Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale Fonds Lat. MS. 8824, fol. 3r

Research Group for the Study of Manuscripts SIGLUM extends an invitation to an online lecture (in English) on “Alfred the Great’s Psalter” by Professor Jane Toswell from the Department of English and Writing Studies, Western University, Canada. The lecture will take place at the University of Warsaw on 8th March 2022 at 16:00 (CET) via Zoom.

For links to the meeting, please contact siglum@wn.uw.edu.pl

Alfred the Great’s Psalter

In England, the ninth century belonged to the Roman version of the psalms, the Romanum.  The Gallicanum, the Gallican version of this book of scripture so often associated with Alcuin because it was the version chosen for the Tours bibles, already owned large parts of what is today France, Italy, and Germany, and especially Ireland. Where the Roman version may never even have arrived in Ireland, it did not start to leave England until the end of the tenth century.  Moreover, it held on tenaciously, still copied in the eleventh and into the twelfth century.  (The third version of the psalter, the Hebraicum or Hebrew psalter, seems to have been known to scholars but not frequently used.)  How the Roman psalter held its hegemony in England is either still a murky issue, or a testament to both the conservatism and the power of Canterbury to dictate usage in all of England, for it was at Canterbury that some influential thinkers held to the Roman version.  As a result, although Patrick O’Neill argues that the principal source for the vernacular translation of the first fifty psalms completed near the end of the ninth century had as its principal source a glossed psalter of Irish origin, which would certainly have been Gallican, the prose psalms (frequently attributed to Alfred the Great) found in the Paris Psalter manuscript were a translation of a Romanum psalter.

In other respects, however, psalter activity in ninth-century England was innovative and creative: the first glosses appeared in the Blickling Psalter in the eighth century, but the first extant full vernacular gloss of a psalter was added to the eighth-century Vespasian Psalter in the mid-ninth century.  The abbreviated psalter which seems likely to have been prepared by Bede survives only in three ninth-century manuscripts, including the Book of Cerne.  It is based on the Hebraicum psalter; there are possible other versions of abbreviated psalters prepared during the ninth century, which reflect the other Latin psalm versions.  Alcuin provided a copy of Bede’s abbreviated psalter to one colleague on the continent, and he seems to have remained engaged with breviate psalters, as were other Carolingian and perhaps Irish colleagues.  Devotion to the psalter as a part of the Bible that can readily be extracted for special treatment is also evident with the first fully illustrated psalter extent from the continent in the ninth century: the Utrecht Psalter. This manuscript did not obviously arrive in England until much later, to be the source of much late Old English psalter illustration, notably the Harley Psalter, but thinking about it does suggest that ninth-century psalter developments in England took place within a larger European sphere, and should be addressed from that perspective as well.