The Late Anglo-Saxon Psalter: Ancestor of the Book of Hours?
1996; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.3138/flor.14.001
ISSN2369-7180
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval European Literature and History
ResumoIn the introduction to her book, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, Beryl Smalley remarks that the Bible was “the most studied book of the middle ages,” and that “the language and the content of Scripture permeate medieval thought” (xi). This concern with the basic text of the Christian faith was felt in early medieval England as much as anywhere else in Christendom. Bede, for instance, highly prized his own commentaries on the books of the Bible, and at the end of his life was translating the gospel of St John into the vernacular. The Codex Amiatinus, the Lindisfarne and Rushworth gospels are all de luxe manuscripts, are all produced in insular scriptoria, and are all beautifully laid out and gloriously illustrated copies of these biblical texts. Perhaps more important, the latter two of these codices were copiously glossed in the vernacular, a process which, to the modern eye at least, disturbs the visual splendour of the manuscript, but which proves that study and understanding of the text was of great importance to the Northumbrian monks who used the manuscripts. Similarly, many of the psalters of Anglo-Saxon England were glossed, illustrated, or otherwise laid out in such a way as to suggest careful study of the text.
Referência(s)