Fragments of the N-Psalter on the spine of Concordantiae (Leiden, 1560), C. Norwid Library in Elbląg; Photo: Dorota-Jurzenka-Supryn (UMK)
Between the 4th and 6th of September, 2024, several Siglum members took part in a conference ‘Medieval Fragmentology and the Fragmented Old English Glossed N-Psalter, which focused on the current research into a long-lost medieval psalter from England. In this ongoing project, we have been looking for answers to the oldest questions of philology which center around the proper arrangement and content of a text and also the historical development of language. To do this, we have been aided by state-of-the-art research methods which include digital reconstruction as well as physical and chemical analyses of ink, pigments and parchment. Research strands stretch between Cambridge, Leiden, Alkmaar, and the royal city of Elbląg. One captivating, albeit unconfirmed, hypothesis leads to a forgotten princess from a fallen dynasty.
The conference and workshop, co-organized by Monika Opalińska (University of Warsaw) and Thijs Porck (Leiden University), took place at the Regionaal Archief Alkmaar in the Netherlands. It gathered scholars representing various disciplines – historical linguists, literary scholars, conservators, archivists, researchers in the history of books and printing, as well as physicists, chemists, and specialists in bookbinding. The discussion focused on an 11th-century Latin psalter with Old English glosses, known in the literature as the N-Psalter (for details, see Opalińska et al. 2023; Porck 2023).
The long-lost Psalter rediscovered
At the beginning of the 16th century, fragments of the N-Psalter were used as binding supports in early printed books. Using manuscript folios to reinforce book bindings became common in the early modern period when handwritten books gave way to printed books. Manuscripts from church collections and private libraries were shipped from England to the Continent, where they ended up in various bookbinding workshops. Whether this was how the N-Psalter came to northern Europe is not certain. According to Helmut Gneuss’s hypothesis, intriguing though historically undocumented, the codex might have belonged to Gunhild, the youngest sister of Harold I Godwine, the English king who died in the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Gunhild is known to have sought refuge shortly after that in the monastery of St. Donatus in Bruges. She offered her Flemish benefactors a psalter written in Latin and Old English, among other things. The last known written record of this psalter comes from Jacob Meyer’s Chronicles of Flanders, published in 1561. After that, all trace of the codex is lost. The history of the search for Gunhild’s Psalter and its alleged connection to the N-Psalter was laid out at the conference by Oliver Bock (Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg).
Manuscript waste
In the Middle Ages, psalters were among the most frequently copied books, which is why many have survived to this day, sometimes as complete codices, sometimes in single folios or even smaller strips. The N-Psalter, which may have originally contained circa 220 folios, has survived in several dozen pieces. For a long time, only five of them were known and stored separately in the libraries in Cambridge, Sondershausen, and Haarlem. Their shape and form suggested that they had been used as manuscript waste in book bindings. However, the host volumes from which they were removed were unknown at the time. In the 20th century, archivists did not always keep records of the conservation and rebinding process. Today, manuscript fragments removed from old bindings are stored as separate documents in special cardboard boxes, Melinex envelopes, or in the so-called guard books, often with no classmark or any provenance data. The way such material is stored, catalogued, and made available to researchers, and the general public, depends largely on the principles adopted in a given library. In short, there is no consensus on the matter. The problem of preservation, conservation and distribution of manuscript fragments was discussed at the conference roundtable by curators and conservators – Lisette Blokker (Regional Archive Alkmaar), Ewa Chlebus (independent researcher), Hannah Goedbloed (Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem), and Ed van der Vlist (Royal Library, The Hague). William Duba (University of Fribourg), the Head of Fragmentarium, who participated in the roundtable discussion, explained the role of digital repositories in data collection and reconstruction. Among them, Fragmentarium, a platform designed for working with manuscript fragments, aids the process of reconstruction, documentation, and circulation of fragmented collections. Several fragments of the N-Psalter are already available on the platform, a few more still await processing and digital reconstruction.
Psalter fragments in Samuel Meienreis’ library in Elbląg
Caspar Waser’s Hebrew Grammar (Basil, 1600) with fragments of the N-Psalter in the binding, C. Norwid Library in Elblag; Photo: Dorota-Jutrzenka-Supryn (UMK)
In 2020, the modest collection of the aforementioned dispersed pieces of the N-Psalter was augmented with two more fragments, discovered in C. Norwid Library in Elbląg. It was a groundbreaking discovery because the parchment fragments were still attached to the binding of an old printed book which was part of a collection formerly belonging to Samuel Meienreis, a 16th-century theologian from Royal Prussia. During the conference, Paulina Pludra-Żuk (Polish Academy of Sciences) and Ewa Chlebus briefly outlined the history of Bibliotheca Meienreisiana and its owner. The distinctive white parchment bindings of his books, the history of the collection, and the life of its owner were the first significant clues that helped break the anonymity of the N-Psalter and partly reconstruct its provenance. Thanks to these leads, six more fragments of the Psalter were found in the binding of another volume from the Elbląg library. Handwritten annotations in these and several other books from Meienreis’s collection indicated that they were purchased between 1600 and 1602 when Samuel studied theology in Leiden.
