Eadwine Psalter
It contains the Book of Psalms in three languages: three versions in Latin, with Old English and Anglo-Norman translations, and has been called the most ambitious manuscript produced in England in the twelfth century.
As far as the images are concerned, most of the book is an adapted copy, using a more contemporary style, of the Carolingian Utrecht Psalter, which was at Canterbury for a period in the Middle Ages.
[1] In addition to this, there is a prefatory cycle of four folios, so eight pages, fully decorated with a series of miniatures in compartments showing the Life of Christ, with parables and some Old Testament scenes.
[15] The Old English translation contains a number of errors which "have been explained as the result of uncritical copying of an archaic text at a time when the language was no longer in current use".
[19] At the end of the book there is the full-page portrait of Eadwine, followed by drawings with colour showing Christ Church, Canterbury and its water channels, one over a full opening, and the other more schematic and on a single page.
This has one surviving page (of an original three, at least) with compartmented scenes of the life of Christ, which include many miracles and incidents from the ministry of Jesus rarely depicted by the High Middle Ages.
The Eadwine pages include one of these scenes, from the start of Luke 9, 58 (and Matthew 8, 20): "et ait illi Iesus vulpes foveas habent et volucres caeli nidos Filius autem hominis non habet ubi caput reclinet" – "Jesus said to him: The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air nests: but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.
Kenneth Clark commented that "the Utrecht Psalter is full of landscape motives taken from Hellenistic painting, and its impressionistic scribbles still imply a sense of light and space.
There is no simpler way to show the triumph of symbol over sensation in the middle ages than to compare its pages with [their Eadwine Psalter equivalents].
As recorded by M. R. James:"The following inscription in green and red capitals surrounds the picture beginning at the top on L. SCRIPTOR (supply loquitur).
Letter: By its fame your script proclaims you, Eadwine, whom the painted figure represents, alive through the ages, whose genius the beauty of this book demonstrates.
Some scholars see both aspects of the script and the portrait as evoking Eadwig Basan, the most famous of English scribes (and perhaps also the artist of the miniatures in his manuscripts), who was a monk at Christ Church Canterbury over a century earlier, in the last decades of Anglo-Saxon England.
[34] To Heslop, the diverse styles and limited "guest appearances" of the other artists suggests that they are mobile laymen employed for the task by the monastery, of the sort who were even at this early date beginning to take over the illumination of manuscripts.
Such a large undertaking would have taken many years to complete; the Anglo-Catalan Psalter was left unfinished in England, like many other ambitious manuscript projects.
[38] The book is included in the catalogue of the library of Christ Church made in Prior Eastry's inventory in the early fourteenth century.
It was given by Thomas Nevile, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, to Trinity College, Cambridge in the early seventeenth century, presumably without the prefatory folios, which are thought to have been removed around this time.
[46] The emphasis on the miracles and parables of Christ was most untypical in Romanesque cycles in general, which concentrated almost exclusively on the events commemorated by the feast days of the liturgical calendar.
Sources for the selection of scenes are probably considerably older than the 12th century, and might possibly go back as far as the St Augustine Gospels, of about 600, which were then at Canterbury, and no doubt more complete than now, or a similar very early cycle.
