Pembroke College : Psalter

Pembroke College

These fragments come from a dismembered psalter, known by the siglum N, and contain portions of Psalms 73, 74 and 77 with a continuous gloss in Old English. They match several membra disiecta found in the municipal library in Haarlem (Haarlem, Stadsbibliotheek, MS 188, f. 53) and the Schlossmuseum of Sondershausen in Germany (Sondershausen, Schlossmuseum, MS Lat. liturg. XI). All of the above fragments were recovered from the bindings of unidentified books. Recently, four more fragments have been discovered in C. Norwid Library in Elbląg, Poland. The latter were used as endleaf guards in early printed books from the collection of Samuel Meienreis – a sixteenth-century Calvinist theologian, preacher and scholar from Royal Prussia, the Kingdom of Poland. The Elbląg fragments shed new light on the provenance of the bifolia from the original codex in early modern times. Around 1600, they must have been re-used as a binding material in a Dutch workshop, probably in Leiden, where Meienreis studied theology at the university in 1600-1602. Provenance notes indicate that he bought the volumes during his stay there. The Dutch link is supported by Meienreis' itinerary, entries in his Stammbuch (now lost, but described and summarized by Hans Bauer in 1929), and several distinctive features of the volumes' binding structure. The fragments belonging to Pembroke College in Cambridge are two parchment strips cut vertically from two different leaves (possibly from the same bifolium), each measuring 220 x 40 mm. They contain 93 complete and incomplete glosses in Old English. The script of the Latin text suggests that it was produced in the middle or in the third quarter of the eleventh century. The gloss is rendered in a contemporary, though smaller, vernacular script. Verse initials in alternating colours (red, green and blue) are located to the left of the text block. Inside the higher-ranked initial 'C' that opens Psalm 73 runs the antiphon 'In israheli magnum nomen eius' and neumes added by a later hand. Similar musical annotation has been added at the top margin in one of the Elbląg fragments. A fragment of the Psalm title, based on Pseudo-Jerome's Breviarium in Psalmos, rendered in rubrics, has been preserved above the initial. Thin dry-point lines are drawn above the Latin text to indicate the top of the minims and to guide the glosses. A distinctive variant of punctus versus appears at the end of verse lines. Based on these and other shared features, Helmut Gneuss (1998) demonstrated that the fragments found in Cambridge, Sondershausen, and Haarlem must have once been part of the same complete psalter measuring approximately 300 x 170 mm, and containing around two hundred leaves. The newly found Elbląg fragments match the palaeographical and linguistic criteria, and represent a further part of that same codex. Although the place of origin of the manuscript remains unknown, Canterbury, Winchester, or Exeter may be considered as possible locations on palaeographical grounds. The fragments seem to be related to a decorated Gallican Psalter and Canticles, now <a target='_blank' class='externalLink' href='http://searcharchives.bl.uk/permalink/f/79qrt5/IAMS040-001952778'>London, British Library, Stowe MS 2</a>.Dr Monika Opalińska Associate Professor, Institute of English Studies University of Warsaw