I have written another blogpost for the Medieval Manuscripts blog of the British Library! This one is on a manuscript, Harley MS 2928, which we catalogued for the Polonsky England and France 700-1200 project, which turned out to include a copy of a text which I know very well. De laude psalmorum (‘In praise of…
Category: Psalms and psalters
Rivers of tears, softening stone
“Jesus wept.” Famously the shortest verse in the Authorised English version of the Bible (John 11:35), when Jesus weeps at the death of his friend Lazarus, this is actually slightly longer in Latin, usually a more succinct language than English: Et lacrimatus est Iesus. A major focus of my work is on the circumstances surrounding…
Devotion and Digitisation: Medieval Prayer Manuscripts and their Online Images
On the 8th of March, I gave a keynote paper at a two-day workshop at Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf, titled ‘Devotion and Digitisation: Medieval Prayer Manuscripts and their Online Images’. I’ve written elsewhere that, whenever I publish a formal academic work, I back it up with a ‘non-identical twin’, an accompanying blogpost which handles the same subject…
Now open: Anglo-Saxon Exhibition at the British Library
Hwæt! The British Library’s new exhibition, Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, has now opened. I have had the great privilege of working alongside the curators, being one of the first to see the completed exhibition, and of celebrating the official opening. A number of the manuscripts which I have written about in my blogposts are…
Living on loaned time
Autumn has come to London: a mostly hot summer suddenly turned in the final week of September. I like early autumn, the time just before and just after the emniht (or ‘equal-night’, as an Anglo-Saxon would have called the equinox), when there is still some warmth and plenty of sunlight, but a slight nip in…
Not Angles but angels
According to the Venerable Bede, the evangelisation of the southern English was proposed by a Pope with a pun. In his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the story goes that Pope Gregory I was walking through the market of Rome when he saw some slave boys with striking looks and hair. What people, he…
Scorpio, that is suffering: a natural history of a medieval Zodiac symbol
It’s incredibly frustrating when you know you have read something somewhere and can’t remember where. Such as the time I read an article or book which made an excellent point about Anglo-Saxon zodiac illustrations. Most medieval psalters and other liturgical books begin with a calendar, the primary purpose of which is to list the feasts…
The Vespasian Psalter
As mentioned in my last post, I have a new publication out – an entry in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, on the Vespasian Psalter, the manuscript now shelved as London, British Library Cotton MS Vespasian A. i. So how better to celebrate this than by dedicating a blogpost to the manuscript…
New publication: ‘The Vespasian Psalter’, in The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain
I have a new publication out! The Encyclopedia of Medieval Literature in Britain, edited by Sian Echard and Robert Rouse, and published by Wiley Blackwell in August 2017, features my 500-word entry on the Vespasian Psalter (London, British Library Cotton MS Vespasian A. i) – and a lot of other interesting things besides. I will…
Bizarre beasts and naked acrobats! A look inside the Winchcombe Psalter
In recent months, I have been tweeting the occasional image from a manuscript shelved as Cambridge, University Library MS Ff. 1. 23, known as the Winchcombe Psalter. Intrigued by its miniatures, its bilingual nature, and the rather bizarre initials which are used to open the psalms, I have found myself coming back to this manuscript…
For the Wynn 