Apart from being a work of exceptional beauty, the Psalter of King Louis IX (Paris, BNF, MS lat. 10525) is often regarded as the epitome of a group of Parisian royal manuscripts produced ca. 1230–1260. Moreover, the Psalter exemplifies a popular kind of lay prayer book amplified by a prefatory cycle of full-page illustrations. Stahl, following previous scholars, focuses his attention on this large and unusual Old Testament cycle (seventy-eight full-page miniatures). Yet, as a liturgical book per se, the content or text of the Psalter is unremarkable and is abbreviated by contemporary standards since it does not contain the customary Hours of the Virgin or Book of the Dead but only the Psalms of David, a calendar of saints' days, obits, and the concluding prayers commonly found in similar psalters.
Stahl's monograph is large and heavy, in a double-column format produced on glossy paper, and contains a list of illustrations, a foreword by Jacques Le Goff, the editors' note; a list of abbreviations, a lengthy introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. In addition, there are seven appendices: (1) Description, (2) Legends (captions for the illustrations), (3) The Calendar (Folios 79r–84v), (4) Text Signatures and Catchwords, (5) Concordance of Attributions [to artists and folios], (6) The Previous Binding and Its Textile Covering (in French by Sophie Desrosiers), and (7) Working Groups with Physical Variables. There is also an extensive bibliography.
The full-page illustrations, scaled to those of the original, are exceptional in quality. They are arranged according to the biblical sequence of the Old Testament, beginning with Genesis (offerings of Cain and Abel) and concluding with Samuel II (Saul as king of Israel). As Stahl explains, the miniatures are arranged to face one another as narrative diptychs, as are also the accompanying texts, or “legends.” The legends (appendix 2) are presented in the original Old French and in translation, but it is a pity that these are not in a foldout format to facilitate coordination between text and image. There are also a number of legends for illustrations that do not appear in this book (see below).
Following the prefatory miniatures, Stahl lists but does not illustrate the calendar (ff. 79r–f. 89v, appendix 3). The color illustrations then continue with the first page of the Psalms, the well known Beatus vir with the familiar large, historiated initial B, but here exceptionally, depicting King David gazing at Bathsheba in her bath (f. 85v); additional pairs of half-page historiated initials follow, all depicting King David in prayer and in various contemporary scenes. The end matter as well as the canticles and creed are summarized in the first appendix.
The lengthy introduction presents the manuscript, its history within the royal collection, its historiography, and the themes that have occupied scholars. Stahl places the Psalter in a variety of contexts: patronage at the Parisian court; Louis' advisors, specifically Vincent of Beauvais; stylistically related manuscripts; book production and the ateliers of mid-thirteenth-century Paris; the Bibles moralisées that emerged in Paris in both stained glass and painting in the second quarter of the thirteenth century; and the life and psychology of the king himself after the failed Egyptian crusade and his zeal to promulgate a new crusade in 1270. From the outset, Stahl argues for the personal and “exceptional” nature of the Psalter and dates the manuscript to the last decade of Louis's reign (the 1260s).
Chapter 1 is devoted to the physical manuscript, its structural organization, gatherings, and the stages of production. He draws attention to the drawings (or under-drawings), the color palette, the application of gold (a conspicuous feature of deluxe psalters), and the script. Heraldry is briefly discussed, but perhaps most interesting to specialists will be the interpretation of the “high number of corrections” (51). Contrary to earlier scholars, Branner for example, Stahl concludes that there is no evidence that the manuscript has suffered any loss in the prefatory cycle, although he admits that “at least one final gathering is lost at the end of the book” (54).
Chapter 2 concerns the stylistic attributions to different artists. Here Stahl compares the Psalter of St. Louis to the so-called Isabella Psalter (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam MS 300), long noted as the Psalter's sister manuscript; he concludes (as others have) that both manuscripts shared ateliers and artists (78); more importantly, both were products of the commercial production of manuscripts in Paris, described in Richard and Mary Rouse, Manuscripts and Their Makers: Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200–1500 (Turnhout, Belgium: Harvey Miller, 2000). Stahl, however, ventures further in his attributions to suggest that there was a specific royal painter, “a peinture du roi,” who might be the highly innovative “Saul Master” (80–81).
Chapter 3 is complex and diverse, discussing a number of themes and interpretations, most importantly, the conspicuous yet subtle use of architectural framing in the miniatures and their relationship to contemporary architecture such as the façade of St. Nicaise at Reims and the south porch of Notre Dame in Paris. He explores the wide-ranging repertoire of pictorial images found in both sculpture and stained glass. More speculatively, Stahl then turns his focus to the contemporary understanding of pictorial narrative in Paris of the 1260s where he finds a distinct parallel between the Psalter and the sculpture of the south transept of Notre Dame. Stahl explains how the specific actions, movement, gazes, superimposition of figures, and so forth create the architectonic, pictorial space for the narrative in the Psalter. This is a sophisticated, stylistic essay on the ways artists in different media use their talents and resources to enhance the visual experience and pleasure of a learned audience, that is, St. Louis and his court (116–31).
Chapter 4, “Psalters and the Old Testament,” constitutes an almost independent study of the origins of biblical prefatory cycles and how the imagery evolved over time. The images and their presentation are explored in terms of how scenes were organized, biographically or chronologically, how meaning is achieved by repetition, symbolic objects, juxtaposition, and typology and why specific scenes may refer to events associated with the life of the patron; this is similarly argued (143) for the Psalter of Queen Ingeborg (Chantilly, Mus. Condée, MS 1695).
Chapter 5, “A Royal Program,” amplifies the earlier arguments for royal patronage and seeks to confirm the iconography by means of the author's exegesis of Old Testament text and illustrations interpreted as part of the larger theme of kingship, especially the juxtaposition of the roles of regnum and sacerdotum. This chapter suffers somewhat from repetition and extraneous references but mainly from the considerable number of illustrations to which the author refers that are missing from this monograph (a total of twenty-one of the seventy-eight folios!). The legends are complete and inform the reader of the content of the missing scenes. The episodes' successive heroes and kings, both good and evil, lead Stahl to the central argument that the lineage of the biblical kings and the establishment of the kingdom of Israel present a paradigm or even a prefiguration of the Capetian monarchy as defenders of the Church (207).
Stahl concludes that the lengthy pictorial cycle, ambiguously ending with Saul, who lost God's favor, reveals Louis's personal concerns about his kingship and its legacy, its success or failure. Stahl also discusses how it may have functioned as instruction from father to son, from one king to his successor, Philip III (211). Moreover, as William Chester Jordan has previously maintained, Stahl argues that the Psalter miniatures, which concentrate on the story of Joseph in Egypt, must be seen against the personal tragedy of Louis IX's failed crusade in Egypt (1248–1254). For analogies between Louis's reign and the composition of the Psalter, this monograph will interest social and cultural historians, though they may be overwhelmed by the voluminous background material and art historical analysis of style and iconography. The book is ambitiously interdisciplinary and occupied Stahl for the last decades of his career until his untimely death; in that respect, Picturing Kingship is a major achievement. Although a great deal of compelling interpretation is brought to bear, the reader, as Stahl admits, must still decide whether this was, indeed, the Psalter actually used daily by St. Louis and personally tailored to the king's wishes.
