has recently termed a “nonworking, luxury” copy of a liturgical book not used in religious ceremonies. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS lat. 17294, did not fulfill the ostensible, practical purpose of a breviary owned by a layperson instead of a religious institution because the volume was not primarily a book of texts and images that would allow its owner to follow church services. Like a number of the illuminated manuscripts Lowden discusses, the Salisbury Breviary's cultural function was glorification of its patron, John of Lancaster, Duke of Bedford (1389–1435).