More fragments found in Alkmaar
Soon after the Elbląg discovery, in 2022, Thijs Porck presented twenty-one N-Psalter fragments which were found in a three-volume edition of Thesaurus Graecae linguae by Henri Estienne held at the Regional Archive in Alkmaar. The dictionary, purchased for the Alkmaar library at a book auction in Leiden in 1601 – was bound in the same way as the volumes from Elbląg. With time, more and more clues pointed to Leiden and a local workshop in which bifolia from the N-Psalter were re-used as binding supports. The secrets of the trade and the distinctive features of the bindings were discussed by Herre de Vries (Restauratie Nijhoff Asser).
New clues and strands
Balthasar Lydius’ signature in De Accentibus, et Orthographia by Johaness Reuchlin from Pembroke College Library, Cambridge; Photo:
Monika Opalińska (UW)
The bindings – along with other clues – also proved crucial in the search for the books from which the previously known fragments of the Psalter were removed. Thijs Porck found the Haarlem host volume (Porck 2023). I managed to identify the volume in Pembroke College Library from which the two Cambridge endleaf guards had been removed. Although the book’s binding was partially altered during conservation, the crucial elements, namely, the old pastedowns with the offset marks from the previously removed parchment strips were left inside the book. The name of the book’s former owner – Balthasar Lydius – written on the title page, once again pointed to Leiden. It is there that Balthasar studied theology at the same time and under the tutelage of the same academic supervisor as Samuel Meienreis. This new strand shows that the academic environment in Leiden, as well as the local book market and auctions where students and professors purchased books – are important areas for further search for the N-Psalter membra disiecta and their host volumes. The historical background of the book market and book-binding industry in 16th-century Leiden was the topic of Paul Hoftijzer’s (Leiden University) conference talk and a special guided tour at Bibliotheca Thysiana he gave the following day.
Parchment fragments through the eyes of chemists and physicists
Graphic representation of the ratio between zinc (Zn) and manganese (Mn) to iron (Fe) in inks from the Elbląg fragments, obtained via X-ray fluorescence. The results indicate that the same ink was used for the Old English gloss and the Latin text in the fragments from the Hebrew Grammar (a, b). In the fragments from Concordantiae, the ink used in the gloss and the main text is different and contains more zinc and manganese (c, d); photo: Piotr Targowski (UMK)
In the Polish N-Psalter project, material research concerns not only the bindings of the host volumes but also the fragments themselves. During the conference, two members of the Polish N-Psalter team, Barbara Wagner (University of Warsaw) and Piotr Targowski (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń), discussed several non-invasive methods they applied to analyse the Elbląg fragments. First, using the X-ray fluorescence (MAXRF), they confirmed the presence of fragments hidden underneath the paper pastedowns in the two volumes, thus providing the rationale for their removal. They also showed that iron-gall ink, typical of the period, was used for the main text and the gloss, while the red ink used in the rubricated fragments was made from lead most probably dug up from a mine in Derbyshire in England. They have also precisely identified the elemental composition of four different pigments used in the coloured initials. Furthermore, with the help of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT), they have demonstrated that the lines below and above the Latin text were made with a dry point rather than a pencil. The dry-point ruling technique, attested in early medieval manuscripts, independently confirmed the dating of the Elbląg fragments at an early stage of the project. These and other material analyses, complementary to philological and palaeographical research, allow for a comprehensive assessment of the writing techniques used in the production of the codex.
Psalter fragments and the great tradition of medieval Latin culture
Although the N-Psalter has survived in the form of scattered fragments, it is part of the great tradition of early medieval manuscript culture in England and a testimony to the role that Latin psalters played in the religious culture of the Middle Ages. In her plenary lecture, Jane Toswell (University of Western Ontario), the author of an excellent monograph The Anglo-Saxon Psalter (Brepols, 2014), discussed this tradition showing how bilingual psalters written in Latin and the vernacular emerged from it. Last but not least, Magdalena Charzyńska-Wójcik (The Nanovic Institute at the University of Notre Dame and Catholic University of Lublin JP II) explained how to navigate the intricate repository of extant psalters and identify textual variants of the psalms from medieval English Books of Hours that stem from the same tradition using word-level n-grams.
A display of the N-Psalter fragments
An additional bonus of the meeting in Alkmaar was the presentation of all the fragments of the N-Psalter found in the Netherlands. Looking at the fragments from a single bifolium aligned together, it was possible to visualize better the actual volume of the original codex, on the one hand, and to appreciate the mise-en-page of the reassembled leaf, on the other.
For an overview of the conference from the point of view of one of the invited participants, Ann Pascoe van Zyl (The University of Dublin), including a photograph from the fragments’ display in the Archives, see her blog post http://TCBlog: Report on N-Psalter Conference.
My special thanks for making the conference and the exhibition possible go to my colleague Thijs Porck from Leiden University, and to our hosts, Paul Post and Lisette Blokker from the Regionaal Archief, Alkmaar, as well as to Hannah Goedbloed and Julia Owczarska, the curators from the Noord-Hollands Archief, Haarlem.
We are planning a follow-up on the N-Psalter research, including a display of the Elbląg exhibits, during a special session at the Historical English and Research Tradition (HEART link) conference at the Faculty of Modern Languages in Warsaw, Poland, in April 2025.
Monika Opalińska, coordinator of the Polish N-Psalter project
Polish N-Psalter project team: Monika Opalińska (UW), Barbara Wagner (UW), Piotr Targowski (UMK), Paulina Pludra-Żuk (PAN), Dorota Jutrzenka-Supryn (UMK), Ewa Chlebus (independent researcher), Magdalena Kowalska (UMK), Jakub Karasiński (UW); ALicja Rafalska-Łasocha (UJ).