ABSTRACT
Any consideration of twelfth-century views of the Anglo-Saxon past should take account of the Eadwine Psalter: Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R. 17. 1, produced under the patronage of Prior Wibert at Christ Church Canterbury c.1155–60. 1 The Eadwine Psalter is the work of at least ten monastic scribes and six artists. 2 Eadwine, for whom the manuscript is named, may have been one of the scribes, possibly the main scribe; alternatively, he may have been in charge of designing the book or overseeing the project. Alternatively, some believe he may have been the manuscript’s patron or possibly held a combination of these roles. Whatever his actual involvement in the production of the manuscript, however, the book itself presents him both verbally and visually as its scribe, and he will therefore be described as such in this chapter. In terms of its contents, the Eadwine Psalter is a scholarly collection of texts rather than a book designed for everyday use. It is a psalterium triplex, meaning that it brings together the three translations of the psalter text attributed to Jerome, the Gallicanum (the main text of Eadwine), the Romanum and the Hebraicum (both written in smaller script and narrower columns which run parallel down the sides of the page). The manuscript also contains an interlinear translation of the Romanum into Old English, and an interlinear translation of the Hebraicum (which is incomplete) into Anglo-Norman French, the parva glosatura or glossa ordinaria (a standard gloss or commentary on Psalms 1–150), a series of exegetical prologues, a calendar, tituli and collects, prognostics and, of course, the illuminations, which I have described elsewhere as providing both a comprehensive visual narrative and a gloss on the written text, that is, the psalms conveyed thorough a different form of language. 3 In addition to the drawings that accompany the psalter text, the book includes at its end the famous Eadwine portrait and drawings of the monastic precinct and waterworks of Christ Church, Canterbury. The manuscript now begins with the calendar, but it is most likely that it originally opened with a series of at least four leaves of painted narrative scenes consisting of Old and New Testament subjects from Exodus to the Acts of the Apostles (now separated from the manuscript and divided between London and New York), 4 in an expansion of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of typological psalter illustration. This development of Anglo-Saxon artistic practice is but one of the ways in which the manuscript is especially pertinent to the topic of this volume. It is, in part, a self-conscious look back at and appropriation of Anglo-Saxon traditions, some specific to Christ Church or to the larger Canterbury community, and an original translation of those traditions into a new visual language. Yet in some respects it also looks back beyond the Anglo-Saxons to some of the origins of their manuscript culture and their scribal and exegetical practices. The manuscript is a work of scholarship, indeed historical scholarship, but its heteroglossia can also be understood as symptomatic of the larger multilingual, postcolonial culture in which it was produced.
