Michael Camille - Mirror in Parchment: The Luttrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England

PICTURING HISTORY

Series Editors
Peter Burke, Sander L. Gilman, Roy Porter, Bob Scribner (199598)

In the same series

Health and Illness
Images of Difference
Sander L. Gilman

The Devil
A Mask without a Face
Luther Link

Reading Iconotexts
From Swift to the French Revolution
Peter Wagner

Men in Black
John Harvey

Dismembering the Male
Mens Bodies, Britain and the Great War
Joanna Bourke

Eyes of Love
The Gaze in English and French Painting
and Novels 18401900
Stephen Kern

The Destruction of Art
Iconoclasm and Vandalism since
the French Revolution
Dario Gamboni

The Feminine Ideal
Marianne Thesander

Maps and Politics
Jeremy Black

Trading Territories
Mapping the Early Modern World
Jerry Brotton

Picturing Empire
Photography and the Visualization of
the British Empire
James Ryan

Pictures and Visuality in Early Modern China
Craig Clunas

The Luttrell Psalter and
the Making of Medieval England

Michael Camille

REAKTION BOOKS

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK

www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 1998

Copyright Michael Camille 1998

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgments and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Colour printed by BAS Printers, Hants
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd, Guildford and Kings Lynn

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

Camille, Michael

Mirror in parchment: the Luttrell Psalter and the making
of Medieval England. (Picturing History)

I. Manuscripts, Medieval

I. Title

eISBN: 9781780232485

The courses, classes and public lectures I have given on this manuscript over the past twelve years have raised far more questions than any one book can address. But I was only able to begin this project because of the work of two scholars from a previous generation. The first is Eric Millar, whose partial facsimile of 1932 remains the most thorough study of this manuscript until a new facsimile, or better still, a CD-ROM, can hopefully be produced. The second is Margaret Rickert, a pioneer in the study of English manuscript illumination, who taught long before me at the University of Chicago. The two libraries, one in London and the other in Chicago, where these scholars did their work must also receive my thanks for their help in this project: the British Library, where Janet Backhouse, a more recent expert on the manuscript, has been enormously helpful; and the Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago.

In Lincolnshire I want to thank Graham Platts, D. R. Mills and Pamela Tudor-Craig as well as all those present at the Eighth Harlaxton Symposium on Fourteenth Century England, held near Grantham in 1991. Sheila Sancha was enormously generous at the early stages of this study, and before her untimely death sent me material from her own archive on Irnham village. Further afield I am also indebted to conversations with people who have enriched my understanding of English medieval art over the years: George Henderson, Paul Binski, Lilian Randall, Lucy Sandler, Nigel Morgan, Michael Michael, Sylvia Wright, Richard Marks, Ruth Mellinkoff, Lynda Dennison, Sandy Heslop, Veronica Sekules, Colin Still, Jan Ziolkowski and Jonathan Alexander. Musicologists Anne Robertson, Margaret Bent and the late Howard Brown inspired me to look hard at the sounds in the psalter. Historians whose advice was crucial include Paul Freedman, Brian Golding, R. N. Swanson, Thorlac Turville-Petre, Barbara Hanawalt and Kathy Biddick, but most of all Malcolm Jones for his marvellously manic manuscript and, more recently, e-mail messages, almost as rich as the pages of the psalter itself. At a later stage Michael Clanchy was the best reader one could hope for and provided numerous detailed suggestions and corrections.

I must also thank Ben Withers, Scott Neely, Kim Brooker, Sherry Lindquist, Nancy Gardner, Rita MacCarthy and Jennifer Layton, who were students in my 1988 seminar on Art and the Social Order in Medieval England, as well as Mimi Morris, who took me to Irnham and Hooten Pagnell in 1989. More recently my sister, Michelle Camille, and Gary Sutcliffe helped me find furrows and photograph gargoyles in the land of the Luttrells. Finally, I want to thank Michael Leaman for urging me to make my own manuscript part of his timely series Picturing History, which, according to its rubric, encourages both writers and readers of history to take images more seriously, not only as illustrations of what is already known about the past by other means, but as independent witnesses, testifying not only to what happened but to the ways in which events were perceived and interpreted at the time.

For most of this century visitors to the British Museum in Bloomsbury have been able to see in the flesh, as it were, one of the best-loved monuments of English medieval manuscript illumination: the Luttrell Psalter (). As far back as I can remember, this book, produced for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell of Irnham sometime before his death in 1345, has been on display, opened at one of the famous agricultural scenes of ploughing or harrowing. Today I believe that its leaves are, for conservation purposes, turned more regularly, now that the manuscript is exhibited in the new British Library near Kings Cross. Unlike many of the worlds great national libraries, the British Library is unusual in displaying its most precious treasures to the public and I, for one, am enormously grateful. How else might I have gazed upon gold leaf and followed the intricately wrought leaves and border patterns, my nose pressed close against the glass? It was during these specular childhood visions of the Luttrell Psalter fixed like a butterfly in its exhibition case, long before I had the opportunity of actually turning its pages, that the Middle Ages first seemed to come to life before my eyes. Medieval books are, however, of all historical artefacts, the least suited to public display in the modern museum. Behind glass their unfolding illuminations become static framed paintings, cut off from any of the sensations, texture or transport that one gets from turning their pages. I say transport because I think that books do literally take us somewhere, moving our perceptions elsewhere in space and time. The page may be two-dimensional, but on the roads of the human imagination its traffic is more global than anything on the Internet. So where does the Luttrell Psalter take us?

North of the A1 beyond Stamford, as you travel east on the A151 before coming to the sudden flatness of the fens, the gently rolling south Lincolnshire countryside presents countless small villages like Irnham. To the modern traveller the village seems neither particularly picturesque nor especially venerable. But this is the physical place most closely linked to the Luttrell Psalter. To the south of the road is a ). Here is a landscape which has been written upon by the labour of generations and which, like a book, is waiting to be read.