Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Bibliography in the Service of Biography
- “Withinne a Paved Parlour”: Criseyde and Domestic Reading in a City under Siege
- Beatrice Melreth: A London Gentlewoman and her Books
- How Intellectual Were Fifteenth-Century Londoners? Grammar versus Logic in the Citizens’ Encounters with Learned Men
- Social Memory, Literacy, and Piety in Fifteenth-Century Proofs of Age
- Crafting the Old Testament in the Queen Mary Psalter
- Affective Reading and Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection at Syon
- Book Accessories, Gender, and the Staging of Reading
- Enska Vísan: Sir Orfeo in Iceland?
- Reading the Real Housewives of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs
- The Writings of Mary Carpenter Erler
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
Crafting the Old Testament in the Queen Mary Psalter
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 June 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: Bibliography in the Service of Biography
- “Withinne a Paved Parlour”: Criseyde and Domestic Reading in a City under Siege
- Beatrice Melreth: A London Gentlewoman and her Books
- How Intellectual Were Fifteenth-Century Londoners? Grammar versus Logic in the Citizens’ Encounters with Learned Men
- Social Memory, Literacy, and Piety in Fifteenth-Century Proofs of Age
- Crafting the Old Testament in the Queen Mary Psalter
- Affective Reading and Walter Hilton's Scale of Perfection at Syon
- Book Accessories, Gender, and the Staging of Reading
- Enska Vísan: Sir Orfeo in Iceland?
- Reading the Real Housewives of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs
- The Writings of Mary Carpenter Erler
- Index
- Tabula Gratulatoria
Summary
For elite audiences in the late Middle Ages, the act of reading was often as much about contemplating pictures as it was about consuming texts. Imagery and texts in richly illustrated, intricately designed one-off volumes may structure, reinforce, gloss, explicate, vivify, inflect, and even challenge or contradict one another, enriching and complicating the messages they were intended to convey, and, by extension, the reader-viewer's experience of them. Careful selection and editing could shade illustrated texts and captioned pictures toward the timeless or the topical. Indeed, as scholarship on the medieval illustrated book has richly demonstrated, examination of the relationship between word and image in any single example may reveal “a space of intellectual struggle, historical investigation, and artistic/critical practice,” as W. J. T. Mitchell put it, and thus may suggest the conditions of an artifact's crafting as well as its reception.
These ideas have resonance with respect to the Queen Mary Psalter (BL MS Royal 2 B. VII), among the most impressive English manuscripts of the fourteenth century. The Psalter is exceptional not only for its sheer bulk and pictorial abundance – 319 folios displaying over 800 images – but also for its harmonious design, lavish production, and rich presentation of Christian salvation history. The manuscript opens with an Old Testament preface covering Creation through the story of Solomon, after which follow four full-page miniatures detailing the lineage and kin of Jesus in the male and female lines and the prophetic and apostolic foundations of the faith. A Sarum calendar embellished with narrative imagery of the monthly labors and zodiac signs precedes the Latin psalter, canticles, and litany, texts that are framed and articulated by eighty-seven full- or half-page miniatures depicting the Life of Christ and Christological, Marian, eschatological, and devotional themes as well as twenty-three historiated initials at the main text divisions. The lower margins of every folio of these texts display drawings – 464 in total – comprising several thematic series, including bestiary themes, Marian miracles, hagiographic narratives, combatant grotesques, and vignettes of courtly and urban entertainment, material that extends the Psalter's program into the realm of contemporary aristocratic ideals and experience.
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- Reading and Writing in Medieval EnglandEssays in Honor of Mary C. Erler, pp. 100 - 129Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2019