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The scribe of the Paris Psalter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Richard Emms
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Extract

The Paris Psalter (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, lat. 8824) has attracted much interest because of its long, thin format, its illustrations in the Utrecht Psalter tradition and its Old English prose translation of the first fifty psalms, which has been convincingly attributed to King Alfred himself. It is a bilingual psalter, with Latin (Roman version) on the left and Old English on the right. The first fifty psalms are in the prose translation connected with King Alfred, the remainder in a metrical version made by an author whose work has not been identified elsewhere. The leaves are approximately 526 × 186 mm, with a writing space of about 420 × 95 mm. It has been estimated that there were originally 200 leaves in twenty-five quires, but fourteen leaves, including those carrying all the major decoration, have been removed. There remain thirteen outline drawings integrated into the text on the first six folios. Some drawings may have functioned as ‘fillers’ where the Latin text was shorter than the Old English. Further on in the manuscript, in order to solve this problem, the scribe either left gaps or made the columns of Latin thinner than the corresponding Old English ones. The Old English introductions were set out across both columns, suggesting that the book was made for someone who read English more easily than Latin. The manuscript was written around the middle of the eleventh century, and it is clearly the work of a single skilled scribe who used a neat Anglo-Caroline minuscule for the Latin texts, and matching English vernacular minuscule with many Caroline letter forms for the Old English. Unfortunately, his hand has not been identified in any other books or charters; however, he did record in a colophon (186r; see pl.V) that he was called Wulfwinus cognomento Cada.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 28 , December 1999 , pp. 179 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1999

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References

1 The Paris Psalter, ed. Colgrave, B., EEMF 8 (Copenhagen, 1958).Google Scholar The most recent discussion is Toswell, M. J., ‘Studies in the Paris Psalter, Metrical Version’ (unpubl. DPhil dissertation, Univ. of Oxford, 1991).Google Scholar See also her ‘The Format of the Bibliothèque Nationale MS lat. 8824: the Paris Psalter’, N&Q 241 (1996), 130–3.Google Scholar For the authorship of the OE prose psalms, see Bately, J. M., ‘Lexical Evidence for the Authorship of the Prose Psalms in the Paris Psalter’, ASE 10 (1982), 69–95.Google Scholar See also Pulsiano, P., ‘Psalters’, The Liturgical Books of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Pfaff, R. W., OEN Subsidia 23 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995), 61–85.Google Scholar

2 For the (tenuous) Malmesbury connections, see Dempsey, G. T., ‘Aldhelm of Malmesbury and the Paris Psalter: a Note on the Survival of Antiochene Exegesis’, JTS ns 38 (1987), 368–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the litany, see Anglo-Saxon Litanies of the Saints, ed. Lapidge, M., HBS 106 (London, 1991), 80 and 250–3.Google Scholar

3 Utrecht, Rijksuniversiteit Bibliotheek, 32 (Hautvillers Abbey, s. ixmed). For the most recent study with further bibliography, see The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art, ed. Horst, K. Van der, Noel, W. and Wüstefeld, W. (London, 1996).Google Scholar

4 Noel, W., The Harley Psalter (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 169–74.Google Scholar

5 Aethici Istrici Cosmographia Vergilio Salisburgensi rectius adscripta, ed. Bishop, T. A. M., Umbrae Codicum Occidentalium 10 (Amsterdam, 1966), pp. xix–xx.Google Scholar For illustration and description of Harley 5431, see The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art 966–1066, ed. Backhouse, J., Turner, D. and Webster, L. (London, 1984), pp. 47–8.Google Scholar

6 I am indebted to Dr Michelle Brown for this information.

7 Paris Psalter, ed. Colgrave, , pp. 13–14Google Scholar (N. R. Ker's contribution on the handwriting of the manuscript).

8 London, BL, Cotton Vitellius C. xii (St Augustine's, Canterbury, s.xi2–xii2); see Kauffmann, C. M., Romanesque Manuscripts 1066–1190 (London, 1975), pp. 61–2, with colour pl. on p. 23.Google Scholar

9 Searle, W. G., Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum (Cambridge, 1897), p. 523Google Scholar, lists seventeen instances of the use of the name Wulfwinus. I am grateful to Professor M. Lapidge for pointing out that Wulfwinus is probably a latinization of OE Wulfwine, but could equally possibly represent OE Wulfwig, since the final -g was palatalized by the eleventh century.

10 Tengvik, G., Old English Bynames, Nomina Germanica 4 (Uppsala, 1938), 297.Google Scholar

11 ‘Basan’ allegedly means ‘the Fat’: see Dumville, D. N., English Caroline Script and Monastic History. Studies in Benedictinism, A.D. 950–1030 (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 120–4.Google Scholar According to Tengvik, , Old English Bynames, pp. 287–8Google Scholar, ‘Bata is likely to mean a person of stout, heavy appearance’. For a different explanation of ‘Bata’, see Porter, D. W., ‘The Hypocorism Bata – Old English or Latin?’, NM 96 (1995), 345–9.Google Scholar

12 Confraternity in English monasteries has received little attention from historians. For a recent discussion, see The Liber Vitae of the New Minster and Hyde Abbey Winchester, ed. Keynes, S., EEMF 26 (Copenhagen, 1996), 49–65.Google Scholar

13 In the colophon of the Paris Psalter, Wulfwinus described himself as ‘Sacer Dei’. I am grateful to Mr Tim Graham for pointing out that this term is likely to have been used instead of sacerdos for metrical reasons.

14 Wormald, F., English Drawings in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries (London, 1952), p. 78.Google Scholar

15 Paris Psalter, ed. Colgrave, , pp. 11–12.Google Scholar In the fifteenth century the psalter was in the library of the Sainte Chapelle de Bourges.

16 London, BL, Cotton Claudius B. iv; see The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch, ed. Dodwell, C. R. and Clemoes, P., EEMF 18 (Copenhagen, 1974).Google Scholar

17 For an illustration of a layperson commissioning a manuscript from a monastery (if the colloquy in question reflects actual practice), see Lapidge, M., ‘Artistic and Literary Patronage in Anglo-Saxon England’, in his Anglo-Latin Literature 600–899 (London, 1996) pp. 37–91, esp. 43–5.Google Scholar

18 See, for example, Heslop, T. A., ‘The Production of de luxe Manuscripts and the Patronage of King Cnut and Queen Emma’, ASE 19 (1990), 151–95.Google Scholar I am grateful to Dr Richard Gameson for the ideas behind this paragraph. For the wider background, see his The Role of Art in the Late Anglo-Saxon Church (Oxford, 1995), pp. 248–60.Google Scholar

19 I am grateful to the authorities at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the British Library for allowing me to see the manuscripts mentioned here. My thanks go to Dr Michelle Brown, Dr Mildred Budny, Dr Richard Gameson, Mr Tim Graham and Dr Helen McKee for their perceptive and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.