ABSTRACT
The commissioning of the four Gospel books shows that Judith wanted beautiful religious objects for herself as well as for the institutions she patronized.1 In this, she may have been typical, but because of the huge loss of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts through the later medieval period and the English Reformation, she seems unique: we have no other “set” of personally commissioned books from the period, whether for a man or a woman. Goda, sister of King Edward the Confessor, gave at least one book to Rochester in the mid-eleventh century, but it is much less ornate than Judith’s Gospel books.2 Margaret of Scotland (c.1045-1093), queen and saint, is described in her Vita as a generous patron of books, but only one of her manuscripts has been identified. That book, also an extensively decorated mid-eleventh-century Gospel book, is somewhat analogous to Judith’s in that it was owned by a high-status secular woman. While much more luxurious than Goda’s book, it is not as visually spectacular as Judith’s books, however, and has been described as “modest” and “unpretentious.”3 Margaret probably acquired the book in the late 1050s or early 1060s while she was a student at Wilton Abbey and still identified as the sister of Edgar the Ætheling rather than the Queen of Scotland (she married Malcolm of Scotland in 1069/1070);4 she and Judith may have met at Edward’s court. Queen Edith, Judith’s sister-in-law, was also educated at Wilton Abbey and is thus another potential contemporary English female book patron, but nothing survives of her personal library, if it ever existed. Judith’s books now stand alone as the stellar examples of secular female patronage in late Anglo-Saxon England. Two of the books are now in New York at the Pierpont Morgan Library; the others are in Italy and Germany. All four are deluxe productions that would have displayed Judith’s wealth, piety, and good taste in the chapel of her household.
